Motion Sensor Light for Front Entrance

Which is why the power companies charge industrial and other customers, with large reactive loads, a premium. They have to supply (and have the infrastructure for) the higher current even though it does no work.

It is also why CFLs may not bring about as big a reduction in power usage as claimed by those who foisted them on us. Instead of merely banning (effectively) incandescents, they should also have mandated that CFLs have a high power factor or, at least, require the manufacturers to put the PF on the package.

I'll see your top-posting and raise you one. It's amazing how the net was really like Camelot. For a little while it really did represent an amalgam of viewpoints and information from across the world, a real roundtable of ideas. Then came the commercial corruption. And netcopping and lots of other "badness." IMHO, top posting is a very logical and "page down palsy" free way of reading a thread. Obviously not everyone agrees. I guess that's human nature.

Between the explanations both you and Jeff have offered, I understand better what some of the issues are and why it's difficult to read the power consumption of X-10 modules with garden variety meters.

I agree the hand method is clearly the best sanity check. IIRC, I was trying to determine the amount of heat generated by a lamp module in the dimmed state, where they do tend to heat up quite a bit more than an appliance module because of heat generated by the triac. When I went to look up the phrase "Why do triacs get so hot" one of the first 10 Google hits confirms my contention that the old WWW ain't what she used to be:

How Can I Become Hot? - GirlsAskGuys.com I wanna be hot because then I will feel good about myself and get more attention. The question is: what should I do? I was kind of a tomboy growing up so I ...

How does something like that come back in a search that includes the word triac?

I assume there's some resistance in the triac and some of the current passing through it is dissipated as heat, and the more current the more heat. I am only curious because the lamp module I melted by running 1000W through it still works. It just looks like it's part of that Dali painting with the distorted clock faces. I assume the issue is that while the circuit can handle the wattage, the case design can't dump the heat fast enough to keep it from melting.

-- Bobby G.

Not to further the off-topic but...

I totally agree with the reference material as an attachment (below)

The advancement to threading newsreaders has obsoleted the need to bottom post and / or even attach reference materials, at all, except when the previous post being responded to contains multiple ideas that could confuse the isolated response idea.

Threaded response posting is even worse and can only survive a few generations. It usually indicates "too much to say".

Top posting keeps the ID headers with the text they belong to. Note the bottom posting confusion here at the bottom. Multiple colours and other special reader techniques have been implemented in order to keep the bottom posting confusion from happening over the years. Why bother?

Between the explanations both you and Jeff have offered, I understand better what some of the issues are and why it's difficult to read the power consumption of X-10 modules with garden variety meters.

I agree the hand method is clearly the best sanity check. IIRC, I was trying to determine the amount of heat generated by a lamp module in the dimmed state, where they do tend to heat up quite a bit more than an appliance module because of heat generated by the triac. When I went to look up the phrase "Why do triacs get so hot" one of the first 10 Google hits confirms my contention that the old WWW ain't what she used to be:

How Can I Become Hot? - GirlsAskGuys.com I wanna be hot because then I will feel good about myself and get more attention. The question is: what should I do? I was kind of a tomboy growing up so I ...

How does something like that come back in a search that includes the word triac?

I assume there's some resistance in the triac and some of the current passing through it is dissipated as heat, and the more current the more heat. I am only curious because the lamp module I melted by running 1000W through it still works. It just looks like it's part of that Dali painting with the distorted clock faces. I assume the issue is that while the circuit can handle the wattage, the case design can't dump the heat fast enough to keep it from melting.

-- Bobby G.

Inline ammeters only work for purely resistive loads where voltage and current always remain in phase with each other. With reactive loads (inductive or capacitive), voltage and current are 90° out of phase, requiring multiple, simultaneous measurements. Power=Voltage*Current so averaging each doesn't work. You have to average the products of the many readings. Non-linear loads are usually those related to power suplies with diodes that tend to draw current only at certain points in the voltage sine wave. These also require multiple, simultaneous measurements. I'll leave it to Jeff Volt to explain why you had the problem with the XTB. CFLs have non-linear power supplies which cause (small) surges, triggering the X10 flashes.

You really don't need the closed box. Just put your hand on the 7W nightlight. It should be hot enough to be quite uncomfortable. IIRC, I used

Not to further the off-topic but (I will)...

I totally agree with the reference material as an attachment (below)

The advancement to threading newsreaders has obsoleted the need to bottom post and / or even attach reference materials, at all, except when the previous post being responded to contains multiple ideas that could confuse the isolated response idea.

Threaded response posting is even worse and can only survive a few generations. It usually indicates "too much to say".

Top posting keeps the ID headers with the text they belong to. Note the bottom posting confusion here at the bottom. Multiple colours and other special reader techniques have been implemented in order to keep the bottom posting confusion from happening over the years. Why bother?

Between the explanations both you and Jeff have offered, I understand better what some of the issues are and why it's difficult to read the power consumption of X-10 modules with garden variety meters.

