LED, Halogen lighting interference.....???

[quartermaster]

I'm finally going to break down and replace my flourescent lighting in my reloading room. I've never had a really big problem with the lighting effecting my scales and dispensers, but since buying the new Chargemaster, it has become an issue.

At least I hope that's the problem, and not just that the new Chargemaster doesn't work as good as the old RCBS dispenser with the infared communication method.

Does LED or Halogen lighting have any effect on electronics? I want to stay away from incandescent if possible

I'd like to do the job once as it is going to be a pain to do. I'm thinking of either track lighting or preferably recessed.

I suppose I could call RCBS, but I'd rather get the info from any of you guys who have experience using this type of lighting.

thanks in advance for your comments, QM

 

[WYOMan]

I am not sure about the LED lights, but I tried a halogen fixture once. It looked like a bar fixture for flouesents, but it had two little 6" halogen lights in it. The only thing that I noticed was the heat from it.

 

[Crashbox]

At least one of the LED bulbs I have (I think it's one of the newer Lights of America ones from Costco), tend to put out copious amounts of radio frequency interference (RFI). I notice it via my radio in the reloading room. It is most certainly possible that this would mess with sensitive electronics, but I have an RCBS 750 scale and there have not been any issues even with the numerous fluorescent lamps I have over the table. I do need to test it further with the LED lamp on.

 

[FROGO207]

The LED lights are also frequency modulated to get the correct color of light and power supply match. Each LED only needs to run on 1.5 volts DC to work. I have not had or heard of any problems with the newer LED lights. With respect to post #3 the more inexpensive florescent or LED lights have less RFI filtering than the Name brands and allow more noise to escape down the power lines. If you pay about twice as much for one that is a name brand bulb the noise will probably be gone.

 

[popper]

Halogen is just incandescent with halide gas to get more light(and LOTS of heat). LED light is pulsed (most systems). frogo - can't change the color by pulsing. The pulses may interfere with optical communications. They should meet FCC RFI requirements, but many don't. I'd try your chargemaster without any lights (use a regular flashlight) to see if it works OK first. If you are replacing CF with LED, try one bulb/brand and see if it is a problem.

 

[FROGO207]

Popper there was an article recently on LED Lighting in EC&M and they stated that you can change the intensity and color of the LED slightly by varying the pulse width of the power. Just repeating what was reported there. They were discussing the pulse width and PQ problems with units that had poor RFI filtering

 

[kingmt]

I'm going to show how little knowledge I have but this is my understanding of a LED. The LED itself only pulses & brightness is controlled by the amount of voltage it is receiving. I don't understand them very well & need to research them a bit I'm not sure how they get there color. A LED range of operation is 1.4v to bridge the circuit to 3.7v but it can be over driven to 4.5v but above that the light will get dimmer & shorten its life. I assume it the circuit is staying open longer from the higher voltage.

 

[quartermaster]

I called RCBS today and couldn't believe that I got right through to a rep without waiting for more than 10 seconds on hold. When I mentioned that to him and he said my timing was impeccable and I also was a bit lucky. He told me tradationally, that they get around 600 customer service calls on a Monday.

Anyhow, according to him they have done no testing on halogen or LED lighting. He asked me what problem I was having, I told him that my dispenser would drop up to.3 more gr more than programed in relatively often, particularly with extruded powder. I mentioned that I thought possibly I should slow it down as the powder was bunching up at the end of the drop tube and it didn't tke too much rotation to drop an overcharge. He told me to try the straw trick, which has been posted on this forum a few times. Needless to say, I stuck a straw 1/2 way in the tube tonight, but didn't get a chance yet to try it and see how it works. The theory sounds good to me though.

Also, I told him that I had to continuously reprogram a given charge in as it seemed to want to drop more and more powder a my reloading sessions progressed. apparently this has been an ongoing problem with the Chargemaster. He said that they have come up with a solution which seems to aleviate most of that dilemma. He told me to remove the second foot back underneath the unit on the right side as you are facing it, Apparantly they have found that the screw on this is putting a bit of undo pressure on a sensor in the scale. Once again, I immediately removed that.

I guess I will see if these suggestions work the next time I do some reloading, which should be in a couple of weeks.

The funny thing is, he said that the flourescent light problem is not nearly as big as it is made out to be. His opinion was, that unless it is within 2 or 3 feet, you should have no problem at all. Mine is 5' away. His point was made when he told me that the RCBS testing facility was totally lighted by flourescents which are hung 6' above their work tables. Pretty interesting, wouldn't you say?

I would still be interested in hearing from anyone that has the halogen or LED lighting in their reloading room, just to satisfy my curiousity.

I appreciated your thoughts and comments. Thank you.

 

[dragon813gt]

Putting in a UPS to clean up the power to the scale is always a good idea. This goes for most electronics anymore. You'd be amazed at how "dirty" most power supplies coming from the electric company are.


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[BeerSleeper]

You need to get a really good UPS to do that. Most of them just pass wall voltage straight to the plug, and switch over to battery if the voltage goes high or low.

Really good means not the $60 you walk out of walmart with in most cases.

 

[quartermaster]

At the risk of being stupid, what do you mean by UPS? Power surge Protector?

 

[cfullgraf]

The amateur radio community is having issues with some LED bulbs emitting large amounts of radio frequency interference (RFI). If there is enough RFI to affect radios, there would be enough to affect delicate electronic equipment.

