LED lamps, electronic converters and ...

Electronic transformers or converters for 12 V halogen lighting raise many a claim over conventional transformers made from lots of iron and copper. One is that the output voltage is regulated and hence offsets variances of the load. Variances of input voltage, they do not balance out, but this they do not claim. So much as an aside.

But a commonly-known problem with electronic transformers is that, at a certain degree of part load – which may be 10% or 50% of the rated power – the regulation completely fails. This means that when one or two of the lamps fail, the remaining ones also go dark or, worse still, start to blink at more or less regular intervals. This cannot really be called a 'regulated' voltage.

If this is not bad enough, it also prohibits the replacement of halogen lamps with LED lamps, since LEDs claim energy savings of around 80%, and the present models use even less power than that. Note that incandescent halogen lamps are still incandescent lamps, although the erratic distinction between 'incandescent lamps' and 'halogen lamps' is often made, and as such halogen lamps are very inefficient, require a lot of electric power and should be replaced with LEDs sooner rather than later!

If you have conventional transformers in your halogen installation, you are fit for the transition straight away. If these are toroidal core transformers, you are optimally suited because these have excellent efficiencies when only slightly loaded! But if you have electronic converters in your installation, you may be at a loss.

Or perhaps you use this lamp by Philips, which claims in a press release that problems which used to occur with 'some transformers' will not happen with this type of lamp.

But what is this? When you read the information on the packaging, you learn that this lamp is only suitable for operation with AC 50 Hz or 60 Hz! So, the lamp that is meant to solve the HF problem is not fit to be exposed to the problem?