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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."
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.
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!
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.
Now we have to wait for the ballast to warm up before inspiration strikes!
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
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?
Three words:
Ouch, my wallet!
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
Just a thought...
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...