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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."
But if we get rid of the lightbulb what will appear over my head next time of think of something?
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 ***
The thing is, no matter how cheap they make LED lightbulbs, I doubt they'll ever get as cheap as the incandescent bulb, as the incandescent bulb is just plain out cheaper to make as it is much more simple. Therefore, the Wal-mart crowds will still buy the standard bulbs for years to come.
What they should do if they want people to adopt these new bulbs is make it so all lightbulb packages have to display the average cost of the lightbulb over its lifetime. People may see that the LED or flourescent lights sitting on the shelf right now cost a lot more and don't buy them, but I bet they will when they see on the box that the bulb over it's lifetime costs a fraction as much in electricity used.
I must say that Color Kinetics gear rocks. Their color-mixing LED arrays not only look cool, but are a neat toy to program for fancy light shows.
Also on the LED front, the city where I currently reside (champaign, IL) recently passed funding and a proposal to replace all of the old incandescent traffic signals with LED arrays. Should cost a lot of money originally, but will save big on electricity bills in the long run. Here is an interesing EPA EnergyStar paper talking about the potential energy savings that cities can get from this technology -- 1 Million kWh and nearly $70,000 per year per 100 intersections! Also, LED based traffic signals are (IMHO) easier to see both at night and during the day.
One complaint from a study is that the green traffic lights are actually too bright.
worlds oldest currently operating college webcamWho is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
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
They built a better mousetrap back in the late 50's. The device was very good at killing mice, somewhere in the neighborhood of the high 90 percent. Anyway, the problem ended up being price. The improved mousetrap cost 3 times more than the old standard version. So when the new and improved mouse trap caught a mouse, and they often did, the housewife was faced with the dilemma of either prying the dead mouse body from the trap, or throwing the whole thing away. Long story short, they weren't about to touch the dead mouse body. And, they must have felt that at three times the price, they couldn't afford to keep buying the improved mouse trap and throwing it away. So after becoming an instant market success, the improved mouse trap flopped. Lessons from business marketing 101.
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.
My father still tells the tale of the paint he saw in the '50-'60's that would eliminate light bulbs. I believe it was low voltage, so you just paint a surface, attach an electode (probably paint-over an electrode or 2 already anchored to the wall) and get as much light as needed with different sized surfaces. This way, entire ceilings or small spots could be used as illuminating sources. Liquid LED?
I'm sure GE had something to do with the product never seeing the "light of day" (um...yeah).
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
You forgot one more slashdotter to preview the post, and realize that there was no formatting. I probably would have given you a +1 mod, but then I considered giving a -1 for such an eyestrain, now I've finally settled on responding to let you know why you're not getting modded up (at least by me).
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
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
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'.
I bought an LED desk lamp that has an array of about 100 LEDs. To get around the bluish color problem, about a third of the LEDs are orange to make the light warmer colored. Unfortunately it is still not quite like incandescents or flourescents. The light from the lamp still makes skin tones look sickly bluish gray. It's very bright for only using 5 Watts. I believe that flourescent lights are still more efficient, but there is a certain coolness factor of having an LED lamp.
If anyone is interested, here is a link to the PDF of the GALAXe LED desk lamp
> OK. So how much time are you spending changing light bulbs per year?
Not much. But if regular bulbs everywhere would be replaced by less energy-consuming alternatives... there's a point to it, especially when you concider the recent news.
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.
Plus, the cat was cheaper, almost 100% effective, made its' own replacements, and if it got run over, big deal, it was only a cat.
If they replaced the bulbs for the lighted signs on the sides of the Goodyear Blimp with leds, would we call it a Led Zeppelin?
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
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.It also decreases lightbulb sales. It's just like many other things (consumer electronics, computer parts, shoes, clothes, etc.) that are basically designed to break after a certain amount of time.
Before this mentality took over in the 1950's, things were made to last forever and had a really sturdy, well-crafted feel to them. A lot of stuff from this period still works perfectly today.
Actually, i find that the Sears 1/2hp ShopVac makes for some fun anti-rodent stakeouts. Set the cheese in the end of the intake hose, sit quietly and wait across the room holding the switch on the powerstrip.
Vaccuum cleaners make good fly swatters too.
Yes my parents had a party the day i was old enough to move out.
do() || do_not();
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.
The Dark Sucker Theory
For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light,
but recent information has proved otherwise. Electric bulbs don't
emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers.
The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove
that dark has mass and is heavier than light.
First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs
suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in.
There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The
larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark.
Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck
dark than the ones in this room.
So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are
full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot
on a full Dark Sucker.
A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick.
You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing
all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to
the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because
it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the
disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.
There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't
handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage
Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied
or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from
the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating
Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel
into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a
great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating
candle.
Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below
the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to
slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and
darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This
is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the
lighter light floats at the top. The is why it is called light.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were
to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly
opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet.
But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave
the closet.
Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.
Choose yer poison: Prophets or Profits
I keep seeing people say this, but it just isn't true. The reason stuff from the 50's seems to be well-built and last forever is because the crap is already broken and gone. All that's left is the good stuff. In another 53 years, nobody will remember the $40 VCRs that died in two years. But there will be people hanging onto commercial video-editing decks that really were built to last. And everyone will run around saying things like "i wish they built things as well as they did back in 2003!"