Hello, my name is Jim Walters.
I’m the Senior Test Lead for this product that we’re launching right now and today
I’m going to show you how easy it is to measure some key parameters with fluorescent
lights.
So the first thing I’m going to do is take a standard fluorescent light, turn it on,
and show you what the waveform looks like as the light just turns on.
It’s a little unstable; you’ll notice that lights usually flicker when you turn
a fluorescent on and I’ll show you why that is.
The second thing I’ll show you is what happens to the fluorescent light once the power stabilizes
and you’re at the steady-state position and your light is showing nice and even.
Then once I’m done showing you the fluorescent light, I’ll show you a different style light.
This is a fluorescent tube with LED strips down the back and I’ll show you that that
type of light, not only does it allow you to change colors but it consumes less power.
So here we go.
So I’ve got the box set up in a single mode and I will turn on the fluorescent light.
You’ll notice the fluorescent light came on and we’ve captured our waveform.
So the important thing to see with the waveform is that it started off very high and our power
is very high as well.
Go to the power men – you can look at either voltage, current, or power, or all thing.
So now I’m on the power menu and I can move that up and down.
If I want to know how large that waveform is, we have a bunch of built-in measurements.
I can select measure and I’m going to be measuring on Power 1, and I want to know what
the real power is.
So I’ve selected that already and you can see that I’m measuring 23.9 watts.
That measurement is the peak-to-peak there.
Now the fluorescent light is in its steady state and we’re in this mode here where
we’re consuming less power.
I’m going to go to our built-in analyze mode and this brings up an analyze panel.
Once I turn that on with the run button I’ll capture the waveform and I’m just going
to stop it so we can look at the data.
Now that we’re running in efficient mode, we’re consuming 24 watts.
So that’s really the key measurement out of this fluorescent light measure, is how
much power we actually consume.
There’s a lot of other measurements that we show here: power factor, crest factor,
other items that are a concern to engineers.
So what is nice about this panel is the analyze button gives you all of these measurements
at one time and when you’re running, you just see all the measurements.
If you stop it and want to zoom out you can see the waveforms in more detail.
That’s the voltage waveform, that’s the current waveform, and that’s the combination,
the power waveform.
Now I have an interesting light and this is something I created on my own.
What I’ve done is take a fluorescent tube and down the backside of the fluorescent tube
I’ve attached a stripe of LED lights.
So normally, an LED – or a fluorescent light is powered by AC power.
In this case, the LED strips down the back of the fluorescent light are being powered
by 12 volts DC.
So this light takes less voltage to power up and the nice thing about the LED lights
is that they will shine through the fluorescent light and allow you to change the fluorescent
light to various colors instead of just the white.
So what’s interesting to see is the waveform that we’re capturing for the current powering
this fluorescent light and then the other thing that’s interesting to see is the total
amount of power consumed.
So the idea is that by using LEDs combined with fluorescent lights you consume less power
and you have the added benefit of multiple colors.
So I’m going to put our power quality analyzer into the analyze mode.
I’ll turn it on run and right now with nothing connected we have what’s called phantom
power.
So anytime you have a little converter, in this case we have AC power coming from the
wall being converted to DC with that little adapter.
And that’s always consuming power, that little adapter.
So that’s called phantom power and it’s consuming 750 milliwatts, so you’re always
wasting that power if you’re not lighting up the light.
So now I’m going to turn the light on and I’ve started off with green.
You’ll notice when I turned the light on, we’re now measuring four watts.
If you remember from the previous fluorescent light we were measuring much more power.
So notice that this is the current waveform.
It’s a little small right now so I’m going to make it bigger.
You can adjust the size on all of these and the waveform is now a little bit bigger.
I’ll make it even a little bit bigger.
There, so this is now the current waveform.
The voltage waveform has a nice sine wave and the current waveform is going low and
then going high.
This is the waveform that you see.
When I go back to my analyze mode, you can see that we’re measuring four watts.
Now, depending on what color I’ve selected will consume different power.
The blue color that consumes 3.9 watts.
The white is actually turning on all three of the LEDs and that should consume the most
power.
So you can see in this case that we’re consuming ten watts, still quite a bit less than the
other fluorescent light, but it’s the most power that we consume.
So if you notice, there’s some other data on here – the power factor, the RMS voltage
for the signal there.
Another nice feature with this product is we have multiple displays.
So if I really want to look at what’s happening on the current display I can make it very
large by selecting display and current.
So now I have a very large current display and if I want to stretch it out in time I
just adjust it like that and it’s much bigger.
Make it a little bit smaller and there.
Now you can do a bunch of characterization on this waveform, determine the frequency,
we have cursors that allow you to set cursors and then make measurements.
So that’s very quickly, we’re able to characterize both of these two devices and
visually see what’s happening inside the device.
That’s the real power of this box.
That concludes my presentation.
So I’ve showed you that you can quickly measure AC power going into a fluorescent
light and also DC power going into a fluorescent light with LED strips.
Thank you very much for watching this video.