ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Califoria better get ready....

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