Power is changing, yes it may be 50-60Hz and it may say 110v or 220-240v ac but look at it on an oscilloscope and you would be very much surprised. “It's power, Jim, but not as we know it”.

Each new energy-efficient technology being brought into use in agriculture is having to learn new ways around old technologies mistakes and rough-and-ready approach to the market. Some old-style dimmers for incandescent and fluorescent lighting are just simply not refined enough to get the very best performance from your energy-efficient lighting and some benefits can be lost by not upgrading your dimmers.

So you may be surprised to discover that some of the most energy-efficient equipment can also cause problems for your new energy-efficient world.

Over the past two years, Agrilamp has been concentrating on a phenomenon that has appeared on a handful of farms around Europe where solar panels and wind power have been used to either supplement or generate power for the farm. The problem has caused power correction systems to literally fry and farm computers to go into a spin are actually where old and new electricity supplies are simply not happy together. This can cause huge power spikes and mayhem.

Lighting is always the first electrical device to demonstrate a problem on the farms electrical supply, purely because it is visual. The power jumps or drops and the lights do the same. The trick is to find a way so that the lighting can ignore it.

Take some clever thinking and a lot of experience in the poultry industry and a little help from our friends, mix it up with a bit of Formula 1 technology and hey presto, a dimmer that thinks about the power supply constantly. Then, instead of trying to filter out the problem, it just pretends it is not even there. It does not really care what the power looks like; it fixes the power errors constantly. If the power supply gets really out of this world, it simply turns on a warning light to tell you, shuts itself down briefly protecting your investment and then carries on as though nothing happened.

It is called the Agrilamp Symmetry Dimmer. And it works brilliantly, the company says.

To find out more, contact [email protected] and quote 'Dimmer'.