every electrician I have ever talked to on the subject disagrees with you...including the one sitting next to me right now. the only benefits to running 220 is lowered amperage draw and less wear on your equipment. you will not see any change in your power bill.
your wrong,lowering the amperage,lowers the amount of kwh used,which is how your charged by the elec.co
if your drawing 50 amps,the dial spins at a rate for 50 amps,if your drawing 25 amps, the dial spins slower,which means less kwh,which translates to less bill.
the reason for using 230v,277,440v and even 3 phase is it is MORE EFFIECENT.
and quantum ballasts are the shit,I have 3 1000's and never had a problem.
a good read
Obviously, there is sufficiently little difference in the big picture that both standards have survived in different jurisdictions. (In fact, there are more than two standards: there are places with 110, 120, 130, 220, 230 240 V nominal line voltage [generally +/-6%] plus both 50 and 60 Hz frequency standards. There has been a little progress toward increasing standardization, but it has been very slow.) The existence of the various standards has been largely the result of local politics and historical accident. Roughly speaking, to operate a particular appliance requires a particular amount of POWER, which (at least for resistive loads) is current times voltage.
If you double the voltage, you draw half the current to achieve the same power. The primary advantage of lower current is that you lose less power in the wires feeding current to the appliance (or you can use smaller, cheaper wires for the same power loss rating). On the other hand, the higher voltage is somewhat more dangerous if accidentally touched or if there is an accidental short circuit. Some experienced electricians are relatively casual about touching 110 V circuits, but all respect 230 V. (This constitutes a "don't-try-this-at-home thing, though--it's quite possible to get a fatal shock or start a fire with 110 V!) Current trends are toward the use of even lower voltages (24 V, 12 V, 5 V, 3.3 V...) for any devices which don't draw much total power to increase safety. Power is rarely distributed at these lower voltages; rather it is converted from 110 V or 230 V by a transformer at the earliest opportunity. Even in North America, 220-240 V is commonly used in residential appliances for most high-power electrical appliances (ovens, furnaces, dryers, large motors, etc.) so that the supply current and supply wire size can be smaller. Higher power industrial applications often use 480 V or more. And, of course, transmission lines use progressively higher voltages as the distance and total power go up (22,000 V for local distribution to 1,000,000 V for long distance lines).For further reading, one good newsgroup discussion on the issue can be found at sci.engr.lighting:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...%3D10%26sa%3DN
