Here in Southern California, there is no need for a fireplace, but many houses have them.\u00a0 The residents that have them probably don’t use their fireplace much, since they are very inefficient, and if they burn wood or logs, it can cost quite a bit.\u00a0 Not to mention they would be a big contributor to air pollution.\u00a0 That’s probably the reason why many fireplaces have a “log” with a natural gas burner inside.<\/p>\n
I remember many years ago when the TV stations broadcast during Xmas Eve, they showed a picture of a fire in a fireplace.\u00a0 They didn’t have automatic programmed digital playback equipment then, and their tape players would have required\u00a0 one of the staff to miss his vacation to be at the studios to man the equipment.\u00a0 So they just let everyone go home for vacation and pointed a camera at the fireplace picture, probably a Xmas greeting card.\u00a0 You could turn your TV on and the set would be your fireplace for Xmas eve.\u00a0 This makes me wonder if it might be easier to just record a ten minute video of a real fireplace, and put it on Youtube for everyone to enjoy.\u00a0 Just let it loop and playback over and over again.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking of how to scale up Quantsuff’s Electronic Fireplace<\/a> to the size of a small fire in a fireplace.\u00a0 The light output is going to have to be more powerful, maybe a few watts of LED light.\u00a0 I was thinking about using a combination of yellow, amber and orange LEDs to get some color that’s similar to a fire.\u00a0 If the different color LEDs are connected independently to the randomized outputs of the drivers, then some variation in the color temperature of the light will be seen.<\/p>\n But it will cost a fair amount to get some amber LEDs that put out high power.\u00a0 I thought that using old technology might be cheaper and just as good visually.\u00a0 If an incandescent light is run at much lower voltage than it rated voltage, its lifetime can be hundreds of thousands of hours, and its color temperature might be the same as the light from a fireplace.\u00a0 The bulbs would never have to be replaced.\u00a0 I have a whole box of 1152 12V, 21CP auto tail light lamps (CP = candlepower). I’ll have to try one on a lower voltage supply and see how it looks.<\/p>\n I put one of the 1152 lamps on a power supply.\u00a0 At 3 to 4V and about 3\/4 amp, the light put out a nice orangish amber glow.\u00a0 But it got quite warm, so it will have to be mounted in something that won’t melt.\u00a0 The filament has a slow response, much like the light from a fireplace.\u00a0 I don’t need to slow the turnon and turnoff so a square wave would work.\u00a0 More to follow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here in Southern California, there is no need for a fireplace, but many houses have them.\u00a0 The residents that have them probably don’t use their fireplace much, since they are very inefficient, and if they burn wood or logs, it can cost quite a bit.\u00a0 Not to mention they would be a big contributor to <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-led","category-lighting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1523,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}