"Steve Kraus" wrote in message
nk.net...
Is there a photoelectric light control such as you might use for outdoor
lighting that cleanly turns power on and off. I have one that seems to
use
some sort of triac circuit like a light dimmer. It turns on and off
gradually. If you put your finger over the photocell in daylight you can
make the light come on to varying degrees of brightness by varying the
daylight on the cell. The sort of weird waveform this sort of phase
control puts out is unsuitable for most compact fluorescent bulbs. So I
need to get one that has a pure on/off output.

I was thinking of adding a relay between the control and the light socket.
That would make the switching clean but there's always the possibility
that
it will chatter on and off at dusk or dawn. So another possibility is to
use a junk AC adaptor with a DC output switching a relay with a low
voltage
coil. A capacitor on it would iron out any chatter.

But presumably there's already something available that is suitable.

There's all sorts of solutions available. The only screw in one I've found
to be worth anything is the microcontroller type, I picked one up at Home
Depot but you can probably get them other places. It allows you to program
the amount of time the light will be on for once triggered by darkness from
1 to 16 hours so it's immune to the light produced by the lamp once
triggered and works great.

Another option is to get a standard hardwired photocontrol and mount it
remotely on a junction box but that's a lot more work.