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California Proposes to Ban Incandescent Lightbulbs
zhang1983 writes to tell us CNN is reporting that California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine wants to make his state the first to ban incandescent lightbulbs with the "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb Act". The act will promote Compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) to replace the inefficient incandescent lightbulbs. According to him, "Incandescent lightbulbs were first developed almost 125 years ago, and since that time they have undergone no major modifications, meanwhile, they remain incredibly inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the energy they receive into light."
Don't most CFL's contain a small amount of mercury? What are we supposed to do with them when they go bad/break/whatever? Maybe this should also come with a CFL recycling bill.
The biggest problem I see is that you can't get a CFL bulb to work with a rheostat. There are far too many dimmer switches out there for this to be technically feasible at this point.
Does anyone know if LEDs will work with dimmer switches?
This is the dumbest goddamned thing I've ever heard of.
I use CFLs here at home. Have for years. But the idea of making incandescents illegal is ridiculous.
What will studio photographers do? How about people who are sensitive to the noise many CFLs make? What about legacy fixtures that CFLs don't fit into?
Run a public information campaign instead.
As I mentioned in the last post on this topic, the vast majority of fluorescent fixtures I have come across in the last decade are horrible polluters of the RF spectrum. I have a recording studio in my house, and I *cannot* run fluorescent fixtures because of this problem. Despite using all balanced connections, there is a marked increase in the volume of the noise floor whenever I replace the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, or when I use the long-tube traditional types.
Not that I expect California's legislators to worry about this, even though CA probably has the largest concentration of movie, music, video, and television studios in the country, but what are they going to do to force the manufacturers of fluorescent fixtures (who are largely Chinese companies serving the megabox stores of America nowadays) to clean up their emissions?
I'm sure there will be exemptions for professional purposes, and of course, street lights, if you can call sodium or mercury vapor lamps "incandescent". I wouldn't mind seeing just regular old vanilla incandescent lamps banned, but better let me keep my halogen for my desk lamps.
I also think they need to make the local beverage container recycling places take your old CFLs to keep the mercury from leeching into the water tables via the landfills. Maybe even give you a dollar each (of course there would be a CRV-type fee assessed at the time of purchase).
Does kind of make one wonder though, does Lloyd Levine have any friends that own CFL companies. From what I've seen, even though the big guys like GE and Sylvania are starting to enter this space, I more commonly see off-brand companies on display. What a boon it will be for these smaller companies.
cat
Three words: you don't experience my consciousness, so don't presume to tell me what does or does not bother me.
... yet that's not good enough, so you have to make my home's lighting unpleasant as well? Now, I can't even relax at home. Thanks, assholes.
What is with this focus on whether or not I follow some rote process for reducing energy usage? Why not focus on how much I'm actually using?
I average 300 kwh per month and drive a small car
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yeah, while well meaning, this bill is stupid. It assumes a number of things, such as CFL bulbs that FIT a fixture... I tried to replace my yard flood lights with CFL, but the huge-assed base wouldn't fit in my fixture. I also have some motion sensors that explicitly state that they do not work with CFL. So I went Home Despot and Lowes, and found that they don't carry any motion sensors that work with CFL. Nice.
I also tried to find dimmable CFL's. Not in my town - only on the internet for 5x the cost of a standard CFL bulb.
When all CFL's are dimmable, and the bulbs are the same form factor as regular bulbs, or we have cost-effective LED lamps that are also dimmable and fit, then this could work. I think this bill is a few years too early however. Maybe if it was one of those "reduce over the first 5 years, eliminate in 10" it would be viable. You can encourage reduction by putting a "penalty tax" on standard bulbs, and use that money to subsidize CFL / LED.
It's also worth noting that fluorescents of all sorts are a very bad idea when working with fast-moving (repetitive) tools like lathes and drills, since Very Bad Things (tm) can happen if the RPM of the tool hits the same number of beats per minute as the ballast on the fluorescent light. That is to say, with the light flashing at the perfect rate, your eye will suddenly see the tool at the same point in its rotation on every rotation, instead of a motion blur, and if you're having a bad brain day, you might forget you have it turned on. Bye bye fingers.
Fluorescents are also a pain for photographers, for the same reason -- flip your shutter at a faster frame rate than the ballast on the light and you'll see very bizarre things, like having two pictures in a row, one lit and the other not.
anywho...not to say I'm against CFL's -- I'm not, I love them -- but there's a time and a place for "legacy" tech, and a ban would be dumb.
