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Resilience of lighting to voltage fluctuations

Former Community Member
Former Community Member

Came home this evening to find the house in darkness. Got the text from Western Power just as I turned into my road. Problem: HV fuse blown on one phase (probably due to trees as they don't appear to be cutting them back as regularly). Despite this there was still some power: when checked, my mains supply was running at about 80V. Switched on hall light (LED), got interesting disco effect. Landing light (also LED) stayed off. Switched on alcove lights in living room (tungsten filament) and got red glow. DAB radio in kitchen worked perfectly! (Plug type PSU, switch mode?). Other LED lights didn't play ball either except for 3-LED flex light over the bed (worked but dimmer than usual) and workbench anglepoise lamp (12W LED rated 220-240V) which worked perfectly!

From this I assume that most of my LED lighting probably has fairly simple driver electronics while some lamps are regulated better and more tolerant of wide voltage ranges.

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    If you want to know about the innards of LED lamps, see a seemingly unlimited number of teardowns of them on the “bigclivedotcom” YouTube channel.

    Some have a switch mode power supply.

    Others use a simple “capacitive dropper” - a capacitor wired in series with the LEDs to add impedance and limit the current.  It's like putting a resistor in series, but without generating lots of heat.

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    If you want to know about the innards of LED lamps, see a seemingly unlimited number of teardowns of them on the “bigclivedotcom” YouTube channel.

    Some have a switch mode power supply.

    Others use a simple “capacitive dropper” - a capacitor wired in series with the LEDs to add impedance and limit the current.  It's like putting a resistor in series, but without generating lots of heat.

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