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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."
California Assemblyman Llyod 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"
It takes a vote of more than half of the legislative body considering the measure. The full Assembly requires a majority vote of 41 and the full Senate requires 21, based on their memberships of 80 and 40 respectively.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hey! I'm counting on the incandescents to be inefficient--I use them to heat my home!!
If they want to target something, let them ban electric heaters. People ought to be running P4 servers as space heaters. At least *do* something with all that electricity!
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
While it's great they want to promote CFLs, I think this is excessive. What if you want to light an art room or something? Maybe there are exceptions for cases like those, but wouldn't it be better if they created incentives to use CFLs or maybe tax incandescents?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
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.
Specific technology mandates or bans are a bad idea. However, rules requiring a certain efficiency of lighting would make sense. This could effectively ban incandescents and lead to replacement with CFL, but without getting unnecessarily stuck on a particular technology. For example, LED bulbs will probably soon be better than CFL. And of course we must believe in the American corporate ability to manufacture some sort of Hummer of CF bulbs that still manages to use 1 megawatt per room, while complying with a technology mandate.
You do realize that given the amount of light bulbs over there, swiching to CFL is actually a huge energy saving
Ave Maria
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?
Politicians were invented over 2,000 years ago, and still spend only about 5 percent of their time writing legislation. I say be ban these inefficient politicians!
Using lights as heaters is silly. Heat rises. Most lights are at least halfway up the wall -- floor level lights are very rare. Besides, were talking CA here, and while significant parts of the state have 4 seasons, a lot of the population is located from LA to San Diego where cooling is more of an issue than heating. Seriously, would someone in Maine leave their refrigerator door open all day to cool the house in winter (not that it would work because the cooling elements release heat back into the house -- but play along here)? Why would someone in a hot clime intentionally use lights to heat their house in the summer?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
Or you could just tell him which type of CFLs you find the best, so he doesn't have to do the same experimentation that you did.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Now we have to wait for the ballast to warm up before inspiration strikes!
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?
Dont worry. California legislators will simultaneously propose a bill to ban CFLs, because they contain a chemical
known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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
A good portion of the Mendocino and Humbolt county population are burning a combination of High-Pressure Sodium and Metal-Halide High Intensity Discharge lamps indoors. Some even for 24 hours per day. It is not too uncommon to find a room with 6 1000W lights burning for 24 hours per day for a few weeks, then a switch to 12 hours on/12 hours off for about 8 weeks.
These homes usually have a very musky odor teamed up with the occaisional U-Haul or Ryder truck parked out front.
If you can see the flicker from a modern fluorescent bulb with electronic ballasts, then you must have super human eyes! It is pretty rare to see new fixtures with magnetic ballasts these days. Those old ballasts certainly had flicker problems. Simply turning one of those old fixtures on would create a lightening effect until the bulb fully came on. If you spun a top under them you could clearly see the rate of flicker. Spinning a top under modern fluorescent (especially multi-bulb) shows only a hint of flicker pattern. If modern bulbs bother you, than a CRT would certainly bother you. I'm assuming that you never used computers or watched TV more than a few years ago before LCD's became popular since the flicker rate would have been worse than modern fluorescent bulbs. If you did, and it didn't bother you much, then I must say that your aversion to fluorescent bulbs may be psychological.
With modern fluorescent bulbs, there is no reason not to use them. They come in warm and daylight temperatures now, so they can more closely reproduce a incandescent light or a daylight look. It is interesting to note that proofing tables (for graphic artists, printers, etc) have fluorescent lights in them. This seems to put weight behind the idea that fluorescents *can* produce good light.
Personally, I bought a 68-watt MicroSun lamp for my main living room to replace the stupid 300-watt Halogen. It's super bright and has a very good color index because it is a Metal Halide bulb.
As far as the law goes.... what happens to the bulb that has been on for 100-years at that firestation in the Bay Area?
Heating the ceiling with a light bulb is a terrible way to warm a room. There's a reason they place dedicated heaters close to the floor on outside walls.
Three words:
Ouch, my wallet!
But we have empowered these idiots with our votes in the past. They passed smoking bans and we all applauded. They told us we had to buckle up and wear helmets and we gave them a pat on the back. Lately they have been trying to protect us by banning the very same tranfats that they forced upon restaurants several years ago to get rid to saturated fats. So why shouldn't they further save the world by banning the light bulb. Next stop... who knows.
It's a wash if and only if you are using resistive electric heating as your home's heat source. Light bulbs (and resistive heaters) have a Coefficient of Performance of roughly 1.0-- a watt of energy makes a watt of heat.
Modern heat pumps have COPs in the 2-4 range for air-coupled units, and higher for water or ground-loop units. A watt of energy pumps 2-4 watts of heat into your house from outside.
And lastly, gas heat doesn't suffer transmission loss to the degree that electricity does, since it is burned on-premises instead of being burned far away, used to make power (at a loss), pumped over transmission lines (at a loss), and *then* made into heat in your house.