Rheostats as the primary means of dimming lights have long since gone away over a 100 years ago. The overwhelming vast majority use a low current potentiometer that sets a time in a simple RC time circuit for a SCR/Triac to switch on on circuit (light bulb). The Triac switches on when the RC circuit charges up to the threshold voltage and remains on until the AC waveform crosses the zero voltage point in its cycle, shutting off the SCR/Triac. Basically, the larger the potentiometer value, the longer the RC charge time is set to, and the shorter duration of time that the circuit is on. Check out a typical circuit diagram on Wikipedia
Incandescent bulbs don't care about this chopping of the AC sine wave, since they are simply heating elements that glow brightly...they can smooth out the flicker somewhat effectively. Fluorescents don't like this at all, since they are the product fluorescing gases from high voltage excitation provided by a transformer. However, dimmable CFL bulbs are available. They pretty much reconstitute the voltage through the use of a solid state ballast (instead of a simple transformer), and adjust the "drive" of the bulb excitation based on the input from the wall switch.
I see someone failed elementary chemistry. Hint: try getting your "scientific knowledge" from an actual source, rather than some envirowhacko scare site. Ingested mercury compounds in food do not "pass right through you", and inhaled mercury does not "nearly all enter the blood stream". Compounds and elements are two different things. Don't believe me? Then you must believe that putting salt on your fries is the same as inhaling chlorine gas.
In fact, metallic mercury, while not particularly healthy, isn't nearly as hazardous as the scaremongers would have you believe. It's not "soluble in the blood stream" (sic). Mercury compounds (as would be expected to be found in food) are FAR more hazardous than elemental mercury.
I replaced as many incandescent bulbs as possible in my house with these new lights.
Sure, there are some left, but I'll go to the store and come back with more!
You get used to them quickly, they do have a short hesitation before lighting up, and some require a warm up of a few minutes to reach full light. Most don't.
I have one outside in the carport that comes on instantly, but it is an old style florescent, in a circle-shaped package. It really is instant, no problem.
On one, you get about 35 watts of light (incandescent) for 7.5 watts. That one cost more, but I love it.
Only problem is paying for all the new lights. Most people want a replacement bulb for one that has burned out, the cheapest they can get. The 7.5 wall bulb aforementioned was about $7.00. I hope it lasts forever...
The sooner you replace those incandescent bulbs, the more you save. Can't use them on a dimmer controlled circuit, or one with an infared motion detector sensor. Probably not a good idea to replace the incandescents in the refrigerator, mine has several, in freezer also. You can try that, but some compact florescents are dimmer when cold.
Here is a good link for information on the new bulbs, and how they can save money.
Get to the store, however, to find the less expensive bulbs in 4-packs, etc.
That isle will have a lot of interested shoppers, so be forewarned.
Rapidweather
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Physics gets in the way. We won't ever have anything that can replace incandescent bulbs. Discrete spectra will never be the same as a continuous spectrum, and the only way to generate a continuous spectrum is to heat a solid, liquid, or ultra-high pressure gas/plasma up to an extremely high temperature. Oh, yeah, and that's the definition of "incandescence."
Basically, what this law would mean is that instead of fixing the real problem (which is that we don't have enough clean power production and don't have enough power distribution in this state because our power production and distributions is run by a bunch of greedy corporations who are pumping that money into the pockets of the rich instead of recycling it back into infrastructure), instead they pass the buck, creating new problems for other people in the process. Ever try to take photos/video of your family in a house lit by CFLs? It looks like crap.
For that matter, can you imagine what a ban on incandescent bulbs would do to Hollywood? They'd have to move to another state. No, really. They would have to move to another state. While Videssence does make some special floods that are fluorescent (with a much larger number of peaks), my recollection is that they still don't produce colors as vibrant as old-fashioned halogens do. IIRC, the light also doesn't carry as far, so you need more of them, closer to the talent. Works fine for a news set where you can hang them three feet above the always-sitting anchors... not so much for a movie set.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see laws requiring manufacturers to come up with solutions that reduce power consumption for electrical appliances and electronics... but mandating the replacement of incandescent bulbs with those damn CFLs is NOT the right way to do it. That's the way to make every remotely sane person order incandescent bulbs by mail order and flip a big bird in the direction of Sacramento, thus resulting in MORE greenhouse gasses from the extra trucking.... So much for their "big savings."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.