Here is a video about it. While more detailed than a reloader would care about, it shows some of the issues. It is about 11-12 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8zMhjXcmoA

The commentator in the video mentions that some bulbs are bad enough that a neighbor's LED bulb could affect radio operation, ham radio receivers are pretty sensitive to be able to hear weak singles from around the world.

In terms of affecting electronic scales, it might not be so extreme, but LED lights in some part of a household might have an effect on electronic scales.

 

[ranger335v]

Quartermaster, flourescent lights, as such, aren't a problem for us. What CAN be a problem for quirky digital scales is a strong magnetic field. Many large flourescent light fixtures use a "ballast" transformer which does produce such fields. Keeping the fixtures well away from the scale will prevent any interaction.

Radio Frequency Interferrence is a wholly different thing from magnetic fields. No scale is going to be bothered by any RFI from halogen or LED lamps.

Don't replace your present excellant lighting until you KNOW it's what's causing your scale difficulty. Simply turn off your flourescents and use an incandescent table light long enough to see if it makes any difference to your scale; my bet is, it won't.

Inexpensive Chinese digital scales - the kind sold to us - are quirky at best, no matter how much hype you may read more or less saying "I've used my wonderful digital for 6 months - or 30 years, etc. - with absolutely no problems." That may be true, for them, but it's not the norm; a lot of us left our beams but have returned.

A UPS is an Uninterruptable Power Supply, it provides power for a short time after a power line failure. The better ones condition and clean up the wave form of the AC line power for cleaner power but most consumer models don't. And a 'dirty' line power sure can affect some of our inexpensive electonic stuff - including our computers, etc. - and having to buy a costly UPS to properly power an already over-priced reloading scale just gets too expensive for little to no gain over the performance of a beam scale used properly anyway. All IMHO, of course, as a long time reloader and retired precision electronix instruments tech in the defence/space programs.

 

[brucelytle]

Uninterupted Power Supply

 

[cfullgraf]

Radio Frequency Interferrence is a wholly different thing from magnetic fields. No scale is going to be bothered by any RFI from halogen or LED lamps.

Radio waves are electromagnetic waves. They sure can affect other electronic equipment.

Also, the poorly designed LED lights put unwanted noise on the powder lines.

 

[popper]

Frogo - I understand that you read it someplace - not demeaning you, just people who write stuff they know nothing about. Spent 6 years designing LED lighting systems for commercial aircraft. The cheap stuff will give more EMI. Metro buses are just now converting to LED strip lighting - really expensive so far. Halogen is a real heat generator. As to interfering with electronics, only the real cheap ones. I've seen a 2' LED strip light with separate controller for ~$200. 60-75 W replacements are ~$50-75. The LEDs will last a long time but the controller is the killer.

 

[kingmt]

I think I'll test my cheapy LED lights tonight beside my cheapy scale.

 

[kingmt]

Just tested the LED right against the scale. I fired up 500 high intensity SMD & it didn't affect the scale at all but when my phone ring the scale went crazy.

Keep the phone away & you should be OK.

I only tested the diodes. A power converter inside could still cause interference.

 

[ranger335v]

"Radio waves are electromagnetic waves. They sure can affect other electronic equipment."

Yes, stretched to silly extremes, that's true but in the real world it's not an issue for reloaders, is it?

We may note some effects of powerful 60-120 cps electomagnetic fields by the effects they have on nearby ferrous metals but we really won't see any such effects on a chunk of iron even if it's placed along side a powerful radio antenna.

A scale qualifies as "other electronic equipment" but we aren't talking about sensitive aircraft navigation instruments, etc! The susceptability of a non-radio sensitive DC operated scale to anything less than massive RFI within 3 feet is zero.

You are correct about the potential harmful effects of 'dirty' power on cheap scales tho.

 

[kelbro]

A snap-on choke or two at the connector end will take care of most any interference.

 

[quartermaster]

kelbro, what do you mean by a choke?

 

[sugarmaker]

Strong RF fields (like from your cell phone or cordless) are picked up by the PC board traces and internal wiring. In theory they are well out of the frequency response of the scale circuitry BUT the integrated circuits all have something called an input protection diode. This parasitic diode can (and does) rectify the RF, downconverting it much like a crystal radio. Your scale (and a host of other equipment) responds to this in-band signal. It is possible to shield and design this effect out but it adds cost. This is a common thing in low end consumer electronics. I'm the chief engineer for a medical electronic equipment company. Many LED lights have a step up converter to allow them to run from 1 battery as a single battery won't forward bias the LED. This converter operates at a few hundred KHz and can generate fields into a few tens of MHz. Very capable of interfering with something like a scale if there is any wire length in the switching loop and no effort was made to minimize EMI.

 

[ranger335v]

"what do you mean by a choke? "

An electronic 'choke' is somewhat analogous to an electromagnet; wrap several turns of insulated wire around a bolt and you have an electromagnet if you put DC on it. But it's a choke - reducer - if you apply AC to one side and test for the AC it at the other. The self induced magnetic field works to smooth the output or 'choke' the AC signal. The smoothing effect becomes much more pronounced with more turns of wire and very much more as the applied frequency increases towards Radio Frequencys and up.

Installing a proper choke in the hot side of your 60 hz AC power line won't bother the line current to your scale, the frequency is too low, but it will dampen any really high frequency 'noise' on the line and that reduces the potentially harmful effects of 'dirty' line voltage. Adding a small value capacitor across the power line also helps the choke do its thing. All mildly interesting stuff to be aware of but it's really not very useful information unless you're a technician.

 

[quartermaster]

please close this thread