I agree the hand method is clearly the best sanity check. IIRC, I was trying to determine the amount of heat generated by a lamp module in the dimmed state, where they do tend to heat up quite a bit more than an appliance module because of heat generated by the triac. When I went to look up the phrase "Why do triacs get so hot" one of the first 10 Google hits confirms my contention that the old WWW ain't what she used to be:

How Can I Become Hot? - GirlsAskGuys.com I wanna be hot because then I will feel good about myself and get more attention. The question is: what should I do? I was kind of a tomboy growing up so I ...

How does something like that come back in a search that includes the word triac?

I assume there's some resistance in the triac and some of the current passing through it is dissipated as heat, and the more current the more heat. I am only curious because the lamp module I melted by running 1000W through it still works. It just looks like it's part of that Dali painting with the distorted clock faces. I assume the issue is that while the circuit can handle the wattage, the case design can't dump the heat fast enough to keep it from melting.

-- Bobby G.

Inline ammeters only work for purely resistive loads where voltage and current always remain in phase with each other. With reactive loads (inductive or capacitive), voltage and current are 90° out of phase, requiring multiple, simultaneous measurements. Power=Voltage*Current so averaging each doesn't work. You have to average the products of the many readings. Non-linear loads are usually those related to power suplies with diodes that tend to draw current only at certain points in the voltage sine wave. These also require multiple, simultaneous measurements. I'll leave it to Jeff Volt to explain why you had the problem with the XTB. CFLs have non-linear power supplies which cause (small) surges, triggering the X10 flashes.

You really don't need the closed box. Just put your hand on the 7W nightlight. It should be hot enough to be quite uncomfortable. IIRC, I used

I measured one LM485 lamp module with the 100W incandescent load fully dimmed using the Kill-A-Watt in kWh mode. The total power used was about

Appliance modules with locking mechanical relays dissipate only slightly less power when idle than idle lamp modules - 0.4W vs 0.5W. I think that's an indication that it's the power supplies that account for most of the idle power. I cited this as well as the fully dimmed load on the web page I mentioned earlier in the thread.

I don't recall the details but Charles Sullivan and I both measured the RMS output of a lamp module at various dim levels. I used both the Kill-A-Watt and a true RMS meter. I don't recall the details (these days I have trouble recalling what I had for breakfast or even whether I had anything) but the readings were the basis of the data given in this link...

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It's actually quite suprising how much I've learned about the X-10 transmission process just following this group.

-- Bobby G.

I find it pretty annoying to page down 10 times in a message to find someone added only the words "I agree" to the thread. (-: Better to be able to see that's all that's been added with a single glance.

-- Bobby G.

immediately

"accumulation"

It's the last button on the right that reads kWh.

It's not really a lot consider I have about 6 PCs and a whole 16 camera CCTV setup with active monitors in many of the rooms in the house going along with all the X-10 gear and at least 10 UPS's protecting various gear as well as an alarm system.

I measured it by shutting off the fridge, the lights and any other large loads and watching the meter outside go round and round. I don't know about your house, but with all the wall warts I have plugged in, along with all the AV gear that never really shuts off (so they can be IR controlled) a

Since the house is over 70 years old with the original cloth insulated wiring, I am sure at least some of those watts are "wire heat" ones but I am not curious enough to unplug everything in the house to determine that. Simply shutting off the breakers won't give a true read of the loss caused by the old wiring. If I remember when I move, I'll try to check the meter once the house is empty. That should give me a read on the wiring loss.

After reviewing Dave's data, it's clear it's not the X-10 gear that's drawing all those amps, but in looking around, I realized that there was more than enough "always on" equipment to account for a large standby power consumption level.

Sadly a lot of electronic gear can't be turned off completely without having to reprogram, reset it or otherwise fuss with it. That's why so I have so many UPSs scattered around the house (each sucking watts). The biggest savings I achieved recently was in retiring all the desktop PC's and replacing them with used laptops that draw a maximum of 17 watts each, compared to the old units that ranged from 50 watts to over 200. The power company quickly raised my rates to compensate. (-:

-- Bobby G.

I normally go to another message if there's no original content on the first screenful.

BTW, If you do top-post, be sure your sig seperator (use the correct one, it's hyphen-hyphen-space on a line by itself) and sig are at the bottom. This is important for newsreaders that leave it out of quoting.

Also, snip most of that stuff.

Many of the bottom posting advocate /trolls state you can jump to the bottom with one keystroke however...

I find it even more annoying to page down 10 times only to have to page back two and half pages to find the beginning (top) of the latest posting text. How stupid is that?

-- Bobby G.

What I find much more annoying is people that don't trim anything and quote the entire message to add their very measley .00002 cents. You can tell those posts pretty easily because they are usually "cat fights" where the insults (and the nested >'s) just go on forever:

I hardly ever bother reading any post where the >>>>'s are greater than two or three deep. The thread's almost always drifted away from the question at hand by then and has usually degenerated into some microscopic dick swinging contest. Though I hate Google as a newsreader, I have to give them some credit for collapsing multiply repeated blocks of text and adding a button to "show quoted text" if for some reason you need to refer to the original comments.

-- Bobby G.