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Light Bulb Replacements
LoveOO writes Boston.com has a story about three companies which are trying to replace the Light bulb. I say it's about time and what about hydrogen powered vehicles? Two things that annoy me are filling the gas tank and changing light bulbs. It's time we did alot less of both."
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The light comes out just a bit too blue. At the time, it was impossible to get a truer white in a single 'bulb'.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Well, I'm damn sure Color Kinetics isn't getting any of my money. From the article:
The company holds 19 patents related to the control of LED lighting systems, and has filed for more than 100 additional patents. "We spend about a million dollars a year filing patents," says chief executive George Mueller. The company has two full-time patent lawyers in-house, and also works with the Boston firm of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks.
And:
It'll be interesting to see whether Color Kinetics can exact a licensing fee from anyone who blends colored LEDs. Says Simms: "We haven't invested the fortune that we have in intellectual property without planning to defend it."
I'm not going to rant about this, because you've all heard it before. So I'll just sit here and fume silently...
Hyrdrogen "clean" fuel is a misnomer...since the hydrogen you get from one of these California H2 stations is made from natural gas, and not electrolysis. You end up using fossil fuels just the same. Maybe some day we can switch to from-water hydrogen...but where are we going to get those petawatts of electricity to do that? Nuclear power? We can't agree on a place to get rid of our waste. Solar? It takes energy to produce those acres of panels, and you are displacing wildlife in the process. Microwave from satellites? Just wait until that satellite malfunctions and carves a 500-foot-wide trench through Manhattan. There is no "clean" solution here.
LEDs have their places where you need something bright and compact that can be turned on and off quickly. I like the new LED flashlights, brake lights, and street lights. But use flourescents for lighting, please, and use them today.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
The problem with the flourescents on the market right now is size. All of the screw in varieties have big fat bases that interfere with a lot of lamp designs. The 75 watt equivelent and higher bulbs are also longer than traditioanl light bulbs, which causes problems in globe lamps and anything else where the bulb must fit into a small area.
On the other hand, the modern bulbs are really good about lighting up right away, not flickering, and not dying prematurely--hopefully (unlike some of the early screw type flourescents).
One word of advice from me to Slashdot: Don't buy the "Lights of America" brand, they're nothing but trouble.
I read the internet for the articles.
Whats even wrose is when some idoit with a SUV full of hydrogen plows info a parked car and turns downtown into a mushroom cloud.
that probably wouldn't happen. Contrary to popular belief, Hydrogen isn't very dangerous. Although it is extremely flammable, A hydrogen fire will be extremely short lived and burn straight up as the hydrogen rises rapidly, as opposed to a gasolene fire, which will burn for a comparativly long time and flows over the ground.
additionally, most hydrogen fuel cell designs involve storing the hydrogen in some stable form, such as chemically bound to a metal compound. When a small electric current is run across the metal, the hydrogen is released in small amounts. Its not like the back of your SUV would have a huge compressed hydrogen tank in it.
Im sure the subject of the hidenburg (sp?) will occur in this thread, so i should probably mention that recent studies on that explosion point to the cause of the huge red fire being not the hydrogen itself, but the skin of the airship which was coated with an extremely flammable material chemically similar to solid rocket fuel. Witnesses at the scene reported seeing a large red flame erupt from the airship. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible blue flame, and would have exploded above the airship as the hydrogen escaped. It is likely that the fire was started when an electrical discharge ignited the skin of the airship, and that the hydrogen had little to do with the outcome, i.e, a similar result would have occured if helium was used instead.
Let's make a difference
Hydrogen was innocent in the Hindenburg disaster. The root cause of the explosion was static electricity arcing off the panels of the blimp, which had been coated with a substance NASA uses as propellant in space shuttle solid rocket boosters.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Agreed. I bought 10 of them, and 5 were dead within 2 months. Most of the others are seeing serious discoloration around the base of the bulb. These are in open air, so I don't think the fixture is causing overheating. Stick with the better brands.
> Hydrogen is not that explosive, maybe, but it is
> highly flammable.
