I was told that you want lights on all 3 phases so that you can see spinning things spin. If the lights are on single phase, they will dim 120 times a second, and the strobe effect can cause spinning things to appear stationary. With 3 phase, at least 1/3 of the lights are lit all the time.

> This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.

No, it’s not. It’s a neat trick that visually reveals when the utility drops a phase, but there are better ways to handle avoiding equipment damage.

Best practice is to use phase monitoring relays that can de-energize a motor when a phase is dropped/reversed to prevent damage. The trip time is adjustable and it’s more reliable than manually hitting an e-stop. It also won’t let a motor with incorrect phasing start up either. You see phase loss relays on a lot of compressor motors and other large motors.

Here’s a flyer for an Eaton product: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/industrialc...

Phascinating

I couldn't help myself, downvote at will.

Seems to be needed only for old towers:

> Tower painting has changed a lot over the years. The older towers have lead in them. So whenever there's a project on the tower, it's not unusual to see the guys in some kind of a, what do they call those?

That is one of those wonderful facts that's both interesting and in hindsight completely obvious.

Speaking of, I was recently looking into what exactly makes lights NVG compatible, and found this informative PDF: https://www.consolite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Basic...

tl;dr NVGs are sensitive to near IR so you want lights that are dim in those wavelengths (but not completely out since you still want to see them with NVGs) while still being bright in visible light. There's a neat picture of the flying controll tower on one of the UK's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers that shows two rooms with similar illumination levels in visible light, but under NVGs one room which isn't NVG compatible is massively brighter than the other. In the NVG-compatible room there were still a handful of panel indicator lights that were not compatible and lit up the whole space

Could they also use power grid sync? Not sure as I haven't talked to anyone in wind power, but grid sync would be pretty close to 1 Hz at least in the US.

Building a product that would sync at 1 Hz via GPS that works in the US and other countries with 50 Hz power would be a little easier than syncing to grid phase though.

If you look close - almost impossible in the dark - you will see that most wind turbines don't have any lights at all. Too many lights is a distracion but all the synchronized lights are an easy to understand 'stay away from this whole area'.

There are FAA rules on this.

Yeah, I've seen it with windfarms. Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time. The scale of the blink is pretty jarring at night (but also awe-some, in the same way any big enough infrastructure project inspires a kind of awe).

Wind farms have a certain amount of nimbyism because they "spoil the natural landscape." (So do regular farms -- nothing natural about grain silos or row crops, but that's a side topic...) Anyways, having that many towers blink in unison across that big a landscape is a weird effect when you first see it. I think there's an argument that if they blinked independently it would feel more natural in a way.

But since the blinking is all FAA requirements, I assume it's to help identify all the individual towers from the air. I suppose if they were all blinking independently, it would be a predator-trying-to-focus-on-a-single-zebra-in-the-herd problem, except in this case the predator is a pilot trying not to crash into a turbine.

Sure would emit more subtle 'part of the landscape' vibes though.

(Which I guess is exactly what you don't want when you're flying above them. Sigh.)

That's what DCF77 is. Or GPS.

If they don't sync to a common clock source, they won't stay in sync for long. Probably not even for a few minutes or so.

You'd get the same phenomenon that you see when operating turn signals in traffic. They seem to weave "in and out" of sync. The frequency at which that happens is the beat frequency, i.e. the difference between the two blinking frequencies.

As far as I understand, non-US systems don’t always use (primary) radar.

Wow that wasn't clear to me either, thanks for pointing it out

Yes, reading transcripts is a terrible way of ingesting information in my opinion.

I know. But when I was programming LEDs for my single board computer, I found that blinking the LEDs used a lot less power. If the blink rate was fast enough, your eye did not distinguish that from the LED being on 100% of the time.

I don't know if battery powered devices generally use that trick or not.