Why my lights, tv, and everything else isn’t flickering.

[Hummina Shadeeba]

Being ac and 60hz what keeps the current continuous? Regardless of the frequency.

[Dauntless]

Are you asking? 60hz is the frequency. Tesla himself chose that as the most efficient frequency to run electric motors. He also suggested 220acv, but Edison's 110dcv had people stuck on that voltage. I think to get DC power you had to be within 3 miles of the generating plant but the AC would allow electricity to travel distances.

I've read such wild stories, I don't know which the writers were getting right. Supposedly the most common light in America was carbon arc, which was happy with the 60hz and not wanting anything slower. Europeans were commonly getting 40hz electricity and complaining of flickering lights, so they bumped theirs up to 50hz and people were happy. Allegedly they wouldn't go to 60hz when the U.S. did because they liked 50 being half of 100 while the 60 would be awkward. (??) But the theory goes they remained deliberately different than the U.S.

That's such a tough subject, there were so many different standards all over the U.S. and other countries. Up to 140hz. Japan still has several. But you expect a change in voltage to change the speed of your clock, the same voltage at a different frequency would also make the clock inaccurate.

Television originally was 30 frames a second, 2 fields per frame, but there was phase interference from the frequency of electricity so they switched to 29.97/59.94. Oh, but in Europe they were 25 frames a second. . . .

[Hummina Shadeeba]

Surely some electronic devices require a continuous current as apposed to one that is a sine wave going up n down through zero, no? An incandescent bulb’s flicker makes sense with a lower frequency as the current flickers and the subsequent heat in the filament going below a temp to produce light...what of some more complex electronics? It’s as if someone were flipping the power switch 60 times a second. Or does maybe inductance or some other circuitry bit smoothen the fluctuations? I don’t know much electronics but especially being ac I’d think a consistent current wouldn’t be possible as it necessitates flipping directions and going through zero.

[www.recumbents.com]

In almost all electronic equipment 60HZ AC is converted to various DC voltages with a transformer and other components to provide a stable voltage and current. Incandescent and fluorescent lights have some persistence to eliminate the flickering (though some people do complain that they can see fluorescent lights flickering).

Warren

[Hillhater]

Re: Why my lights, tv, and everything else isn’t flickering.
Being ac and 60hz what keeps the current continuous? Regardless of the frequency.

Your lights ARE flickering, it is just your brain “smooths” the vision so you do not notice it.
Even DC powered LED lights “flicker” ..but at a higher frequency.
Ditto your TV, which whilst it is powered mostly by DC, the picture is “refreshed” at 100 or 200 Hz...
....too fast for your brain to notice.!

[methods]

Basically true.

There are various Android apps that you can download that will allow you to change your sampling rate on the camera.

With this you can tune in the flickering. See a harmonic of it.

... What most people forget about power transmission is that it happens at an extremely high voltage. Thousands of volts, tens of thousands of volts, even megavolts.

That's actually what allows you to use small, cheap, poorly conducting wires. Ohm's law proves it to be true.

...

You can prove it with an efficiency calculation. Power generated, power available at the other end, power cooked off in the cabling.

In every scenario you want to minimize current. As current converges on zero, efficiency converges on infinity.

Layman who don't actually understand. . . Will argue till they're blue in the face to the contrary. And nearly every case I found the flaw and their argument to be....

...

They mix up the voltage at the source and load with the voltage developed over the cabling.

nobody bothers to argue with them cuz if you just write the formula down it becomes instantaneously obvious.

You absolutely have to have a rock solid foundation in algebra. to not be able to do basic algebra is to not be able to understand the most fundamental things

...

The human mind wants to skip around

Especially when a given label can mean two different things.

algebraic equation is what allows us to prove this unequivocally and beyond any doubt or argument. Misconceptions persist. . . Mostly because it is so obvious (once properly written down) that it is accepted as fact.

... The cool thing is that you can prove it too!

You can actually prove it with nothing but thermometers... So Mercury trapped in a fixed volume... You don't even need a voltmeter

-methods

[goatman]

you can calibrate a tachometer using a flourescent light and a piece of tape

http://pages.suddenlink.net/kmielen/C320Docs/Tach.htm

[fechter]

Capacitors.

Most AC powered things rectify the AC to DC and the filtering capacitors smooth the DC so there won't be any flicker. This does not apply to most lights that I have taken apart. They still flicker. The phosphorus in a fluorescent lamp reduces the flicker somewhat, as does the filament in an incandescent lamp.