Worldwide lighting made 20% more efficienct.

The LEDs will generate considerable harmonic content in the secondary current, which will be reflected in the primary (the twisted pair). How is this handled to prevent RF interference?

As I said once before, full wireless power eclipses the isotera system by leaps and bounds.



Other than that, the people here have already called out all most of the points I was thinking about too. In particular, these two things are opposing design goals that make the system very difficult to pull off.

(A) There needs to be good potential for coupling so the power distribution line transfers power to the light nodes efficiently.
(B) There needs to be poor potential for coupling so conductors close to the distribution line do not steal power or catch fire.

With this in mind, I would be very interested in seeing what would happen if a light's secondary were shorted while still on the line!?



Finally, note that a string of LED xmas lights can also do most of what the isotera system claims to do. So there really are not a lot of things justifying the need for the system I'm afraid.

In my 30 plus years in the electronics profession I have often encountered jobs, tasks and/or locations that required special treatment. And it sounds like Isotera has a product that fills some special need. But that doesn't mean that those, often unique, circumstances apply to every situation. And to assume that, since a product that has advantages in specific applications, it is therefore the right product for all applications, well, while it might be a great marketing ploy, it is poor application engineering.

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Exactly. If there is an application where getting wet is common or sparks potentially starting fires and whatnot are common thats what washdown and explosion proof fixtures are for.

thats what washdown and explosion proof fixtures are for

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...those kind of fixtures are expensive and generally not hot-puggable.

poor potential for coupling so conductors close to the distribution line do not steal power or catch fire

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the coupling to the lamp is via special resonant couplers, so only good coupling to the lamp is likely, and not to stray metal.

I would be very interested in seeing what would happen if a light's secondary were shorted while still on the line!?

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this is no problem whatsoever.....shorts arent a problem for current source supplies

note that a string of LED xmas lights can also do most of what the isotera system claims to do

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...i am not sure what you mean.....can you take each chrimbo light off and clip it to the line somewhere else, with no electrical contact, and it lights again?

The LEDs will generate considerable harmonic content in the secondary current, which will be reflected in the primary (the twisted pair). How is this handled to prevent RF interference?

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...the graph isnt like what you show, theres cctry there which means its pretty sinusoidal in the iBus....and in any case, think of a fluorescent strip tube, and the horrendous harmonics in that (large) current loop....nobody complains about florescents

Another point about isotera is the ability to get loads of lamps and lighting, and not need any electricians...ever....not in the installation, or maintenance, or modification etc etc...and its completely safe, mains stops at the power hub, and therafter theres NO CONTACTS....so you wont be able to electrocute yourself......even if you do decide to gnaw your way through the ibus cable, then you will find that your human body has high impedance to the 50khz electricity in there, and you will give yourself more of a faint burning sensation than a mains belt...and it wont kill you.


Its been a surprise that nobody has really seconded my point that an isotera lamp has NO ELECTRONICS OR ELECTROLYTIC capacitors in the bulb...whatsoever....the bulb is sited in the ceiling , in the hottest place, and overheating electronics is the main longevity reduction factor in HF florescent or mains fed led ballasts.....................the dramatic increase in lifetime of isotera lamps is very marked.......there are industries out there who have a pain having to replace lights on awkward parts of factories...and these customers are frothing at the mouth for isotera.............

Even in supermarkets, you should have seen the size of the electrical crane that the guys were using to replace some of the strip lights situated high in the ceiling....it was a huge great manitou type structure....and goodness forbid if the poor guy zaps himself on the mains whilst he's upon that platform replacing the florescent striplights

there are industries out there who have a pain having to replace lights on awkward parts of factories...and these customers are frothing at the mouth for isotera.............

Even in supermarkets, you should have seen the size of the electrical crane that the guys were using to replace some of the strip lights situated high in the ceiling....it was a huge great manitou type structure....and goodness forbid if the poor guy zaps himself on the mains whilst he's upon that platform replacing the florescent striplights

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I have been one of those guys for most of my life and I can assure you that what you are claiming is pure BS from the service techs point of view.

