At present the speed control of a capacitor-run single-phase induction motor is being achieved by using triac based voltage regulators. This paper proposes a new scheme; an electronic transformer acts as a voltage regulator. Performance comparison is made between these two schemes in this paper. it is found that the proposed scheme has superior operating and performance characteristics. Experimental results show that apart from improvement in performance with respect to power factor and total harmonic distortion an appreciable amount of energy saving is also obtained in the electronic transformer based scheme. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.