flickering lights

[gusl]

My apartment is lit by fluorescent lights.

Last week, my living room light began an incessant flicker, so I stopped using it. Yesterday, it was in my bedroom. So I decided to remove the offending lamps... Problem fixed!

Except that now the remaining bedroom lamp does the same thing... on both bedroom connections.

Given the near-simultaneity of these events, the cause of the problem must be power fluctuations in the grid. I wonder if my flicker is due to the lamps being damaged, or due to the power continuing to fluctuate.

Comments

[lordspaz.livejournal.com]

All of our light bulbs tend to burn out at the same. If you assume that light bulbs have similar lifespans, and that the bulbs were all installed at the same time, you would expect them to start burning out at about the same time. Which would then cause them to be replaced at about the same time...

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

an exponential distribution seems much more plausible a priori.

[lordspaz.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean here. I'm saying that a reasonable model (based on my experiences) for the lifetime of a particular kind of light bulb is drawn from a Gaussian around some mean lifetime. If we assume all your bulbs came from the same manufacturing process and are of the same type, then they probably have all the same materials, and therefore should have similar lifetimes (also, the environment they're installed in is probably quite similar, they probably have similar usage patterns, etc.) It's surprising to me that the distribution is so strongly peaked, of course, which is why I remarked on it in the first place.

Of course, some of these assumptions may not hold, but I've found them to be true for a lot of the light bulbs in my house. The one in the storage closet, of course, deviates from this pattern substantially (different usage characteristics) and burns out out-of-sync with the rest.

I'm just saying abnormal "power grid fluctuations" seems like a less likely explanation than "light bulbs tend to have similar lifetimes," unless one of the assumptions behind this model is violated.

Where does the exponential distribution come in re: bulb lifetimes? If you're saying it's in reference to the time between bulb burnouts, I guess I'd agree, but that's kinda what I was saying anyways (most of your burnouts would be close to each other in time).

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weibull_distribution

The usual model is neither Poisson nor Gaussian. I know, I know, that's crazy talk.

[lordspaz.livejournal.com]

I think my long post is just me going "What aspect exactly are you talking about here?" You could use a Weibull to model many different aspects of the problem.

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

I guess they don't have a shared ballast? A common cause of multiple-light failures with fluorescents is ballast problems, but typically it would be all the lights in the same fixture sharing a ballast, not multiple rooms.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

If we're talking Compact Fluorescent bulbs, which is probably the case for a residential fixture, the ballast is built into the bulb.