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posted by martyb on Sunday November 10 2019, @09:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the use-hurricane-lamps dept.

First, I debated whether to put this on stack exchange or here, but it seems like it is a tech question that suits this site fine.

Background
I have a room with a 115 V, 6000 BTU window AC unit plugged into one outlet. Then a bunch of electronics (~800 W measured) plugged into a 1500 VA, 900 W UPS plugged in to a second outlet across the room. Finally, I have two 50 W strands of Christmas lights in series (100 W total) I tried to plug into various outlets around the room.

Problem
The first problem is that whenever the room gets too hot, the compressor for the AC unit turns on and the Christmas lights will all flicker. This is not just an annoyance, because the first strand of lights I had in the room actually got burned out one by one, starting at the light closest to the wall outlet.

So I got another strand and was surprised to see the flickering happens even if they are plugged into the UPS (which does have an internal automatic voltage regulator). This made me concerned for the electronics plugged into the UPS, which includes a PC and monitors. However, I do not notice any flicker on the monitor when the compressor turns on. On the other hand, I have been getting some strange pc crashes lately (which would make some sense because only recently did it cool enough for the AC to not be running constantly) that may be related. This could also be due to installing a second gpu recently, etc though.

Questions
I have two main questions:

1) What is the best way to stop the flickering?
2) If the lights are flickering even when plugged into the UPS, should I also be concerned about the other electronics that are obviously also experiencing a momentary power reduction?

Some secondary questions:

3) Does it make sense to put another AVR between the UPS and the wall, eg something like this?

4) Is there something I can put between the AC unit and the wall to help?

5) This is a rental so I would prefer not to do any maintenance on the AC unit, but is this an issue you would report to the landlord?

Any ideas?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Monday November 11 2019, @01:32AM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Monday November 11 2019, @01:32AM (#918783)

    The vast majority of LED Christmas lights are done as cheaply as possible - they just wire up the LEDs in series directly to the 115 AC outlet, with maybe a current limiting resistor in there. The result is the lights flicker at 60 Hz, which makes them unsuitable for any kind of ambience lighting, and barely tolerable as decorative lighting. I did find one strand about 5 years that uses a full wave rectifier so the lights flicker at 120 Hz, which is good enough to not be noticeable. I've not seen any other strands like that since - or at least that I could tell from the packaging.

    I'd recommend getting lighting that's actually meant to ambience-type lighting. Rope lights instead of Christmas lights come to mind, as they generally are built a little better and either use a full wave rectifier or run off of DC. But watch out for the really cheap ones which are no different than Christmas lights and will flicker at 60 Hz too.

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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday November 11 2019, @04:53PM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @04:53PM (#918980)
    So much this. I am not one to really notice flicker but those cheap AC powered LED Christmas lights (especially the older ones) is just annoying. Newer ones are better but yea, get something with a proper AC to DC power supply.