#Halogen to led conversion drivers#
#Halogen to led conversion driver#

#Halogen to led conversion drivers#

Many of the new drivers use active power factor correction. Power companies like this because you take only useful current - and you pay for all of it.

#Halogen to led conversion driver#

With active power factor correction the driver looks like a resistor to the AC line, with the current in phase with and proportional to the voltage. Good drivers use 'active power factor correction' (called other things, like 'active harmonic filtering' in some places). The capacitive filter draws current in spikes only at the peaks of the AC voltage, so it is also nasty from a power distribution perspective. Simple LED drivers rectify the AC mains input and filter the DC with a capacitor before switching it down to drive the LED. This is done with magnetic ballasts for fluorescent lamps.) (You can compensate for inductive reactance by adding capacitive reactance. Reactive current still causes losses is power transmission systems, so power companies don't like it much. Depending on where you live, you might pay for reactive power, but in many places you don't. Magnetizing current does not change when you load the transformer.

A replacement of the illuminants is always useful if you want to keep the lamp itself for a few more years. But it can also be worthwhile to replace a functional spotlight with an LED version in order to reduce energy consumption. There is a large selection of LED illuminants for these bases. The conversion of a halogen spotlight to LED naturally makes sense if the old light source has just burnt out anyway. Many lights in the house have bases of the type E26, E11 or GU10. In a conservatively designed transformer, the magnetizing current is quite small and the other losses are small. The easiest way is to replace the old lamps with new ones using LED technology. In actuality, some 'real' power is wasted due the the current flowing through the resistance of the winding of the transformer, and there is a small amount of 'hysteresis loss' and 'eddy current loss' in the iron core of the transformer. This is called 'reactive' current or reactive power. Essentially what you have is just a simple inductor, so the phase relationship between the applied voltage and the current is such that, ideally, the actual true power would be zero. It is called 'magnetizing current' because it creates the magnetic field in the core of the transformer. Current does flow in the primary of a transformer that has no load connected.