Inrush related problems caused by lamps with electronic drivers and their mitigation

New types of appliances sometimes bring unexpected power quality problems. On several locations it was reported that energy-saving lamps cause random false tripping of circuit breakers. In all of these cases these lamps had electronic drivers. An investigation of this phenomenon is presented in the paper. Laboratory measurements were done on several types of LED and gas-discharge lamps to obtain their inrush characteristics. Some lamps are found not to cause the problem even in large numbers, while other lamps show the ability to cause a false trip even in small numbers. Different solutions to the problem are considered. One of the proposed solutions is mitigation trough an external device, and a prototype of such a device was built and tested in the laboratory.