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.
Bright white LED's.
That's 5 words
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
A better idea would be to tax them. An even better idea would be to increase the energy tax. That way you force people to make more energy-efficient decisions about all products, not just one particular type of light bulb. This is a case where economics can work for you, not against you. Bans like this also get complicated: What about cases where incandecent is the only option? What if someone makes a hybrid bulb? What if someone makes a more efficient incandecent? It all comes back to legislating technology (light bulbs), instead of legislating the real problem (energy use).
What's that, Marxist? You're saying that a selfish, human concern like that can possibly override the goal of SAVING THE EARTH? No, it can't be!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I got 6 fancy energy saving light bulbs. They cost $10. The packaging assured me that they would save me a fortune in energy costs and be easier on my eyes.
But they're very fragile, and one of them broke when I tried to arrange my light fixture on it.
And the power here in this building isn't very good, so in relatively short order, two more blew out.
3 of them were in the garbage inside of a month. Wonder how much energy they cost to make?
I got 6 old school bulbs to replace them. They cost a $1. And they last longer.
That's why I personally haven't switched.
Next time I pay $10 for six light bulbs, I want a warranty.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"People [Incandescent lightbulbs] were first developed almost 125,000 [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."
Thus and so, I recommend that all Californians be unscrewed.
Or screwed some more, I haven't decided yet.
They Live, We Sleep
There are a couple of ways of running an LED from an AC power source. Some types can run directly from AC, and you are correct in thinking that they are lit only half the time. This typically happens faster than can be preceived by the human eye, but it screws up us photographers.
Some newer AC LEDs meant as replacements for incandescents come bundled with an AC to DC inverter. Various people are selling inverters combined with higher power LEDs, like the Cree or Luxeon 5 watt emitters, packaged into an incadescent sized space.
LEDs aren't quite there yet when it comes to indoor lighting. They make great flashlights, unless you want to see a long way off, but they tend to suck for general interior lighting.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I hope the CFL bulbs you bought had handling/disposal instructions on them: CFL bulbs contain mercury. Mercury damn it - mercury! Can you imagine how many of these CFL bulbs break every year, and how many of those weren't handled properly during the cleanup? I wonder how many people are just chucking the CFL bulbs in the garbage (in Brampton, ON, they're supposed to go the community recycling centre, which has a hazardous house waste disposal facility too). I really like that CFL bulbs use little power, but the mercury content is a problem. I'm surprised no one talks about it.
But we have empowered these idiots with our votes in the past. They passed smoking bans and we all applauded. They told us we had to buckle up and wear helmets and we gave them a pat on the back. Lately they have been trying to protect us by banning the very same tranfats that they forced upon restaurants several years ago to get rid to saturated fats. So why shouldn't they further save the world by banning the light bulb. Next stop... who knows.
This is just a pet peeve of mine, but I get sick of seeing smoking bans rolled in with a bunch of nanny laws which only protect you from yourself and your own stupidity.
SMOKING AFFECTS OTHER PEOPLE. There's this little thing called second-hand smoke. I seem to recall it being actually worse than first-hand smoke, since the first-hand smoker at least has a filter.
I'm all for repealing drug laws and such in general - it's none of anybody else's business what you put in your body. But what you put in our, collective air is our, collective business, and as such it is the legitimate domain of state regulation.
And back on topic again... yeah, banning incandescent light bulbs is stupid.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I work for an organization that promotes energy efficiency and we encourage people to replace standard bulbs with CFLs. The new ones are much better in terms of the quality of light, ability to fit inside common fixtures, reduced flicker and noise.
There are, however, still many applications where CFLs just aren't a good choice.
1. There are dimmable CFLs but they only dim so much and not very smoothly
2. Not recommended for enclosed fixtures (trapped heat shortens life of electronics)
3. Not recommended for use with photocells
Another problem with CFLs is that quality is very uneven and people tend to buy the cheap ones. They should avoid CFLs without an Energy Star label.
One good thing about CFLs is that they can produce quite a wide variety of light from a soft warm light to something very close to daylight. People often end up disappointed though because they don't know what to look for and they end up with a light that's too harsh or too dim looking for their tastes.
A ban on incandescents doesn't make sense. You can't really ban them because they are still needed for certain applications. You could however tax them which would make CFLs seem more attractive.
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.
I believe not all CFL's are quite made the same. Instead of looking at what they say they are "equivalent" to, check their Lumen output. Compare that number to your current incandescent lumen output. I have found that "60W rated" CFL's (light wise) have varying lumen outputs between different brands.
I've gotten 60W replacements with lumen outputs higher than the incandescents they replaced and they are indeed brighter (once they fully get going in 15 seconds).
