High efficiency bulbs

1. Osram design
2. Philips design
3. Huayi design

High efficiency bulb becomes for me an obsession since the price of electrical energy grows up. (Probably this is true only in Romania.) Using this kind of bulbs in a house with more than 10 rooms will increase your budget. Unfortunately this will be happening only after a few years after shipping. These bulbs have a medium life of 8 to 10 times more than an ordinary bulb.
Ten years ago I've got a defective Osram energy saver bulb. At that moment it has 3 years old. I've change driver transistors and now works OK after 9 years. Here is the schematics in reverse engineering way ( PCB to SCH), for 20W OSRAM DULUX:

An alternative schematic for Osram 21W from one romanian reader of this page:

Not the same philosophy for Philips... I don't know if this energy saver is a real Philips product ( but this is writing on the PCB).Schematics looks familiar ( guy's from Osram and Philips have the same style for electronically projects)


Now romanian market was invaded by some energy saver made by Huayi Group from People's Republic of China and
surprise! bulbs come from 15 to 36W ( equivalent of 75 to 175W standard Edison's bulb) in two colour temperature (2700K warm white and 6500K cold white ) and a lot of  cold colours: blue, red, yellow and green....
Warm white lights exactly like a good Philips bulb and have a price 5 time smaller than Philips!
If the life time expectancy will be the same, chinese do a well done job with a minimal component design:

Some of 21W bulbs have a problem at warming up when the power supply is under 200V (instead of 220V), problem was solved by increasing  L2  wire numbers with 10...20%.

Conclusions after 4 years of tests: Chinese lamps have a short life time for the bulb. Do not spend money on it.

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web adress: http://www.oocities.org/vsurducan       email adress: vasile@l30.itim-cj.ro
last update: 16.08.2004