Evaluating the Collective Impact of Nonlinear Residential and Commercial Equipment on Power Quality

This paper presents an experimental investigation of harmonic currents produced by sets of nonlinear equipment commonly used in residential and commercial facilities, with different technical specifications. The measurements were conducted with a power quality analyzer, for individual equipment (in isolated operation) as well as for sets of diverse equipment (connected to one socket). Experiments have shown that the combination of compact fluorescent lamps, light emitting diode lamps and personal computers can lead to relatively large cancellation effects of current harmonics, due to the very pronounced diversity effect. When only compact fluorescent lamps and light emitting diode lamps are present, the current harmonics attenuation due to diversity is found to be limited to small effects.