05-01-2010, 02:36 AM
I don't know of any good cures for inverter noise. I think its the nature of the beast because of the switching harmonics that occur in the DC>AC conversion. There are such things as line filters that may help but if the unit is not a clean sine-wave inverter (the $$$ ones) then they might not be very effective. Sine wave and clean sine wave are two different animals. There can be all sorts of harmonic garbage along with the 60Hz sine wave.
As for CFLs, I've never had any noise problems with them but I hear people mention it occasionally. I need to interject a war story here. I had a lamp that generated a bunch of hash when using a CFL. It wasn't the fault of the CFL itself. It was fine in a different fixture. And this lamp was fine with an incandescent bulb. It turned out that the contacts in the lamp socket/switch were not so good and after a good cleaning the CFL works fine and creates no noise. I think CFLs sometimes take the brunt of blame in situations like this.
Onward to dimmers. They have a history of being noise makers. They actually sell good ones nowadays with decent filtering but they cost a bit more. I hear $25-50 range mentioned. If a guy is going to mess with radios its probably a good investment to look into the better quality dimmers.
As for CFLs, I've never had any noise problems with them but I hear people mention it occasionally. I need to interject a war story here. I had a lamp that generated a bunch of hash when using a CFL. It wasn't the fault of the CFL itself. It was fine in a different fixture. And this lamp was fine with an incandescent bulb. It turned out that the contacts in the lamp socket/switch were not so good and after a good cleaning the CFL works fine and creates no noise. I think CFLs sometimes take the brunt of blame in situations like this.
Onward to dimmers. They have a history of being noise makers. They actually sell good ones nowadays with decent filtering but they cost a bit more. I hear $25-50 range mentioned. If a guy is going to mess with radios its probably a good investment to look into the better quality dimmers.