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Australia Outlaws Incandescent Light Bulb
passthecrackpipe writes "The Australian Government is planning on making the incandescent light bulb a thing of the past. In three years time, standard light bulbs will no longer be available for sale in the shops in Australia (expect a roaring grey market) and everybody will be forced to switch to more energy efficient Fluorescent bulbs. In this move to try and curb emissions, the incandescent bulb — which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light — will be phased out. Environmental groups have given this plan a lukewarm reception. They feel Australia should sign on to the Kyoto protocol first. A similar plan was created together with Phillips, one of the worlds largest lighting manufacturers."
Modern CFLs do not oscillate at anything nearly as slow as 60Hz.
It's 2007, not 1997.
Thereby making almost any dimmer switch entirely useless, as well as forcing people to use CFLs in dimmer circuits that could damage them.
I think you mean using CFLs designed to work with dimmer switches. Like the ones made by GE and numerous others?
Maybe not.
Australia gets almost 100% of it's power from fossil fuels. As far as I know they burn a lot of coal.
California has a much more diverse energy base than Australia. In fact Australia has the highest carbon output per person in the world last time I checked.
They are a large country with a low population density. Australia doesn't have a lot in the way of hydroelectric resources and they have not embraced nuclear power. They do have a lot of coal.
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"GE makes a dimming compact fluorescent light bulb (called the GE Longlife Plus Soft White Energy Saving Bulb) that is specially designed for use with dimming switches."
q s/cfl.htm#3
http://www.gelighting.com/na/business_lighting/fa
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Compact Fluorescents don't use old fashioned ballasts so they don't oscillate at 60Hz. They use electronic ballasts that oscillate somewhere in the thousands of Hz.
I read the internet for the articles.
Ironically, a regular incandescent light bulb actually releases much more mercury into the environment than a CFL. CFLs prevent mercury from entering our air, where it most affects our health by reducing energy demand at the power plant. The highest source of mercury in our air comes from burning fossil fuels such as coal, the most common fuel used in Michigan to produce electricity. A CFL uses up to 75% less energy than an incandescent light bulb and lasts up to 10 times longer. A power plant will emit 10mg of mercury to produce the electricity to run an incandescent bulb compared to only 2.4mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same time.
Source: USEPA 'Fact Sheet: Mercury in Compact Fluorescent Lamps CFLs', 2003
The "warm white" CFs are very warm, and the "soft white" are very close to a standard incandescent.
The "sunlight" are very cool, but I use them where there is insufficient lighting (mostly outside and in the basement) because they look much brighter than they are.
The "full spectrum" bulbs are a little cooler than incandescents, but make artwork and tapestry look great (or faded if it is).
CF bulbs are not by any means universally cooler color than an incandescent though.
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In California, the power companies subsidize the CFLs and there are huge displays in the major stores - six bulbs for a dollar. They don't want to build more generating capacity.
I've replaced all mine. Cheap. The instructions on the box say to put them in the recycle bin when used up. Easy.
What was the problem again?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
All joking aside, the radio-interference issue is a non-trivial one to many people (including myself) who are concerned about mass producing a whole lot of anything that's going to possibly mess up the shortwave or HF radio bands. Luckily, most CFLs don't seem to be too bad. There are a lot of anecdotal reports of ham radio operators using them alongside HF radios without problems, and the manufacturers themselves seem to be cognizant of the problem.
In case anyone is interested in specific figures, there is a chart of RFI versus frequency from a typical CFL ballast here (go to the very end of the document for the graph).
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Firstly, you can get a flourescent in practically any colour temperature you want.
Secondly, even old fashioned flourescent strips flicker at 120Hz in the US, not 60.
Thirdly, any flourescent (strip, compact, whatever) manufactured in the last 15 years will have an electronic ballast - so the flicker will be around 20kHz to 30kHz depending on the design, and imperceptible to any human.
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If you want to control carbon emissions, calculate the marginal externality cost and charge it to people. If they reduce -- great. If they don't -- you can fix their damage. Plus, it lets them pick whichever method is least inconvenient. The market would then incorporate externalities into prices.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
Environmentalists who have a gram of economic knowledge know that capturing externalities by converting access to the commons into a market commodity is the most sustainable way of ensuring environmental efficiencies. Once the commons (in this case, the atmosphere) is no longer freely available for dumping, a well-designed market will automatically compute the costs and distribute them appropriately.
Every environmentalist worthy of the name knows this: if you restrict access to the commons via a market then environmental efficiencies become economic efficiencies, and you do not have to waste enormous resources trying to maintain unsustainable economic regulation.
This worked extremely well in limiting sulphur dioxide emissions in North America in the late 90's, to the extent that everyone was astonished at how quickly "cap and trade" reduced acid rain. There is no reason to believe that something similar can't work for carbon emissions. The only issue is that like any market it must be free of political interference. When that happens we get disasters like the East Coast fishery in Canada, which has been mismanaged due to political manipulation of catch limits to the point where major commercial stocks have collapsed.
Treating access to the atmospheric commons as a limited, ever-shrinking, tradable commodity is something that absolutely everyone whose political agenda does not trump reason and responsibility ought to be in favour of.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
There is no such thing as a greyish tinge to light. In subtractive color theory, grey is made by adding black and white. In additive color theory, grey is just a dimmer white. It is not a tinge. If something seems grey, add more light.
There is no way for anything to have a "pinkish/yellowish tinge." It could be one or the other, or it could be orange. Pink is desaturated red. Red and yellow make orange. Pink and yellow makes light orange.
The problem I think you are encountering is not an actual color temperature issue, but a color accuracy issue. There are a lot of different ways of making colors that all look the same to a human eye. You could make orange by mixing red and green light, or by using an orange light. To the human eye it looks the same, to a spectrometer one "orange" looks like peaks in the red and green wavelengths, the other looks like a peak in the orange wavelengths.
Because phosphors only emit light in a very narrow band, CFLs use a combination of phosphors to approximate white light. But instead of a continuous spectrum of color mixed together to make white, you are getting just red, green and blue mixed together to make white. The light looks white to the human eye, because we only have red, green and blue receptors, but some other colors will look off because the light is not full-spectrum. There is no way to fix this with gels, either. There is nothing there for a gel to subtract.
Here's what wikipedia has to say about the quality of light in CFLs:
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CFLs do work with dimmers, but you must get ones that are especially made for dimming, otherwise you get very short lifespan on the CFL. Not that I have any dimmers, I watch my movies in a dark room.
Also, almost half of the lights in my home are CFL, and during last 3 years I've had to change 1 CFL and about dozen or two normals ones.
It probably takes about 30 seconds until CFL reaches the maximum brightness, but for me 90% brightness is usually enough for anything that I need to do within that timeframe.
Basicly the only reason that I haven't changed all my lights to CFL is that I have still 50 old lightbulbs left, but once they are gone, I'll switch to use only CFL. Except for my outside lamps, CFL really don't like winter and temperatures of -30C or more. They often just die in a week or so. Though some people have been lucky and their CFLs have lasted a winter or two.
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