California Title-24 Ch 6 is changing!

Residential Electricians and Lighting Designers better get ready for it. It is drastic and sweeping. Draconian even!
http://www.energy.ca.gov/title24/earlycompliance/2004-06-03_LIGHTING_STNDS.PDF

I’m still having a hard time convincing designers we have to meet the current energy code. This new one is going to be a nightmare. One benefit will be the sales from having to use occupancy sensors or dimmers for almost every switch in the house. I’m not sure what is going to happen for exterior lights but my guess is there are going to be a lot of temporary fixtures installed to get a final.

not only state of californe will do this and there are few other state will adopt this code as well [ state of wisconsin will be adoting this very soon i dont know when effective date will be somehow little diffrent than state of californe will do]

I belive it will make it more challange for some of us to deal with alot of new stuff here and some owners will have hard time to deal with the change of trend to engery saving trend but the tech stuff is allready there from commercal market it will show up in resdentinal aera soon ,

that going drive some cost up a bit too so let see where this trend will go for resdentinal area


merci , marc

[This message has been edited by frenchelectrican (edited 02-05-2005).]

Now all we need is lighting manufacturers to realize that there is going to be a huge market for high efficacy light fixtures, maybe giving the public more options for these type of lights - ones that look good in their homes. I don't know about you guys but I spend a lot of time changing out light fixtures and can guts after inspections to keep a lot of my high-end clients happy with their 6 and 7 figure remodels when they did the right thing and pulled permits. Which brings up another topic. What about all the fewer people out their that aren't going to pull that permit to remodel their kitchen or their bathroom because of cost and lighting options. Thus taking more work from the licensed guys and giving them to the guys who don't care about compling with Title 24 - i.e. handymen working for real estate agents feeding the endless market of multi-million $ Bay area homes

Sorry guys I had to vent on that one!

[This message has been edited by Northbayec (edited 02-05-2005).]

I agree this is going to be hard to break to the owners! Hell, even I will agree that a bunch of little 4" cans w/ MR-16's and Xenon counter lights looks 10x better than the flourescent alternative. Flourescent does not scale down to residential sized rooms, and as mentioned above, there are not many fixtures that look good that take pin-based CFL's.

That said, I haven't done a remodel in a while, but my girlfriend's parents are about to start on their kitchen (Poway, CA ), I asked if their building inspector was aksing for flourescents, etc per the 2001 code, and they just gave me a blank stare...

So, who enforces this??? Building dept or is there another inspection by the CA Energy Commission?

Looks like it's time to go learn about dimming ballasts!
Mike

So does this mean that in all new and renovated housing, most of the lighting now will have to be fluorescent tubes?

Wow! That is pretty heavy-handed.

Of course that's not going to stop average Joe-homeowner from replacing the Circ-line fluorsecent kitchen fixture with a regular porcelain lampholder so he can screw in an incandescent bulb.

Welcome to the People's Fascist Republic of Kalifornia! You can't be trusted to make good choices for how to light your own home, so we're going to make the choices for you.

You got that right Solar.
A beautiful place I don't think I even want to visit. Shame really.

I happen to know that many people are very (negatively) sensitive to fluorescent (and similar) lights for various reasons. One common cause with certain visual disorders is sensitivity to the uneven spectrum. Even though the colors are balanced out to give a good character of white, and accurate rendering of color, the spectral peak lines still cause eye stress when trying to focus for some people. Another common cause is the flicker rate at 120 Hz (100 Hz in Europe) can affect certain people with certain neural differences (Autism, Asperger's, and Kanner's). The flicker has not only a time component, but a spectral component because the different color phosphors used to produce different colors decay at different rates during the off cycle. The buzz from the ballast can also affect these same people.

I happen to know about these problems personally because I fit both categories at the same time. I have to use extra incandescent lighting at work, and usually disable or shut off the fluorescent lights around my work area. Lucky for me I don't live in California.

More information:

http://asumag.com/mag/university_eliminating_distractions/

http://www.autism.org/irlen.html

http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/Teaching_Tips.htm

http://www.angelfire.com/pa5/as/autismunit/AutismAwarenessforKids.htm

http://www.azcentral.com/families/education/articles/1221autism-ON.html

http://www.autismcoalition.org/whatisautism.asp

http://www.jems.com/jems/exclus04/e0604b.html

http://www.asmonline.org/dosanddonts.htm

pdh,

Do you have problems with the T8's too. They have a higher frequency (400hz?) and the color rendition is much better.

What about HID like HPS & MH or worse Mecury vapor?

I have been trying to figure out some ways to get by on some of these, as I soon will have to mandate it to customers. (Our Inspectors enforce title-24 at final.)

