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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."
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.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
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.
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
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.
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.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.