Another thing to look for is the light temperature rating. 'Bright White', 'Soft White' & 'Daylight' are just some of the different light temperature ratings out there. The temperature of the light can give a different feeling of brightness for a particular room. For instance I replace the can bulbs in my kitchen with 65W equivalent CFL bulbs that were Soft White type temperature. They rather sucked. I then replaced those with the same lumen output but with temperature of Bright White, and the results were much better for that type of room.
Things to think about for sure.
I recommend the CFLs from Ikea - they are rated at 6W - and claim equality to the output of a 50W incandescent. They have a globe around them to look like traditional bulbs, and except for the color of light they cast, I was quite impressed with the quality and brightness- it was greater than many cheap ones I have around. They are about $3.50 each, but last forever under the right conditions in my place. The only thing is that they don't fit in some fixtures I have.
Most importantly, though, I noticed a drop in my bill immediately - greater than the cost of the 4 bulbs in one month.
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
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.
If doing something is good (installing energy saving bulbs), then it is only logical that the government throwing anyone who doesn't do the good thing in jail is also good! After all, a police state is a small price to pay to save a little bit of energy!
Up next, I propose manditory minimum sentences of at least five years for people who don't floss (poor dental hygene hurts all of us! Including the children!) And only one of those gosh-darned extremist Libertarians would oppose the reasonable action of sending in a paramilitary SWAT team every time someone leaves their faucet running too long!
And, without a doubt, reading blogs like Slashdot is harmful to your health... it keeps you from being outside and getting exercise! Not to mention the millions of lost man-hours to our economy caused by people reading Slashdot at work. And don't get me started on the energy wasted running the Slashdot servers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Only someone totally brainwashed by the Capitalist system to destroy the enviornment, and someone who hates Democracy and Social Welfare to the core, would suggest that we don't criminalize Slashdot!
Thank god for the progressive state of California to realize that personal freedom and individual choice is simply a barrier to be smashed and destroyed in the struggle to make a better world!
Taken from http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/epafactsheet-cfl.
So, if you add the 4mg intrinsic to the CFL(being pessimistic here and assuming NONE get recycled properly) and the 2.4 mg from electricity production you end up with 6.4 mg of mercury released to the environment, as opposed to the 10 mg for regular incandescent bulbs. About 2/3 the mercury our regular light bulbs are giving off, and some of the CFLs will get recycled eh? Sounds like a good tradeoff to me.
Psst. That's because the incandescent it replaced was burned out.
It depends on how you perceive light. An incandescent has a constant stream of photons whereas a fluorescent has spikes as the arc passes through the tube. Some fluorescents when new are 60Hz, some 120Hz, some ~10kHz. So depending on the density of rods vs cones in your eye and other genetic variants in their response time, and the way your brain interprets that data people can perceive far different quality of light coming from a fluorescent.
Some people see 60Hz fluorescent light as a solid white where others see it as a really fast strobe light. Also, as fluorescents age they start 'missing' and have a lower and intermittent Hz.
Like color blindness, if you don't have 'fast' eyes it is hard to believe that the bad fluorescents can make others physically ill when all you see is solid white.
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.
The dangerous stroboscopic effect only occurs if the fluorescent light source is using a magnetic ballast, which drives the light output to oscillate at the same frequency as the alternating current (60Hz in the USA). Electronic ballasts increase the oscillation frequency to something above 20000Hz, eliminating flicker and increasing energy-efficiency at the same time. Magnetic ballasts have been outlawed in commercial and residential applications, but are still allowed in some cheap "shop light" fixtures meant for garages and such, so watch out.
Be aware that LEDs operated on AC exhibit worse flicker than the cheapest fluorescent. At least with a fluorescent, there is some light from the phosphors between cycles -- an LED goes completely dark between cycles. I recently examined dozens of brands of LED holiday lights -- every single one flickered like crazy. At least they made some cool effects when you swung them around.
Tips & tricks:
1) CFLs don't typically work well on a dimmer switch or any faulty wiring. I've found two instances of faulty wiring in my home because of constantly blowing CFLs.
2) In Washington State, many companies (Lowes, Fred Meyer) have coupons for $2 off a CFL, up to 8 per person per trip. Albertson's, Lowes, Fred Meyer, Wal-Mart, etc. sometimes have sales with bulbs running about $2 each - free light bulbs! Stock up as you only have to pay the tax on them - comes out to aobut 18 per bulb depending on local tax rates. 3) The CFL coupons are available through various electric companies nationwide - not all areas have them. 4) CFLs contain a starter just like any fluorescent bulb. This is what makes them wear out when used with a dimmer. 5) Be careful about using CFLs near infants and children. The mercury CAN cause significant health issues. CFL, dimmer at night for the night light - can add to the mercury content for a child if the light blows up.
This is the problem with having legislators rule us. They don't always check the facts or dangers but require us to obey.
With electric rates being Federally deregulated in 2008, CFLs help NOW, but when consumption drops, then the electric companies can charge just a little more for less power. Seems like a good idea until you realize you pay just as much for 1/4 the consumption. Ingenious way of raising electric rates.
Just a thought...
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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.
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.