4160V Primary to 240V Home with cap coupled LED

Primary peak is about 5,880V and 60Hz (USA). LED's are over sized to see how a capacitively coupled LED power flow looks. So the question is if I couple power through a capacitor and an LED does the resulting reactive power stay on the home side of the lines or does it end up on the primary side. Answer it stays on the Home side. After additional checking of the power meter on my house I found it measures the real power (kW) and not apparent power (e.g. the total reactive and real power combined) so I do not pay for the power circulating between the power company's transformer and the capacitor I used to couple with the LED. Also the capacitive VAR added would actually help. It turns out that my home is full of inductive reactive power. Little transformers that power the dishwasher, doorbell, the digital display on the stove, audio amplifier, holy crap they are all over the place. All those transformers are sending reactive power (VAR) through the power meter. It turns out that those inductive VARs are canceled with capacitive VARs, of which I now have none. Again the meter is not reading the VAR but it is still good to reduce them.

published 10 years ago