Comparison of power quality and luminous efficacy of commercial energy saving lamps in Thailand

The objectives of this paper are the investigation and comparison of the electrical power quality and efficacy of energy saving lamps. These lamps consume less real power and produce higher relative illumination compared with traditional incandescent lamps. However, the energy saving lamps produce high total harmonic distortion (THD) that have effect to power quality problem. On the other hand those lamps operate at low power factor which is the demanding additional reactive power from the electrical utility. To investigation the power quality of lamps, the samples of commercial energy saving lamps in Thailand are tested. The experimental results are compared with standard incandescent and mercury lamps. The experiments were performed by using Luminous Flux Tester which is developed according IEC standard. We found that, the sample compact fluorescent lamps have lower energy consumption, higher illumination than the standard incandescent lamps, but high level of THD. The compact fluorescent lamps have higher efficacy than the mercury lamps. In this paper, the electrical and lighting characteristics of energy saving lamps are presented to verify the effectiveness of each lamp.