That and any industrial facilities with ceiling heights high enough to need man lifts to get to lights is running 400 - 1000 watt HID bulbs in each lighting fixture which BTW any modern HID fixture is already power factor corrected plus has a realistic working efficiency in the same range as the best LED systems but at far far higher wattages and lumun outputs.

On top of that they typical industrial grade HID bulb has a active service live usually int he 15 - 20,000+ running hours range and the ballast systems tend to last at least 10 times longer than that.

Now relating to the high output high efficiency super long service life for large area lighting systems the new tech is Induction lighting not LED.

Read it for yourself if you care too. **broken link removed**

...those kind of fixtures are expensive

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Yeah and... isotera is certainly much more expensive. Several times I'm sure.

the coupling to the lamp is via special resonant couplers, so only good coupling to the lamp is likely, and not to stray metal.

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Stray metals can't ever be resonant at 51khz?
Stray metals can't have magnetic coupling properties?

As I said, either...
(A) Good coupling is possible, and then other stuff near the line can get good coupling too.
....................*OR*....................
(B) Good coupling is not possible, and your lights do not get the power they require.

You can't have your cake and have also eaten it I'm afraid.

this is no problem whatsoever.....shorts arent a problem for current source supplies

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At the very least, I'm sure all the rest of the lights would be taken out until the situation was remedied.

Edit: With a current regulated power source that is. With a constant current source... See Roffs comment below.

...i am not sure what you mean.....can you take each chrimbo light off and clip it to the line somewhere else, with no electrical contact, and it lights again?

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Why would you move them? There is a bulb every foot. Do you need to move them a few inches.... really?

Another point about isotera is the ability to get loads of lamps and lighting, and not need any electricians...ever

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Yeah... you usually don't need an electrician to install and operate commodity lighting.

Its been a surprise that nobody has really seconded my point that an isotera lamp has NO ELECTRONICS OR ELECTROLYTIC capacitors in the bulb...whatsoever

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So what? There is no reason to debate a problem that does not exist. The lack of capacitors is mostly irrelevant. It's not the 80's-90's anymore, there are plenty of cheap and durable capacitor technologies that will survive more abuse than the LED's can take.

Even in supermarkets, you should have seen the size of the electrical crane that the guys were using to replace some of the strip lights situated high in the ceiling....it was a huge great manitou type structure....

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Yeah, high places often require something to get you to them, and an isotera system will not change that.

and goodness forbid if the poor guy zaps himself on the mains whilst he's upon that platform replacing the florescent striplights

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Or grab a hot electrical cable, or slip off the ladder, or drop a tool, have a light flash him in the eyes, or get stung by a bee, or have someone screwing with the ladder/lift.... or... or... or...

Flyback said:

this is no problem whatsoever.....shorts arent a problem for current source supplies

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As a general statement, this is not true. The dissipation of a current source can go up dramatically if the load is shorted.

We should put some cost figures next to the pieces, but I bet we don't have any cost figures.

It looks like there is a connector from the coupler to the LED. Could that be?

The dissipation of a current source can go up dramatically if the load is shorted.

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..isotera told our Building services manager that the charger coupler on the secondary works by pulse charging a nimh batt....when OFF, it is off because the secondary of the winding is literally shorted.....thats how it works.

Yeah, high places often require something to get you to them, and an isotera system will not change that

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..yes but you dont have to go to them as often , because your bulbs last far longer

Or grab a hot electrical cable

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..you dont get hot electric cables in an isotera system

Flyback said:

..isotera told our Building services manager that the charger coupler on the secondary works by pulse charging a nimh batt....when OFF, it is off because the secondary of the winding is literally shorted.....thats how it works.

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There is a BATTERY in the system? And you really expect a long runtime from it? At high temperature?

