This paper presents a new control method of single-phase active power filter (APF) for the compensation of harmonic current components in nonlinear loads. To facilitate the possibility of complex calculation for harmonic current detection of the single phase, a single-phase system that has two phases was constructed by including an imaginary second-phase giving time delay to the load current. The imaginary phase, which lagged the load current T/4 (Here T is the fundamental cycle) is used in the conventional method. But in this proposed method, the new signal as the second phase is delayed by the filter. Because this control method is applied to a single-phase system, an instantaneous calculation was developed by using the rotating reference frames synchronized to source-frequency rather than by applying instantaneous reactive power theory that uses the conventional fixed reference frames. The control scheme of single-phase APF for the current source with R-L loads is applied to a laboratory prototype to verify the proposed control method.