Slashdot Mirror
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."
Hope they're putting a big recycling effort in place for used compact fluorescent bulbs.
[Insert pithy quote here]
When incandescent light bulbs are banned, the black market will flourish
I dont think that would happen... if stores are forced to sell only non-incandescent bulbs, that's what the majority of people will buy, if for no other reason than out of convenience.
How much effort are you willing to put into finding black market light bulbs?
Thereby making almost any dimmer switch entirely useless, as well as forcing people to use CFLs in dimmer circuits that could damage them.
Brilliant, guys.
A tax on incandescnt bulbs would be better. 90% of the lights in my house or CFL. But a few lights are incandescent. Those lights have the fancy shaped bulbs. As a kid I used incandescent bulbs to keep the chickens warm in the winter.There are a lot of niche areas where CFLs make no sense. Don't outlaw incandescents, just tax them more. Then you get the energy savings and the minority of people that need incandescents can still legally get them.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Or just let the market forces work it out. When it becomes reasonably compelling to replace incandescent with fluorescent, people will do it. Until that point, why screw with it with legislation? It's not like fluorescent or incandescent is a decision that will decide the fate of the planet.
That can be true when you are paying the actual cost for your decision. At least in the U.S. though, most items that are bad for the environment don't factor that cost into the purchasing price. Gasoline is one example where we are only paying for the product, and not it's environmental effects.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
I doubt very much that the preference for warm lighting existed prior to the widespread introduction of incandescent lighting. Before then, most people spent the majority of their time under 5000K light from the sun, and a much smaller portion (relative to the time we now spend indoors) with candles or gaslights. But the "warm" artificial lighting would definitely have been the exception, and daylight the rule. Now, it's almost the opposite way around; people perceive the light from incandescent bulbs as 'normal,' and bulbs that produce light that's actually similar to the big glowing thing outdoors as "cold" and "harsh."
There's probably some deep-rooted psychological link between lower color temperatures and "warmth," and associated feelings of security (because fires produce lower temperature light compared to the sun, fires = warmth and usually, safety), but I think most of it is social, and that we've acclimated to a home life that's lit by incandescent bulbs.
I switched my bedroom and home office to daylight fluorescent bulbs a while back, and after getting used to them, rooms lit with conventional (3500K) incandescent bulbs seem very 'yellow' and seem stuffy in comparison. The light from the fluorescents also blends much better with the natural light from the room's windows than the incandescent light did, and there's less of a change during the day (previously, during the morning when there was a lot of window light, it would seem very blue, then during the day as the sun would fade, I'd turn more incadescent lamps on to compensate, and everything would get yellow; now, when it gets dark, I put on the fluorescents, and it's just like turning the sun back on).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't even remotely see where you're coming from here.
And with all due respect, I don't understand why so many people miss the point I made.
Australia's approach doesn't to anything to change your lifestyle, your comfort, etc
*banging head in keyboard*
YES IT DOES!!!
Why do you think I haven't changed to CFL's? Think about it for a minute.
-Do I like saving money?
-Do my investments currently earn less than the effective 100% ROR you get on CFL's?
It's much harder and controversial to dictate behavior - exactly the point that you make - but your conclusion that this is an attempt to dictate behavior doesn't make any sense.
No, you're completely misunderstanding my points. I was discussing the relative merits of a) banning individual, specific behaviors vs. b) taxing the negative outcome that the individual, specific behavior contributes to.
It's not about whether "behavior in the face of potential emergency" should be dictated or not dictated. It's about the level of generality of this dictation. Do you want to ban each and every behavior some beancounter decided is wasteful? Or do you want to assess people the costs of the negative output and let them decide for themselves which activities are still worth it?
That mega-mansion? Now it will use less energy with the same number of lights installed and turned on...
Yes, but what you seem to have missed in all of that is that the law makes living in a large house with CFL's less penalized than living in a tiny apartment with incandescents, even though the latter uses far less energy. That doesn't bother you? Or, it does bother and, you propose to restrict home sizes, in the hopes that THAT would be the silver bullet? Or, it does bother you, and you recognize the futility of that, and you get the point I was trying to make in my original post?
Where is the problem here? Do you really think a lower electrical bill will lead to more heating expenditure? Most people I know whine about their bill, but they like to stay warm no matter what.
But *how* warm do they want to be? On some level, they make a tradeoff against the bill. Or maybe they'll spend the savings heating the pool, which of course, you now have to regulate.
I think this idea is outstanding - if nothing else, many people don't even know that CF bulbs are out there - this is a chance to build that awareness in Australia, and maybe more countries will follow suit.
Right, but you can build awareness without banning. Even a heavy tax on incandescents would be much better than banning them completely, as another poster pointed out.
Please read my original post again if you would.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"Bright White" CFLs have a strong greyish tinge.
How the hell can LIGHT have a GREY 'tinge'? Definition: "To apply a trace of color to; tint." Most of the people I talk to who object to CF lights and how they "look funny", don't have a single one in their house. Your brain automatically adjusts to different color temperatures. I used to do theater lighting design, and this is (believe it or not) exploited by designers. One scene's overall temperature influences the next.
"Daylight" CFLs have a strong bluish tinge similar to the backlight of an LCD display. Ugly. Horrible for photography. Looks nothing like real daylight.
Tungsten bulbs have a significantly higher color temperature than normal incandescents. Daylight CFLs have one significantly higher than tungsten bulbs. Would it surprise you to know that photographers actually seek out the high temperature FL tubes for home-made lightboxes?
This is because, unlike you, they know how to properly set the white balance on their camera (hint: you need a grey card.)
This would make you want to slit your wrist if you sat under it all day. Totally useless for anything except killing yourself.
I have a "bright white" bulb in my bathroom, one in my kitchen, and one by my desk. The rest are "soft" white. You'll be happy to know that no wrist-slitting has occured in several months since moving in, and my landlord was shocked at how low my power bill was.
Please help metamoderate.
Given that CFLs are in fact a pile of shit that are actually about half as "bright" as the packaging claims
So buy ones rated twice as bright as the ones you replace, and you'll still drop the electric consumption by half.
Oh, but then you'd complain that they look too bright and don't work well on a dimmer (the one fault I will grant CFLs still have, though they continually get better and can now go down to about 10% before stalling).
and take time to warm up before they produce even that
Uhh... No. The el-cheapo ones have perhaps a quarter second delay before they turn on, then maybe up to five seconds to "warm up". Better ones have no perceptible delay, and come on right at full brightness.
Y'know, I do oppose outright bans like this. But from reading Slashdot, I'd swear we live in a world where life-and-death hinges on people doing complex color matching within milliseconds of leaping into any and every room of their homes... "Nein! Your sample has 1.4% too much cyan. Your mother dies."
....Modern CFLs do not oscillate at anything nearly as slow as 60Hz.......
There are two big problems with CFLs. One is that they do not work with dimmers. We have a number of lamps which are controlled by dimmers. These are especially valuable in connection with watching movies.
A worse problem is that CFLs lifetime is much less than a normal bulb in situations where the lights are turned on an off often. These CFLs die very quickly under such service. They are also much more vulnerable to instantaneous power surges and drops. The solid state devices in them silently die and the mercury containing bulb is then trash which needs special treatment.
They also take a while, (about 30 sec. to a minute) to reach full brightness and some of them flicker or pulsate until they get fully warmed up. So it is best to use them in situations where the light is left on for most of the 24 hour day. They have their uses and encouraging their use is one thing, but across the board banning of normal light bulbs is not a good idea. The color balance of the cheaper ones also leaves much to be desired. Some of them make people look like death warmed over.
All theory is gray