All of the dimmers is just a "Cha-ching"$

Baths are going to be hairy, but I think I have that figured out. (Without changing out fixtures) Now bear in mind, (Little black bear this time.) the occ. sensor has to be done in a certain way. It can't be a simple sense movement an it's on, it has to be turned on manually, after motion is sensed. Which means to cover this, you need a latching relay after the occ. sensor, or other lighting control contactor. And I'm checking into a motion controlled/enabled Graffic Eye. This will cover the "Low Efficiancy" lighting,(Cha-ching$) and your "High Efficiancy" too. Now the kicker.... It say "50%", it doesn't say you can't put 5000watts of lighting in. So you put in all of you regular "Low Efficiancy" decorative fixtures. Then you match the wattage of them in 32W flouresant cans, you might need 30 or so (Cha-ching$) for the average bath to equal those 2 Italian Halogens the customer demanded as vanity fixtures. Now you have 30 six inch holes in the cieling for your wall to wall flouresant cans. And its all controlled by the Graffic Eye. So you have one scene for Inspection, (Sir, please don you goggles.) and the other scene for actual use by the customer. I know this plan needs some work, but we still have a little time....

Mark, we all know how it's really going to happen... The Italian halogens are going to stay in the box, which you're never even going to see. They're going to give you a couple really, really awful $10 fluorescents from Home Depot to install. And after final, the owner's going to swap them out. DIY, by homeowners who don't really want to be doing it and quite likely aren't going to find out what they need to find out to do it right, and completely uninspected.

I wonder how many houses are going to have to burn down before they realize that trying to force people to act againt their own best interests simply creates a black market, and back down from these stupid rules? (At least I hope they back down, but I suspect that may not be realistic. The usual reaction of despots is to get even more draconian.)

[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 02-05-2005).]

In light of George's comments in the "Homeowner pack service panels" thread, and in light of a California jury awarding a woman millions of dollars because her McDonald's coffee was hot, I'm wondering about the liability aspect of all this.

Here's the scenario: Homeowner asks you, following final, to swap out the "environmentally-friendly" lights for lights they can live with. You refuse, based on the fact that you're in trouble if you get caught doing it. This "forces" the HO to do it himself, and he does it wrong. A fire results, maiming and crippling a young child, who before the fire was even cuter than JonBenet Ramsey. The parents sue. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a California jury is going to find is going to find for the family, to the tune of many millions of dollars.

Hmmmm...


[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 02-05-2005).]

Solar', Yep, fully aware of how this will go down. Our shop has a whole shelf of the cheapest, and beat up from being installed 4 times "Title 24 fixtures". Which is soon to expand I guess. Customers are just not going to take it very well. And I find it hilarious....

Customer and Designer hand you a fixture schedule and several thousand dollars of lighting, you look up from it with one eye glowing red and say, [schwarzenegger]Silly girly-man. All lighting MUST be METAL HALIDE, I'll be back.[schwarzenegger]

(I know full well our Hummer driving Governor had nothing to do with this, other than the rubber stamp.)

As for PDH's comment there, prolonged exposure to certain types of these "High efficiancy" lights make me feel physically ill. And there are "flicker free" ballasts made now, but cost a fortune.

New Jersey also has an energy code go to

http://www.state.nj.us/dca/codes/

and look up under the energy code if interested. We have to do res checks now to make sure houses are "air-tight" and the recess cans have to be air tight as well. The building inspector is the one who is really the one who enforces the rules but as an electrical inspector I can tell the electrician to change the cans.

I'm getting pretty tired of loosing my rights in California. I somewhat understand the loss of rights in allowing the government to come onto my property to check construction for safety issues (I think inspections should be handled by the property owner, not the government, just like how soil is tested by an outside contractor paid by the owner on comercial projects). However the government designing lighting systems on my property is a violation of my rights.

But, people don't seem to care about how much the government sticks its nose into everything and so it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Soon they will tell me what color I can paint my house.

I'm a strong libertarian incase you couldn't tell

jps1006:

I don't specifically know what the T8's look like, so I can't say. But if they are just chopping the 60 Hz waveform at 400 Hz, then the 60 Hz up and down effect will still be there, and it will still be a problem. You'd have to conver to DC then to 400 Hz for the visual problem to go away. I suspect I won't be affected visually by 400 Hz. Audible might be another issue.