It's not the flammability that's the hazard associated with pressurized gas cylinders (like hydrogen). It's the pressure. Heck, a *helium* cylinder can kill you if mishandled.
-- Rick
Hydrogen cannot explode in a "mushroom cloud", since that is typical of H-bombs, that require an A-bomb as a detonator. Now, if the other car had an A-bomb onboard, this might have a far-fetched possibility to happen.
However H2 is pretty safe. It is ultralight, which means that, if it has a clean path to the sky, it will not accumulate as gasoline fumes; that's why nobody on the Hindenburg died because of hydrogen (Yeah, nobody). Some were killed by the explosion in the diesel engines, others were so scared by the flames above them that they jumped out of the gondola - crashing in the ground 100 meters below, but all those who remained in the gondola survived the crash landing. That's because the hydrogen flames went straight upwards, while in a gasoline fire you have liquid gasoline running all over the place.
The real safety issue with H2 is that it fires very easily. You need a spark to ignite a mixture of air and methane, while static electricity is enough for hydrogen and air. Normal atmosphere in a windy day is normally enough. That's sometimes actually a Good Thing, because hydrogen is lit way before it can accumulate in large quantities.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, and are rarely disposed of properly. Here's a stat I just found on the web (so it must be true) ...discarded [fluorescent] bulbs release approximately 2-4 tons of mercury per year in the United States...
(this is just the ones that are improperly disposed of and break)
I don't know when the last time you bought a compact flourescent light is, but here in the year 2003 I know for sure that 2 of your 3 problems are solved.
1. They often don't fit in a light fixture.
I recently bought some GE compact flourescent bulbs for our kitchen, which were $8 for two "60W" bulbs. They are *exactly* the same size as the incadescents they are replacing, including the base, which is only ~1" in diameter, only draw 15W, and are ~15% brighter than a 60W incandescent.
3. They make everyone look slightly green.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Our compact flourescent lights have a much more pleasing spectrum than the yellow incandescents, and are very close to the full-spectrum lights we use around the house.
I don't use X10, and so can't answer to that, but please don't post outdated nonsense.
>> 3. They make everyone look slightly green
Keep shopping.
I, too, hated the funky color flourescent lights produced. Then, about a year ago, I discovered that Sunbeam sold screw-in flourescent lights that emit light indistinguishable from incandescents (to my pretty picky eyes).
I originally bought them from Target but stopped by a few days ago for the first time in a long time and learned that the don't sell them anymore. Oh, the wonders of the American marketing machine.
Not all flourscent lights are the same. Find the Sunbeams.
--Richard
In the last few years, several of my gripes about flourescents are no more:
- Upfront Cost: They now cost very little, they have come down from $20 per bulb to $2 per bulb. You no longer have to make an "investment" to go flourescent.
- Size: They used to be bigger, They now fit everywhere a regular bulb fits.
- Speed of Light: Old flourescents often tooks several seconds to turn on and up to 15 minutes to get to full brightness. Newer ones come on almost instantaneously (300ms maybe) and are plenty bright right away. While they aren't on par yet, its good enough for me.
There is still one area in which I don't use flourescents. Dimmable lights. That means they don't go in my living and dining rooms where I want to dim the lights for TV or a nice dinner. It makes it hard to use them with X10 as well, since all X10 is dimmable. There are some that are dimmable, but they tend to be more expensive and I haven't tried them.I've been looking at bike light lately and I must say that the LED ones are quite impressive. Only three LEDs can compare with a normal bike light bulb, and the new models coming out are going to have five. And the fact that the LED lights 'burn' for about 100 hrs where a bulb would go for about 3.5hrs, makes LED lights very, very attractive.
--- to swing on the spiral...
You don't "burn" the hydrogen in a hydrogen powered car, and you don't "burn" the natural gas to produce hydrogen. Natural gas is composed of hydrocarbons (natural gas consists of only hydrogen and carbon atoms; granted it is probably not pure, so there might be trace elements in there). The natural gas is put through a chemical process to extract the hydrogen. This chemical process need not produce CO. (In fact burning hydrocarbons only produces CO when incomplete combustion takes place--the chemical reaction doesn't complete properly in an internal combustion engine. Any factory that produces hydrogen doesn't need to produce CO, if it does, it can capture that CO and combine it with O to produce CO2 which is much safer on the enviroment)
...interesting if true.
