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So I have been looking for ways to get more light in the garage when the door opens. With CFL's I thought I could put more lumens for the same wattage. Well the space for the lights is perfectly sized for a 60W incandescent bulb. All the newer low wattage bulbs are physically larger than incandescent bulbs so they don't fit. Also living in western NY CFLs don't have time to warm up. Now comes the real experiment. I took an old 2 bulb 4' fluorescent fixture and put LED tubes in it. I used a screw in adapter in the light socket so I could plug in the light. That works great and I have tons of light but I cannot close the door with the remote in the car. When the light is on there is only one sweet spot you need to find that will allow the car remote close the door. When the light is off I can open the door from the end of our private drive. Do LED lights generate some kind of RF signal that can interfere with the remote signal?
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It's a weird thing, but I have read that LED lights do indeed interrupt the remote signal.
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I don't think it's too weird, they have a really cheap switching power supply that is no doubt wiping out the radio spectrum for nearby electronics. Gotta get from 120v down to 3ish volts somehow.
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The frequencies that openers use now is crap and so is the wattage of the transmitter. During the swap to digital TV and the reallocation of bands allot was won and lost. Cellphone carriers got more frequencies to work with as 2 wasn't enough. Remote control cars and planes lost their freqs and so did gdo companies and those were given for military use.
So while the use of older openers is ok it's now illegal to use many of the older rc plane transmitters. Nothing new can use them
So what they did was give those uses fewer frequencies and in things like the rc world they use less freqs but now the units basically encode so they won't cross talk with others. (Simplified explanation)
Garage door openers got a crapper frequency and wattage that is awful. All it takes is a tiny bit of interference and it won't work well. So bad that remote antennas are popular now.
My parents used to open from the street 150'+ away. The new opener barely works with you in the car in front of the door. And it's a wood door so no metal to block it and windows towards the street.
Basically in your case you have a 4' fixture with an electronic ballast which puts out quite a bit of RFI to begin with and now you have added led bulbs that have circuitry that takes the very high output voltage of the ballast and brings it down to 12 or 5v eventually. So lots of RFI noise being created and poor opener electronics to boot.
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I did pull the ballast out of the old fixture so the interference is coming from the LED light electronics. The door opener is 10 years old so before the big frequency swap. After doing a little more research is sounds like as we adopt more LED lighting things may get worse.
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Bope said:
I did pull the ballast out of the old fixture so the interference is coming from the LED light electronics. The door opener is 10 years old so before the big frequency swap. After doing a little more research is sounds like as we adopt more LED lighting things may get worse.
Yeah just bad electronics design. Pretty common. Also the power factor on CFL and led lights is awful. The EU is much more pickey about RFI in products there than we are here. RFI and power factor both are regulated in consumer products.
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My old garage door operator would not function with cfls. When I replaced it, the new one works fine.
You can get cfls the function in cold weather (the temperature range is printed on the side of the bulb) and I use those for my outdoor lighting. But in the very cold weather they can take 5 minutes to reach brightness. So LEDs would be an advantage. I still have some incandescent bulbs in the house and I continue to use them on the garage doors as they are lit for a very short time and therefore don't draw much current.
No animals were injured or killed in the production of this post.
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So what's a guy to do about his openers down the road? I bet the openers in my garage are pushing 20 years old... I've only owned the house for 1 year. Incandescents are getting hard to find....
Benny
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I would wait until I had a problem to worry about it. I have a mix of LED and CFL lights in my garage with no issues
I can open my garage from my phone. The garage door opener companies will probably find a fix, or at least the better ones will. I suspect the reciever hardware needs a little frequency filtering that they have avoided because it hasn't been needed
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I bought a bunch of 100 watt Incandescent bulbs before they quit making them. I don't need 100 watts for any particular fixtures, but my idea was to put them on a dimmer so they would last a long time, and they do.
I wonder if you were to build a wire mesh cage (aluminum screen perhaps) for the light if that would change or block the signal it puts out? Or is the signal sent in the voltage wiring itself?