As for HID ... the more it tries to render white, the worse the problem might be due to the variation of color over time. I know that the more white lighting in grocery stores bothers me; I have to limit my shopping time to at most a half hour to avoid a headache. Lights that are not (trying to be) white are actually less bothersome. I can deal with the yellowish HPS lights just fine. The poor color rendering might be ugly (I wouldn't want that in my home at all), but I believe it actually compensates for the problems. My own theory is that a single color would not be a problem in this regard. I do know that in my teen and pre-teen years, lighting my room with a single color was always "comfortable".

http://www.advancetransformer.com/uploads/resources/Advance_Ballast_Specifications_Centium_T8.pdf

Some electronic ballasts are 42khz, all that I know of are 20khz+. Electronic ballasts should not be producing any flicker unless someones brain processes visual images 200x faster than everyone else

This new energy code requires all ballasts to be electronic and have an output no less than 20khz. Unfortunately many of the recessed and decorative fixtures still use magnetic ballasts.

Anybody out there know of a mainstream manufacturer who makes recessed cans with electronic ballasts? Or a link to some catalogs with vanity style flourecents. I have an architect who is intrested in specifing these in future projects?

Thanx

John

I mainly use Lightolier or Elco recessed fluorescents for residential projects. The Lightolier will work with 26 or 32 wall triple twin CFL’s and the Elco will work with 26, 32 or 42 watt triple twin CFL’s.

Curt

Thanx for the promt reply Curt.
I've been using the Elco cans myself mainly because they are easy to change out to incadecent. Maybe I'll look into the 42watt triple twin CFLs. Alright in commercial locations. Convincing home owners they look good in their house is a whole different project in itself.

John

John

I have been using the Lightolier for many years but just started using the Elco to try and reduce the cost. Elco actually has 3 different housings (1 for each wattage). The 26 watt housing is a single wall housing and is limited to the 26 watt lamp. The 32 and 42 watt housings are identical and all 3 use the same ballast. According to my supplier all 3 are the same price so we use the 42 watt housing and install which ever lamp works best for the application.

Almost all bathrooms I do have a recessed light over the shower or tub so I will use a fluorescent with a lens and it provides much better lighting than an incandescent with lens does. One of the GC’s I work for likes to push recessed in fluorescent’s in the kitchen for energy saving and heat issues and so far all the customers have been happy with the end results.

Curt

For those that are already using a lot of flourescent in homes, what color temp bulbs ae you using?

I used all 3000K in a project I did, but they don't look as "white" as 3500 - 4100 but they do look softer and skin tones look a lot better. I was trying to match existing incan. and halogen. What has been your experience? What do HO's, architects, and designers like best?

The guys in Washington, DC are the ones forcing the states to pass these energy codes. I believe there is a deadline for all the states to comply. I think there was a recent article in EC&M about it.

Direct lobbying effort of Advanced Ballast and thier parent ubber corp.

dmattox:

I looked at that specification. It's just a buyer's spec. It's not an engineering spec. It doesn't show the circuit schematic, or give any indication how it (supposedly) gets rid of the 60 Hz component. What is the ballast going to be doing during the zero-crossing of the incoming AC? Is it converting to DC first? I tried downloading their "Technical Data Sheet" but the SQL server it's accessing seems to have some problems at the moment (that's not good web server programming to make delivery of a file dependent on a database that isn't reliable).

I've seen "flicker free" lights before. And I can still see the flicker (while everyone around me said they could not).

I once asked on another forum how best to go about making a fluorescent light work directly on DC. I didn't get any answer to that one. But I'd think it is just a matter of achieving the start voltage and limiting the current by chopping up fast enough.

This could be done with three phase power. Just chop around the phases at the right syncronized rate and timing to use an equal amount of power at all times. Do it fast enough (42 kHz should work) and a small capacitor could sink all the harmonic currents with a negligible power factor drop.

A more complex circuit could do this with single phase power using a capacitor to get something approximating a 90 degree phase shift so there's a power source during the incoming zero crossing. But that would drop the power factor significantly (maybe down to 0.7).

Otherwise, they'd have to convert from AC to DC then chop that up to make it work without flicker.

Here is an extensive information resource on fluorescent lighting:

http://nemesis.lonestar.org/reference/electricity/fluorescent/index.html

NorthBayec,


Electronic ballast can light
I just installed several of this type of fixture http://www.kurtversen.com/Catalog/Leafs/Section_P/P626.pdf

not sure if a home owner is willing to fork out $200

another reason to raise property values


[This message has been edited by Dave33 (edited 02-07-2005).]

[This message has been edited by Dave33 (edited 02-07-2005).]

Thanks for the link Dave.
Its always nice to know what else is out there.
HOs love having options!

John

I think I have found the recessed can made for flouresant facist goverments....

Completely Convertable.... I did a job with them about a year ago, and just now remember them. They have modules that swap out. So you take your Flour's out and put in the low effeciancy stuff everyone really wants.

Could be a bit rough on the pricing though, these things were not cheap.
http://63.76.47.174/
See the 5" and 7" platforms....


[This message has been edited by e57 (edited 02-08-2005).]