According to the articles and advertisements published in leading newspapers, Halonix – a brand of Phoenix Lamps, is the No. 1 manufacturer of CFLs in India.

But our readers have pointed out that the products from Halonix are not so easy to procure thanks to their distribution network!

Hope that the No. 1 manufacturer also takes efforts to sell the products and make it available all over India – at affordable prices too.

And it also looks like Eveready is no longer in the picture. Halonix now has products ranging from 5W to 110W.

# – Source : ELCOMA – Electric Lamp and Component Manufacturers’ Association of India.

Check out : http://www.phoenixlamps.com

The government is working on a proposal that will provide consumers the energy saving CFL bulbs at the cost of a common incandescent bulb — Rs 10-15. It is working to ensure that the distribution of the subsidised CFL bulbs begins in right earnest across the country in the next six months, though some cities may see the introduction of these cheap CFLs even sooner.

The government estimates that once the replacement is complete, it could save the consumers energy cost of 10,000 MW annually and at the same time reduce the country’s carbon footprint. Taking advantage of the clean development mechanism under the international climate change treaty, the government will be able to offset the cost of the CFL bulbs to the manufacturers or the distributors by availing carbon credits. Carbon credits allow developing countries to take energy saving action, with the developed countries bearing the costs of such action.

The proposal received the green light from the Prime Minister at the climate change council meeting on Friday.
Under the plan, the CFL producers will tie-up with power distributors across the country to distribute the bulbs at Rs 10-15 to each domestic consumer on the grid. The bulbs will be quality certified to work for 10,000 hours with a guarantee from the distributor to replace the bulb in case of early failure. The bulb will be bought back at Rs 2 upon fusing and sent to mercury recovery facilities that will be set up by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency.

The Bureau of Energy Efficiency will accredit experts to monitor the usage of power through each power distributor’s domain. High-end meters will be put up in a few houses which will remotely send signals recording the power consumed by using a CFL instead of a common bulb. On this basis, the Bureau will be able to calculate the amount of carbon credits the CFL manufacturer and distributor will be able to claim. These credits can then be sold in carbon markets to recover the additional costs and profit.

The director-general of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Ajay Mathur, told TOI, “Each year, the manufacturer or distributor will be able to recover Rs 20-25 on each bulb and therefore recover complete retail cost in three years time.”

Most of us use one form of consumer electronics item or the other. And almost all of these come with “power bricks”. Essentially they convert our AC main voltage of about 220v into DC power for electronic items. They are bulky and generate a lot of heat. When you try to connect them onto power strips, they often have loose connection issues.

Click on image to enlarge

But perhaps the biggest issue with them is that they are so huge that putting two power bricks next to each other on a power strip is impossible.

The goal of this post is to tell you how to work around this problem. In the picture above, you can see that the last power brick is connected using a wire to the power strip. This is actually the solution!

If your power brick wont fit into the socket, you can easily do so as shown in the picture. All you need is to buy a small piece of wire (a pair), a male 2 pin plug and a female 2 pin socket. They are readily available in all electric stores. Now strip the wire and connect it to both the plug and the socket. That’s it. Your DIY item is ready to be used.

Plug the attachment into the power strip and gently place the socket onto the pins of the power brick. Switch your system on to check if all connections are proper.

Some of the advantages of using this trick are:

• Your power brick is not strained from hanging on its own weight. It can now neatly rest on its back with maximum stability.
• Your power strip is not overcrowded.
• The risk of loose connections and loosing power to your appliances is eliminated.
• There are no short circuit or overheating hazards due to crowding effect.
• Eliminates the need to buy one more power strip!

Try it and let us know if you found this tip useful.

We all use Tubelights (fluorescent tubelights is the correct technical term) at home. We also are still in the habit of using conventional incandescent lamps which are held in bulb holders as shown below.

Image Courtesy : indiamart.com

Now we have seen in some houses the two wires which power the tubelight is connected to a mating device which resembles the bottom of a bulb. See below.

So the bulb holder actually ends up powering the tubelight. You may wonder what is the advantage of this. Imagine your tubelight doesn’t startup at all. This could be due to a wide variety of reasons:

• Low voltage
• Faulty choke
• Faulty/aged starter
• Aged tube
• bad wiring

So by adopting this technique, you can simply plug out the adapter which powers the tubelight and fit an ordinary bulb into the socket. Or better still you can use a modern

Today’s post is just an image from Bajaj’s website. Hope this information is useful for you all.

Source : http://www.bajajelectricals.com/c-191-fluorescent-tubes.aspx

A couple of snaps from the recent trip to show how well the wall lamp can be placed and avoid the usual glare on objects which can really be a pain for many home owners.

Click on the image to enlarge

Notice how the light is reflected/redirected towards the ceiling instead of the floor. Maybe the photograph doesn’t capture all the elements, but you can get a fair idea of what we are talking about.

Comments are welcome as usual.

In our continued coverage of “greener” products, today we talk about Khaitan’s CFL range called Leon.