Ok the real deal is that Incandesents are a bad idea for a number of reasons: High power consumption, heat pollution(Remember what happened to the pearsons puppeteers?), frequent breakdown(by the way this offsets any energy savings from their production simplicity since even a florescent will outlast 5 or 6 and an LED could outlast 10 to 20). Note: In situations of unclean electricity or poor wiring the bult in control electronics in florescents helps mitigate the problems and they will outlast a incandescent by such a huge factor as to be not worth calculating. I had a socket that kept blowing bulbs every couple weeks from the surges when the switch was hit. I switched in a florescent and its been running for over a year and a half now.
Florescents are your best bet stop gap and I hear that Ikea sells them for the best price available anywhere and they are consistently coming down in price everywhere.
LED's are the Grail. They are extremely minimalist in raw resources( a transistor and a plastic shell that will outlast 5 or 6 FLORESCENTS), they beat even florescents in energy consuption by a factor of 4 or more, solid state so droppage or shock damage are not a factor. Color is easy to fix and as for price... Who here paid 10 large(this means $10,000USD in case your not in the know) for a laptop in 1993? Ok now how many shelled out $700 this year? LED's are Diodes just like the ones the computer industry has been perfecting for decades. The price will fall. Alot.
Sidenote: All transistors and diodes produces photons as a byproduct Your computer is (depending on its transistor density, since the wavelength of the photons are dependent on the size of the transistor) currently pumping out microwave and radio energy. Since they are not optomized for this effect as LED's are they amount is reletively small and most is absorbed into the chips structure and converted to heat.
Not quite true. Flourescent bulbs come in a variety of different color temperatures. Incandescent bulbs are typically around 2800 K. You can get flourescent bulbs at around 3000K, at 4100 K, and at 5000K (close to daylight, which is 5500K). There are also many specialty bulbs (such as Ott-Lite) that give "true color" from flourescent bulbs. It is practically impossible to get true color from incandescent bulbs.
An article on it beating the other cards is here.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
LEDs will fade slowly with time, thought it's a very slow process for diodes operated at low levels.
LEDs contain an interface between two semiconductor layers; it is around this interface that light is generated. Electrons crossing this interface can occasionally kick atoms back and forth over this boundary. Eventually, enough cross-contamination will occur to dim and then extinguish the LED. This does take a long time. Note also that this process is accelerated at high temperatures.
~Idarubicin
Heh.
I'm migrating from incandescent lights to small fluorescent light bulbs that screw into the same fixtures.
A 3.5W bulb will light a closet.
A 5W bulb will light a small room.
A 15W bulb will light a living room.
A 25W bulb will light a kitchen.
Compare to 4-7W for a typical nightlight, 15W to light a typical closet 40W to light a small room, 60-75W to light a larger room, 75-100W to light one's kitchen, and that's about 20-80% power savings over incandescent lights. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
From an environmental perspective and from an economic perspective compact fluorescents win out. While their initial cost may be higher, they use only 25% of the electricity of an incandescent light bulb and last ten times as long. Plus, the incandescent puts out much more heat leading to increased air conditioning load.
l .p df
I recently did some calculations to see if save any money. Quebec already has one of the lowest electricity costs in North America at 5.97 cents per kWhr (above 30kWh per day). People in other places save even more!
Compact Fluorescent (10000 hr, 23 W)
===================
Initial bulb $10 + Electricity $13.73 = $23.73
Incandescent Light Bulb (1000hr, 100W)
=======================
10 bulbs $5 + Electricity $59.70 = $64.70
Plus, you save on the environmental cost of the packaging. I have also read that although CFL contain mercury, more mercury is released due to coal burning than for the equivalent 10 incandescent light bulbs.
http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/epafactsheet-cf