Hi, just a quick one. not really Electronics related as such, but uh, you know I figure I'd at least shoot a video about it. Now this is my lab obviously and the lighting in here is actually pretty piss poor. and if you've seen my videos, you probably don't notice it because my Canon Hfg10 camera has a really excellent lowl light sensor in it and it compensates for the lack of light in here, especially in the corner.

And uh, I'll show you my uh lighting at the moment. just standard office um, trough type luminary. So I just thought I could see what I can do to improve the lighting in here. Install some new tubes, maybe clean the things and get some uh light measurements to see how much a difference it actually makes.

So let's get on with it. Now here's the main corner of my lab. and um, probably somewhat foolishly. I've only got um, just the one light in this entire area here.

I've got another one that's uh, just inside the um, the office cubicle part of it there, but it's on like the opposite side of the door. so I do get some light coming across onto my face as I'm uh, shooting the videos, but that's not that great. and there's only one tube in here and that basically does both of these benches here which is really crazy. I mean I've got another one? well there's another one here, which sort of does this tear down bench as well, but that's only got one uh tube in it as well.

and I've got another light over there and basically I I've got a total of nine in the entire uh office space and they've only got one Um tube in them each and they're probably the original tubes. Uh, since I moved in I haven't changed them I haven't cleaned the filters Uh, so they're likely very dirty and uh, well, I thought we'd do some light measurements and and uh, see how we can improve it by installing maybe some quad uh phosphor uh lights and just cleaning them out. So let's try and get some direct measurements first. And here's the light meter.

I've got in an optimal position on my this is just on my main bench here. this is my main bench as you see in the video and this is my tear down side of the bench and it's directly under the light there and as you can see, I'm only getting just over 200 Lux there and that is, uh, pretty much well below the Uh recommended um office standard I think which is like over 300 lucks or something like that. so it's pretty poor so that, um, low value. would uh, take into account the um, the age of the tube.

of course it loses um light output as it ages plus the diffuser in there and it's probably not uh, clean as well. So that is a good reference level for the bench. And here's the back corner of the lab where I have my camera set up And that's my live uh notebook over there they use for live shows and it's only 170 Lux sort of standing here and if I go over here, it's at the notebook here. it's only 100 Luck and way over in the corner here.

If I get out of the you know we're only talking 70 Lux it's terrible. Now let's see what happens if I simply clean the uh diffuser up on the light luminary above me I'm I'm I won't touch this I'll leave it exactly where it is. we're getting 207, 208 Luck. So let's clean the diffuser and see what happens.

And if you're wondering what I get without the diffuser at all, we're talking 200 and exactly the same 208 Lux Go figure. I was, uh, a bit surprised about that I Expected, um, it to be, uh, sort of. You know, a a decent increase at least without that diffuser. And here's the pattern that's all over the diffuser.

it's itself. But if you flip it over and have a look at the backside, you can maybe see. Yeah, if I get the right angle, you can see the substantial dust there at that. can I draw a smiley face? Yes, I can.

And we're talking quite substantial amounts of dust too. Let's just swipe that and look at that. But what do you know? You put the diffuser back in and Bingo! We do actually have an increase 212 213 Lux or thereabout. so that you know, just uh, getting in there, and uh, wiping out that dust does actually make a difference.

Not much, but it does. certainly. Um, you know, sort of worth up maintaining when you go in there to replace the uh, you know, the tube or the uh starter. Now I've taken the tube out and uh, you may think that hasn't changed much because I'm not uh shooting at a constant uh exposure setting here.

so it is like, um, really, quite dark in that corner. Now trust me, it's not that great and the reading almost 39. Luck. there you go.

So that is very, uh, dim in the scheme of things. It's just that my C camera is really good at uh, you know, like even right up under the bench under there. you know you can probably can't see any noise in the image because the good in my Canon HF G10 but if I turn the lights off completely, that's the kind of shot that we get and you can see the uh, no, you should be able to see the all the grainy noise on the white wall. There probably a pretty horrible image and Lux wise, we're only talking .3 Lux that's nothing now.

I've gone and got myself a couple of these uh MEC branded uh, Quad Phosphor HG X extra high grade uh 5,000 K color temperature Tues to replace the ones I've got now the ones that came out of here are these Thorn ones as you can see and uh, there's no color gradient on those but my camera uh tells me the light in the lab here is about 4,000k so there might have been the cool white 4200 and they may have uh Dropped In Color temperature with time or something like that. but uh, decided to put 5 000 K in the new ones. um because a they will be uh, brighter and uh B I do have some uh studio uh lights as well some portable studio lights that are also 5,000k So I might standardize on 5,000k and maybe eventually, um, change them all now. as you can see, you might be able to see a little bit of blackening on the original tubes I'm I'm assuming that they've been in here for uh, probably the life of the the office.

you know they haven't been used that much cuz you can tell when they you know they're really going out that uh they'll start to Blacken on the ends but they haven't really done that too much. and with the new NEC 5000k globing there I get 246 249 oh we're talking you know 250 OD luck so that's a significant Improvement I think and that's with the uh diffuser in place after it's warmed up when it first uh turned on from cold. it started at about 18 Lux and then worked its way up to 250 and I have no idea if you're going to be able to see the color difference here, but that's the Uh new 5000 K1 and that's the older Uh 4,000 K ones installed and the new ones are significantly whiter and brighter as you'd expect because they're a higher color temperature. and I believe these NC ones don't contain any Mercury There's no marking on them at all as such, and there's similar marking on the um, uh, cheaper ones, you know? Warning contains Mercury and there's no, you know HG uh symbol on the tube or anything like that.

