Slashdot Mirror
Reducing RFI at Home From Lighting Fixtures?
amper asks: "I'm in the process of building a new home recording studio. When I originally moved into my new (very old) house, I decided that in the interests of conserving energy, I would replace most of the incandescent lighting fixtures or lamps in my home with fluorescent fixtures or compact fluorescent replacement lamps in those fixtures which could not easily be replaced. Unfortunately, these fixtures are creating a massive amount of radio frequency interference in my home. The worst culprits seem to be the dimmable fluorescent fixtures in my living room. Barring replacing all my fixtures and lamps with conventional incandescents, can anyone point me in the direction of alternatives? Is it possible that the decreasing quality of most home goods has led to a decreasing quality in fluorescent ballast systems that are much more noisy from an RFI standpoint? Some of these fluo's are so noisy, they even emit audible sound! It's gotten so bad that I can't even play an electric guitar without turning off all the non-incandescent lighting in my house, which pretty much limits me to playing and recording during daylight hours (when I'm supposed to be out making money)."
Flourescent lighing is inherently noisy - it essentially relies on a large oscillating rf field in a mercury vapor filled tube - no matter what you do, it'll produce noise, electrical from the field, and audible from the tube resonating with the field.
You could replace your fittings with LED based fittings - the power consumption is lower, the light can be better & brighter, and the bulbs (LEDs) last longer. Also, they run off DC, so no noise!