Quote:
Originally Posted by clkingtx
Worth, wasn't it you recently that made a fantastic light with cfl's and a shipping pallet? Maybe something like that(or several like that) would be most economical to light a 12x15 foot greenhouse.
Carrie
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It wasn't a shipping pallet it was my old frame from my old T 12 florescent lights.
My wattage draw was 276 watts but the CFL lights were producing the equivalent of 1200 watts.
I was only pulling about 2.3 amps.
With the configuration I could have tippled it easy.
I know some folks here had a hard time grasping what I did and how it works.
Not only did I get fantastic non elongated growth but I also had tons of blooms forming and fruit set right here in the house.
Some of my first tomatoes of the season are due to this.
Done with 12 100 watt equivalent 6500K lights that only drew 23 watts each.
My thoughts behind it were energy savings and why put one 1000 watt light in and have the plant farther away suffer when you can spread it out with less energy consumption.
This allowed me to take the carbon footprint that I made smaller and transfer it to my motorcycle by going from 120 jets to 140 and burning more fuel there.
Here is one way to look at current/amps, watts and voltage.
For one thing watts were borrowed from the steam engine as a way of expressing energy.
Only later on did they start using it as a way to measure electricity used.
Volts are like pressure.
And Amperage is like current.
Lets put this in wiring.
I hate doing it this way but it works.
If you are using 12 volts you have less pressure like you would in pipe at say 12 PSI.
To get the same amount of energy from point A to point B you need to do one or two things.
Increase the size of the pipe or wire or increase the pressure or voltage.
Now lets look at resistance.
That would be like friction loss in pipe.
The longer the run of wire the more resistance you are going to have, the same would be for pipe, in pipe it is known as friction loss.
In wiring it is known as voltage drop.
With both your are wasting energy.
In pipe it is pressure drop due to friction loss in wire it is energy in the form of heat.
So what do you do?
You increase the size of the pipe or increase the size of the wire at a given voltage or pressure.
To put this in perspective if our electric lines were 12 volt DC they would have to be as big as huge tree trunks in our neighborhood to carry the amount of electricity we use.
A the time Edison had no concept of the amount of electricity we use today.
Thank God for Tesla and his 3 phase concept and AC current.
Worth