The more I hear about this system, the more unrealistic it sounds.

the document i linked on page 6 of this thread iiirc... mentions 150 volt to 1kvac on the ~50Khz side.

now i know from Experience that 300 volts at 120Khz doesn't really shock me with dry hands, and that's gripping two 1/4th inch copper pipes... (induction heater stuff)

but this isn't safe by any stretch of the imagination i'd think. and i'm not about to see if my experience holds for wet fingers.

furthermore the Expense associated with 100 gram ferrite transformers...
and a master inverter which needs a rather smart controller and enough capacitors or inductors to produce a constant current source that is 80% reactive.. with a nominal 10:1 change in the parasitic inductance... means you need about 10 times as many VA's in the reactive network as you're feeding watts into the LEDs..

so.. if you want 10$ per watt for led lighting... by all means have at it.

tcmtech said:

If you are really looking for good quality lighting systems with high efficiency and very high average service life with color and light characteristics far superior to LED Induction lighting in the way to go!

**broken link removed**

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Are these the same thing as "e-lamps"? These were talked about in a magazine (might have been Elektor) in the early 80's as the possible future of lighting. I think the "e" was for electrostatic. Not like today when it seems to mean "digital".

Oh - (now read the faq's) apparently not. Ignore me I'll go back in my corner...

Oh - (now read the faq's) apparently not. Ignore me I'll go back in my corner...

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I bought a 40 watt induction light on eBay a while back and I have to say I am very impressed with it all around.

Very nice natural color and bright for what little power it uses too!

Here is a link to a write up I did on it on another forum a when I first got it.

https://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/84306

Here is a link to a write up I did on it on another forum a when I first got it.

https://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/84306

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..tcmtech your link has hit the nail on the head. Your link rightly says just how bad electrolytic capacitors are. No one can be serious about LED bulbs (or any bulb for that matter) which contains electrolytic cpacitors inside the enclosure with the leds in there aswell.

So ok you then consider LED lights with a separate switch mode ballast....then you realise youre better off using an isotera coupler rather than a switch mode ballast (since isotera couplers contain no electrolytics).
Some of the isotera power hubs contain electrolytics, but theyre highly spec'd electrolytics and they dont have to be situated up in the hot ceiling space.

The battery is only needed if you want mains outage backup. (obviously nothing runs if the mains goes)

Here is a link to a write up I did on it on another forum a when I first got it.

https://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/84306

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..tcmtech your link has hit the nail on the head. Your link rightly says just how bad electrolytic capacitors are. No one can be serious about LED bulbs (or any bulb for that matter) which contains electrolytic cpacitors inside the enclosure with the leds in there aswell.

So ok you then consider LED lights with a separate switch mode ballast....then you realise youre better off using an isotera coupler rather than a switch mode ballast (since isotera couplers contain no electrolytics).
Some of the isotera power hubs contain electrolytics, but theyre highly spec'd electrolytics and they dont have to be situated up in the hot ceiling space.

The battery is only needed if you want mains outage backup. (obviously nothing runs if the mains goes)

Induction lighting , as i understand it, always has electrolytic capacitors inside the hot enclosure which contains the hottest bit of the induction lamp.......and also is more expensive than standard fluorescent....also, induction lighting cannot have an external ballast as can a fluorescent?
Induction lighting is also more expensive than leds as i undertsand it......certainly at the 20W level.

Yes on the low wattage end basic LED is comparable to induction for price and efficiency. That said once you get to the commercial application sizes pushing 200 - 800 watts per bulb per fixture the whole thing changes and induction lighting wins hands down on cost reliability life and everything else.

That's what I am talking about. A warehouse, store or industrial facility that is running a 400 - 800 watt light fixture 30+ feet off the floor for every 1000 square feet of space is what I am referring to. Not small bedroom candle light type applications.

Your isotera system can't begin to compete on that application level and everyone but you seems to be able to see that.

As far as what I said about capacitors? WTF are you reading between the lines?

This is exactly what I said about capacitors in that thread.

It's amazing how long electronic components last when circuits are built to the proper specs using components with specs that actually match or exceed the circuits requirements!

I have a old 24 volt 10 amp switching power supply that was built on the late 70's that put in somewhere near 20 - 25 years continuous duty work before I salvaged it from a piece of equipment in the late 90's. After that I probably had it running another 5 or so on my electronics workbench before I stopped using it on a regular basis.

Pretty good chance if I plugged it in today it would still fire right up and work as it was designed too!