Image Courtesy : www.khaitan.com

The range starts from a 5 watts to 36 watts and the prices starts from Rs. 120 to Rs. 300.

For the complete list, please visit : http://www.khaitan.com/lights1.htm

Image Courtesy : www.khaitan.com. Click on image to enlarge.

The models discussed in this article are “retrofit”. This means that they are meant to be installed in traditional bulb holders. Khaitan also has “non-retrofit” and “spiral” models. The spiral model can also be installed in traditional bulb holders but the “non-retrofit” needs custom holders and are not generally meant for home usage.

First a word about USHA.

Image Courtesy : ushainternational.com

Usha International is one of India’s well known consumer durables marketing and distribution companies. It was started in 1957 and has been marketing its products for over 50 years. The company deals with multiple products under the brand name USHA and has over 50 million customers.

Usha has two distinct brands today apart from the parent brand. They are Lexus and Zentra. The article is just an ice breaker for later, so that you consumers are aware of the offerings.

Image Courtesy : ushainternational.com

The two products offered under the “Zentra” brand are:

a) Digital Inverter:

Image Courtesy : ushainternational.com 

The Usha Zentra range of Digital Inverters come with their high and consistent backup time, low running costs and highly efficient battery charging.

Some features of the inverters are:

• Unique pulse changing technique ensures consistent backup time.
• Specially designed pulse charger generates constant current/voltage, leading to 50% increase in battery life and more efficient charging.
• Reverse battery polarity protection circuit prevents accidents resulting from faulty battery connections.
• Low running cost of inverter implies up to 70% saving on electricity bills.
• Reduced harmonic distortion, in comparison with other inverters, assures longer appliances life.

b) Home UPS System

Image Courtesy : ushainternational.com

The Usha Zentra Home UPS Systems are manufactured with utmost care to ensure trouble-free performance for years to come. They provide backup power for fans, bulbs, tube lights, computers, and others appliances when main electricity supply fails.

Salient Features:
 

• Microcontroller based design oversees all major system parameters, resulting in enhanced performance and reliability.
• Advance5-stage ATM pulse charging ensures a lower electricity bill and increased battery life.
• The Auto Reset function handles overload by shutting down the system after 5 alarms.
• Reverse Battery Polarity Protection safeguards the UPS from faulty battery connections.
• Battery Deep Discharge Protection System shuts down the UPS automatically when voltage below 9.8V

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The product  that we are writing about today is a “flame retardant” wire from “Finolex”.

Image Courtesy : finolex.com

About the product [Source : http://www.finolex.com/index.html ]

This is a premium product of electrical wires from Finolex. These cables are ideal for wiring in residential and commercial complexes, high-rise buildings, hotels, hospitals, schools, colleges etc where density of people is high. During a fire these cables not only emit less smoke and toxic hydrochloric acid gas but also retard the spread of fire enabling those trapped inside to escape safely.

Features

Manufactured from bright annealed 99.97% pure bare copper conductors these cables have low conductor resistance resulting in power saving. These wires are insulated with a special grade PVC compound formulated and manufactured in-house. The insulation is far superior in terms of critical oxygen and temperature index as also in light transmission and acid gas generation.

Technical details about this product can be found here.

Product brochure can be downloaded here.

We have always liked to cover products which give importance to preservation of environment. Well, Havells’ green CFL range of products did just that!

Image Courtesy : www.havells.com. Click on image to enlarge.

You can see press clippings about their product range below:

Image Courtesy : www.havells.com. Click on image to enlarge.

From Havells’ website:

Always sensitive to the needs of the consumers and country, the company strives to serve them better with energy efficient light sources. The wide range of compact fluorescent lamps and luminaries from Havells are a result of this conviction.

At Havells, it is our philosophy to continuously upgrade products in order to best serve modern discerning consumers. We feel proud and privileged to share with you one such innovation of making Havells CFLs more environment friendly by introducing India’s first Green CFL.

Today, most of the CFL manufacturers worldwide use liquid mercury due to cost effectiveness and simpler technology. The disadvantage is that technically it is extremely difficult to limit the weight of liquid mercury (generally a CFL contains at least 3 to 5 times more than prescribed norms by Indian and International standards).

But we have modified all our CFL production lines and adopted PDT (Pill Dosing Technology). With PDT, we now use amalgamated mercury pills that are less harmful to the environment as compared to conventional use of liquid mercury. These pills also conform to Indian and International standards on use of mercury in CFLs.

In addition, we are the first Indian CFL manufacturers to have adopted RoHS, European norms on Restriction of Hazardous Substances in CFLs.

Benefits:
- Environment Friendly CFLs
– Quicker lumen stabilisation time
– Brighter light
– Brightness for longer period – maintains higher lumen
– No black spots
– RoHS compliant & ISI certified

We have been already manufacturing RoHS compliant CFLs for past some time. In order to spread awareness, we are announcing the arrival of India’s first Green CFLs through a new packaging design, using green colour.

It is good to see companies contribute towards environmental causes….