[RE-wrenches] Long transmission line inductance and LED light flicker

Chris Mason cometenergysystems at gmail.com
Sun Feb 2 16:01:42 PST 2014


You should rent or borrow a power quality analyzer to look at the phase
angles and harmonic distortion throughout the day. A scope will also help
to allow you to look at the waveform of the inverter produced electricity.
You need to properly identify the cause of the problem before you invest in
any equipment.

Resistive loads will not change phase angles. Only capacitive or inductive
loads can do that. However, LEDs work fine in commercial installations
where 0.8 power factors are common so I doubt that is your problem.
It is more likely that badly formed waveforms cause switching issues for
the LED's driver electronics. Filtering may help.

Line to Line capacitors are probably not going to help, but Line to Earth
capacitors could act as a high pass filter to shunt noise to ground.



On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Troy Harvey <taharvey at heliocentric.org>wrote:

>
>
> We've got a PV system that has long lines from the inverters to the house
> (1000 ft or so). While the wires are properly sized (2x350MCMs), it
> inherently has a lot of inductance due to the line-length. What We are
> noticing is that dimmable LED lights flicker anytime a new load turned on,
> even if that load is purely resistive and the overall current draw is small
> (20 amps or so). What I "think" is happening is the LED dimmer circuits get
> their cue from phase delays, and that the inductance of the line length
> causes some phase jitter everytime a load is applied - thus causing flicker.
>
> Has anyone dealt with this issue successfully (other than switching
> to incandescent lights)? Would a static capacitor bank at the house do the
> trick, or do we need some type of active PFC? And if static did you have
> any issues with constant power draw from the capacitors?
>
>
>
> Troy Harvey
> ---------------------
> Heliocentric
>
>
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-- 
Chris Mason
President, Comet Systems Ltd
www.cometenergysystems.com
Cell: 264.235.5670
Skype: netconcepts
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