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The development of light sources that provides lighting with electrical energy has a history of about 200 years and it has still been continuing today. Over the time, different light sources have been developed by the use of different technologies. Eventually, a large product inventory comprised from light sources in different structures and characteristics has been obtained. Residential lighting is an important field in the sector in terms of appealing large number of users and a wide range of application areas. In addition, lighting quality is prioritized in residential buildings, because people get more closely exposed to artificial light in those places. In this study, the most commonly used eight different light sources in residential buildings have been investigated. The selected light sources are comprised of the products from halogen, CFL and LED lighting technologies. All the light sources have been chosen with equivalent luminous flux values. The selected light sources have been subjected to photometric and electrical measurements realized simultaneously under the same ambient conditions. The interactions between photometric parameters and the meaning of these magnitudes in terms of users have been tried to be explained in an explanatory language. For the same purpose, electrical parameters have been also examined and their meanings terms of both the user and system have been given. Based on the results obtained, evaluation of the light sources selected from different technologies have been provided sophisticatedly and their suitability in terms of users and systems have been discussed. In the last part, the loading efficacy value has been examined and reference has been made to the appropriateness of the use of this value in expressing the efficiency of the light sources.

For the last few years, there has been a decrease in electricity consumption for lighting purposes. The reason for this decrease is the widespread use of energy saving lighting elements that have high efficacy factor. LEDs are one of these lighting elements and have a very important role on energy saving lighting. On the other hand, power quality problems have started to be experienced more frequently and seriously, so it has become an important issue nowadays. Light emitting diodes are a closely related in both subjects. In this study, the harmonic behavior of RGB WLEDs, which has gained importance recently and has become increasingly widespread, has been investigated. RGB WLEDs, which are quite different from monochrome LEDs in terms of package contents and driver circuit, are expected to behave differently in terms of harmonics. In order to observe that, an appropriate test setup has been established and the power quality measurements of an RBG WLED sample have been performed for different operating cases. In the conclusion of the study, the enlightening results about the harmonic behavior of RGB WLEDs were obtained.

Significant developments on semiconductor technology have captured the electronic industry and paved the way for dominating household appliances market. Typical loads in this market generally have nonlinear voltage-current characteristics. Therefore, highly-integrated power-electronic based electrical equipment in the demand side has caused harmonic pollution, which is one of the most important power quality problems in distribution system operation. To address this issue, there have been significantly great attempts to keep total harmonic distortion (THD) and total demand distortion (TDD) levels within International standard limits defined by IEEE 519 and IEC 61000. On the other hand, load shifting has recently drawn special attention of power grid planners to improve system performance substantially in the smart grid paradigm. In this study, the real harmonic measurements of residential appliances (both linear and nonlinear) are carried out in the Smart Home Laboratory in Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. Different load profiles are then created with a high accuracy based on the measured voltage and current, active, reactive and apparent power. Also, three case studies are considered to investigate the impacts of load shifting strategies on power quality requirements in terms of satisfying the relevant standards. As a result, it is shown that the TDD value decreases below nearly 8% limitation by mitigating the harmonic distortion and the TDD index, which indicates the harmonic distortion effect on the system regarding the desired standard limits of IEEE.