The problems I see with too many modern switching power supplies is not so much bad components fabrication as is bad or highly marginal design of the circuits using those components.

I see far too many bad capacitors simply due to the circuit designer using ones with ESR ratings right at the limit of what's acceptable for the circuit and sizing of capacitors right at the lower limits of what's acceptable for the circuits working conditions. If the designer had just stepped up to one range lower of ESR value and one common size larger of capacitor I would say 90% or more power supply failures could be eliminated even with the higher working temps they encounter.

I just redid power supply in another flat screen TV I was given that had the usual bad electrolytic capacitor issues. I switched all the bad units out for ones that were at least 20 - 50% larger that had same or better ESR numbers than than the stock ones. Total cost difference between the stock and the larger better units was less that $1 or about 5% of the cost difference.

Really? They couldn't spend that extra $1 on better parts for the power supply that runs the whole TV that sold for nearly $600 new 4 - 5 years ago?

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I suggest you re read the whole thread before saying I said something like what you seem to think I said.

The capacitors are only the issue because and when penny pinching idiots use the wrong ones for the applications they are in. Thats what I said.

There were a lot of other people in that thread that were blaming everything on caps alone. Doesn't make them right, or mean Flyback isn't obviously trying to spin the conversation to suit his agenda.


It's true, capacitors have historically been the bad guy in electronics. It's only natural, they are about the only electronic part that can even degrade over time. Young EE'ers more than likely were trained that electronics are immortal to degradation, since for so many cases that is true. And so we have seen a lot of naïvely designed products over the years that simply ignore capacitor life span to usually fatal consequences.

However, since caps have been the enemy, most who have been around awhile are vaccinated against it. Now a days, just about everything with a reasonable price tag has properly spected caps. You almost can't even find a new PC motherboard that doesn't contain low ESR "solid" polly caps now. And virtually all of the power supplies I have seen from the last ten years have 105c electrolytics in them at least. Only cheap throw away junk from china has garbage caps in them from what I have seen. Which... most electronics actually do fit that description unfortunately.

The bottom line is, caps certainly can be the devil, but it's a devil that is well known. This twisted pair vaporware BS Flyback keeps bringing up is still in in the womb, and looks more and more like it has terminal birth defects.

I keep thinking there must be something that makes this system worth the extra cost, but I haven't found it yet. I thought maybe there was some advantage to not having a connector - though I'm kind of at a loss as to where the big market is for that. Then I see what looks to be a connector to connect the lamp to the coupler. So you think maybe there is a big savings in wire cost, but Romex is probably cheaper than the "special" twisted pair due to the very high volume. I think we beat power factor savings to death in another thread. But having said that quality LED bulbs have PF correction already and I suspect buying bulbs without it might actually be more expensive. You still have to get mains power up to the power module and have something to turn it on and off, so that can't be it. Battery backup would seem to be the same with either standard or special so it's not there.
Can't see it being reliability since it has to have a power module to generate the 50KHz that the standard system doesn't even have. I see the coupler kinda like what is inside the standard LED bulb except for the transformer although the package must be more expensive than the base of the standard bulb that needs to be there anyway.
I kind of see the easy to move around, but then I say what if the twisted pair is not long enough. Would you violate the no connections thing? With the standard system you just add to the daisy chain. Chances are there is a big hole in the ceiling holding the fixture you would like to move anyway.
But they did get some money for something so unless there venture capitalists are a lot dumber than the ones I had there must be something. If not you can use the year to polish up your resume.

induction lighting wins hands down on cost reliability life and everything else.

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i think you have it on the 800W bulb case.....the trouble with LED is not particular to isotera, but the problem of needing big aluminium heat sinks in the bulb....the heatsink needs to contact the external air, and then you have to make it waterproof even though the heatsink is poking out.
I ask is there enough bauxite in the world for every bulb to go to LED.
Unless of course common, cheaper LEDs do develop on to 200 lumens per Watt, and this is predicted in the next 2 years.

Oh no, bauxite shortage panic! We'll have to start recycling aluminium or something drastic like that!