Watts up with these CFL bulbs?

The other day, I was doing a check of our power outage gear and I encountered a problem with the power draw of some compact fluorescent light bulbs.  In the photo above, you might be able to read that it's a 20 watt bulb.  Even though the bulb is only a 20 watt bulb, because of some weirdness in how CFL bulbs work, the draw of the bulb can be considerably more than 20 watts (more later).

Don't get me wrong, CFL bulbs are great.  I have a zillion CFL bulbs installed all over the house, including some nifty recessed ones in our kitchen (see above).   We have 8 recessed lights in the kitchen and they used to have 85 watt incandescent bulbs.  When I switched over to CFLs, we went from 680 watts to only around 160 watts and we get roughly the same light.  Since this light is on for 6-8 hours a day, the savings are substantial.  You just can't beat the efficiency of CFL bulbs.

But back to my issue - well sort of.  First a detour.  While I was away from home in the winter of 2006, DW had to deal with a nasty 3-day power outage.  If it weren't for her ingenuity and persistence, we would have certainly had frozen pipes.  Following this near disaster, I purchased and installed a 5,500 watt generator.  It gives us water, heat, light, and a few other essentials whenever the power goes out.

I talked to my electrician and did some research on connecting the generator and found that most transfer switches (that allow you to plug a generator into your home wiring) are limited to just 6 or 8 circuits.  The way modern homes are wired, the actual draw from each circuit is pretty small and 5,500 watts can run a lot more than 6 circuits if you're careful about how you do it. 

I decided on this GenTran 50 amp transfer switch.  This is way oversized for our generator, but it gives us lots of options.  At first, I thought I'd need to be picky about which circuits I lit up when on generator power, but after some experience, I learned that as long as you pay attention to the big stuff (toasters, coffee makers, hair dryers, microwaves, etc), everything else is just noise and runs fine.  Of course, I make sure I switch on the circuits one at a time to ease the startup load on the generator.  Also, I installed voltage meters to go with the amp meters so I can watch the load levels.

This setup worked great during the December 2008 ice storm outage.  As great as it was to have, I was hesitant to run the generator non-stop.  It's loud and it seems wasteful to have it on all the time.  For us, running it in the morning for a couple of hours, and then again in the early evening for dinner seemed to be a good balance.   Also, when the power goes out for a short time, it doesn't make sense to haul out the generator and fill it with gas just for a 2-3 hour outage (which most tend to be).  

So to help with the time when the power is out and the generator is off, I picked up this Xantrex portable power pack (basically a battery and an inverter) to give us some light and a little power.  It works great and even though it was pricey (I got it on sale for around $120), it fills an important role.  It's great for camping and other remote power needs and I actually use it a lot more than the generator.

Since the power pack above takes 35 hours to recharge with the AC charger, I also wanted a smart battery charger that could do quick charging during my limited generator runs.  This 25/10/2 amp Black & Decker unit is currently on sale at the B&D outlet in Kittery for $27 and fits the bill nicely.  It's a smart charger that automatically adjusts its output to the battery, so it can really pour in the juice in a hurry.  With the 35 28 Ah Xantrex unit, it gets the job done in 2-3 hours instead of 35 (This isn't great for battery life, but it's workable in a pinch - I use the slow charger whenever I have time).

Also, while I was at the Black & Decker store, I picked up an additional power pack (this one has a 19 Ah battery, with DC only output) for $41 on sale.  I couldn't let such a great deal go, and I have a small dc/ac inverter that I can use with it.  This setup can give me some additional runtime, or power a couple laptops or a small tv.  It also can be used to jumpstart a car or inflate tires.

Anyhow, back to my CFL problem and the power outage test-run I was doing.  I wanted to be able to really light up a room with the non-generator power backup system.  Not just with a faint candle glow, but with bright light.  The Xantrex power pack, with its 28 Ah battery (~330 watts for 1 hour), should have no problem doing that, even for several hours, as long as I use efficient CFL lighting.  So I dusted off an old 3-socket lamp from the basement and inserted 20 watt CFL bulbs (see first photo) in each of the sockets.

I expected no problems with this setup, since the power pack can sustain 480 watts of draw and the 3 bulbs added up to only 60 watts.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  When I hit the switch I was greeted with a sustained flicker from all three bulbs.  Confused and perplexed, I did what any guy would do.  I tried it again, and this time it worked.  Then I let it rest and tried it again, and got flicker.  Finally, I unscrewed one of the bulbs and tried yet again and it lit fine.  Next, I screwed the third bulb back into its socket.  It also lit up fine and now the room was as bright as day.  For fun, I hooked up a 100 watt fan (because I could), and sure enough, it ran fine along with the lights.

Hmmm, I thought.  That doesn't make sense.  I tore everything down, let everything rest a bit and repeated my experiment.  Sure enough, same result.  What was going on I wondered? Why the intermittent results with the 3-bulb setup?

I set out to track this thing down with some help from google.   Within a few minutes, I learned about something called "Power Factor" and the issues that the low power factors of many CFL bulbs can cause.  Power factor has to do with how a CFL bulbs sips  juice from its 120 volt AC input.  After reading a bunch of stuff, including this thread on an alternative energy site, I thought I had it figured out.  

But on reflection, it didn't quite make sense.  The inverter I was using to generate the AC can provide almost 10 times the needs of the three bulbs.  Even taking the power factor issue into account, along with other inefficiencies, the math said this should work.

Then I found an even more technical post about CFL bulbs and power factor. This one gave me the clue I needed.   The post is very technical, but it contains a key piece of info - How much instantaneous current does a 20 watt CFL draw?  The answer sure surprised me, and it explained my problem.  The scary looking waveform labeled "Tek Run" that's about mid-way down this page shows that a 20 watt CFL can draw as much as 200 watts of instantaneous current.  Multiply that times 3 and I'm right at the limit of my system, and my guess is that this is the issue that I had.  I knew that inductive loads like big motors can have a huge startup draw, but I never would have guessed that a CFL bulb could draw this much peak current, even if only for an instant.  

Electronics in the base of a CFL - courtesy of wikipedia

Apparently, the CFL draws a lot of juice for part of the time, but then nothing during the rest of the time.  My guess is that this peak current is even higher at startup, especially when I look at the size of the capacitor (black cylinder)  in the photo above.  It may be that the inverter in my power pack isn't very robust and although it had enough juice, it just couldn't hold it together well enough to get all three bulbs going on the first try.  

Anyhow, it seems that when using smaller inverters and multiple CFLs, things may work better if they're not all turned on at once.  Incidentally, once I got the bulbs on, I left them on for over three hours before the inverter cut out due to a low battery.  That was an hour or two less than theoretical max, but considering the draw of the inverter itself, as well as other inefficiencies, and the fact that the battery is a couple of years old, it seemed about right.