Does anyone know if the common CFL can be used on a 50 cycle system? Will the work at all? Will they be dimmer or will they burn up in short order?

Thanks

Steve

 

A standard ballast should be fine with 50hz, but it will be louder. You may need to check with the manufacturer if it's an electronic ballast, but that should be ok as well.

 

Compact fluorescent bulbs which can screw into ordinary sockets typically have internal diode/capacitor circuitry which rectifies the AC line voltage to DC. The resulting high-voltage DC is then converted to high-frequency (20000+ hz) AC through a switching transistor and inductor. It's all built into the bulb -- unlike with a fluorescent tube, which is a different matter entirely.

The bulb probably wouldn't care very much whether it was fed 50HZ or 60HZ, since it gets rectified to DC anyway. The capacitor is probably sized for 60HZ so there'd be a bit more ripple on the internal rectified DC. You might see a bit of 100HZ flicker in the light output (ordinarily the lights are flicker-free because of the 20000 Hz operation).

The lights do care a lot about what voltage is applied to them, so don't try to plug a CFL design for 120 volt 60 Hz US power into a 230 volt 50 Hz European system.

But 120 volt 50 Hz would probably work about as well as 120 volt 60HZ for a CFL bulb. I say "probably" because there is so much effort to reduce production costs in these disposable CFL bulbs that the manufacturers will try anything to chisel out every
last unnecessary component from the circuit, and there's no guarantee that they all work the same.


Such a

 

Thanks Guys. You have answered my questions. I am driving down to Baja Ca. Mexico during the Christmas holiday. I thought I would take a couple of pakages of CFl's to the church I have been working on for about 15 years.

Their power comes from a large gen set which they run at 1500 RPM instead of 1800 RPM hence the 50 Hz. It saves on fuel costs. I guess we will see how well they work.