And if we plug our energy meter here into the Uh single 36 wat tube luminary, uh measuring rep power consumption around about 53 Watts that's like 40 over 40% more than the 36 Watts rated on the tube and that'll be because of the efficiency or the lack of efficiency um of the ballast and the power factor correction capacitor. And after I installed two of these NEC quad phosphor lights up there I'm now getting 410. Lucks on the bench! Beautiful! And yes, I know what everyone's thinking. Why don't I just install LED ones? You can get the LED replacement Uh tubes up there and well, yeah, I might eventually.

uh do that, but they're very expensive. Um here in Australia at least if for the good quality ones. Well, upwards of $100 per tube. And yes, I can save some energy.

it'll bring that, you know? Uh, 50 odd? uh, Watts uh per tube. Basically down to, you know, 25 or 30 Watts or something like that. Um, so there's significant Energy savings to be had there with LEDs But eh, that's for another day. And while I've got this fitted down I Just thought it'd be interesting to if we could probe the Uh current going into uh, this luminary fitting with my Ami prober 520.

I've got the little tyroid attachment on it around the active input. there and there it is. and uh, it's going into my scope. So let's check it out.

And here's a simple Dave C drawing of how one of these uh, fluorescent lights work. We got our Mains input over here. We've got our power factor correction cap directly across the Main's input to compensate for the inductance of this thing. and we've got our ballast up here, which helps limmit the Uh current when it starts up.

and we've got our tube here with two filaments either end and they go in series through a starter like this. Now how it works is that when you first apply the Main's power, this starter is just a timer. Basically, it's a switch and it Clos it's normally closed when the mains is first applied and that's why you've got the ballast to prevent a huge in Rush current. Just forget about the power factor correction cap for a second.

assume it's not there. the if you didn't have the ballast there in series The filaments would just they'd blow up bang because there'd be too much current flowing directly through there. You'd have both filaments directly across the Main's input. So the ballast just limits the inrush current there and the starter.

After you know, a couple of seconds, it switches off and uh, that allows current to flow. Uh well. the filaments heat up of course during that uh uh process and then it allows current to flow through the vapor inside the tube and then hopefully once it's all started bang, it reaches a steady state condition and the starter just has an RFI suppression cap built across the contacts there. cuz when this contact discharges, of course there's lots of RFI there.

And the reason these things flicker occasionally is because this starter, if it opens at the wrong time, it usually just contains a a metal strip in there and when it heats up, then it opens. So the timing's you know, not very exact. So um, if it opens at the wrong time, then there's not enough inductive kick uh to generate the high voltage required to uh, switch on the electrons flowing through the tube. So it starts again and Boop after a couple of attempts, it'll finally lock upon it and start it up and kick on the tube.

And once it is, of course, the current actually flows. the electrons flow through the tube itself, the Uh Vapor inside there, and uh, the starter has no effect at all. So I Thought we'd do a few simple Uh current measurements here. Let's measure the Main's input current here.

Let's measure the current through our power factor correction cap down here and let's also measure the starter current down here. and here we go. I Just captured the switch on and we'll be able to zoom into that and have a look. All right, right? let's zoom into this.

We started out at zero current. There's a switch on there, there's some big spikes there, and then it goes steady state. Once it was on and as you can see, it took Uh one, you know, 1 and a half seconds to sort of switch on to uh, steady state there, and that's that's a switch on current. So I'm not exactly sure what's happening there, something to do with the starter and uh, the ballast of course and we can zoom this across.

and whoa, look at that. Look at that high frequency crap there. There's a whole bunch of that just in this part of the waveform here. Rather interesting.

And then we get a different wave shape. Again, you'll notice this wave shape in this part is different to that one. And let's go. let's go along.

Look, there's a little spike in there, little tiny Spike We've got. This is the advantage of the deep memory you can, um, a deep memory scope. This one's got 4 Mega sample memory so you can really capture long waveforms like that and then zoom in and see details like that. Spike So oh, and then we've got a funny little odd pulse around there and we've got that again and it sort of decays.

It sort of jumps up and then decays back down. I've got a couple of flickers there because I think it did flicker like four times and uh, due to the starter. So that's the starter kicking in and then we eventually once it's fully on. Boom we get back to that wave shape again, which you'll notice is of course, different to the wave shape we're getting when when it's during the uh starter, it hasn't actually kicked in yet.

Most interesting, and then, yeah, that's all steady state across there, like that. Beautiful. and there was one Spike I missed, which is right in here in this part of it. between the starting operation that really jumps right down low like that and really, it's just a mess.

look at that Bo and then back up. Wonderful. Now let's try and capture the current in the starter. I'll plug it in and here we go.

Bang. look at that. Look what we have here. Interesting, right at the start here.

for 300 milliseconds we have that mysterious looking waveform. then after that, it really starts to pump it in and we get that triangle shaped waveform again. Once again, that sort of, uh, that sort of Rise which we saw before. it's exactly the same.

and then we've got that noise Spike there as it switches off clearly. um, and then because it, uh, it obviously tries to start a few times and then once it kicks in bang, steady state. no more current through the starter and let's try and capture the same thing. but instead of through the starter through the tube filament, let's go and Bingo! Look what we've captured here.

we go at the start, got the same thing we got before we get the starter, trying to kick in with our triangle shaped waveform there. and then once it kicks in steady state bang, we get the same wave form we seeing on our Main's input and let's capture the current through the power factor correction capacitor across the mains. We expect just a basic sine wave here to be captured Bang There it is, there's the switch on, but after that after that, we expect just the regular Mains sidal waveform. That's exactly what we get.

Beautiful! So there you go I Hope you found that, uh, interesting. And if you want to discuss it, how these things work, or discuss anything, jump on over to the Eev blog forum and remember if you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time.