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GE Announces Advancement in Incandescent Technology
finfife writes to tell us that GE has announced an advancement in incandescent technology that promises to increase the efficiency of lightbulbs to put them on par with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). "The new high efficiency incandescent (HEI(TM)) lamp, which incorporates innovative new materials being developed in partnership by GE's Lighting division, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and GE's Global Research Center, headquartered in Niskayuna, NY, would replace traditional 40- to 100-Watt household incandescent light bulbs, the most popular lamp type used by consumers today. The new technology could be expanded to all other incandescent types as well. The target for these bulbs at initial production is to be nearly twice as efficient, at 30 lumens-per-Watt, as current incandescent bulbs. Ultimately the high efficiency lamp (HEI) technology is expected to be about four times as efficient as current incandescent bulbs and comparable to CFL bulbs. Adoption of new technology could lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to 40 million tons of CO2 in the U.S. and up to 50 million tons in the EU if the entire installed base of traditional incandescent bulbs was replaced with HEI lamps."The California legislature may want to revisit the wording of their proposed ban on incandescents (AB 722). How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
There are times when you *need* incandescent lighting, photography for one. Fluorescent is not suitable in all cases. And initial costs of fluorescents are more because you need the ballast etc.
The fact that these lawmakers don't understand enough of the technology to make it workable really gets on my chimes.
Now, people may get another option in lighting. CFLs cause an annoying flashing in the corners of mine, and other peoples, eyes. Not to mention, some people like the "warm" yellow colour of common incandescents. Could be an intriguing development of lighting technologies.
I wonder how long they've been sitting on this!
Sounds good and all, but when is this new stuff going to be at stores? If it's going to take 1-2 years before we see anything at the stores, won't CFL technology in turn have improved that much more by then?
Here's why. These are INCANDESCENTs. Glowing filliments. You can try to reduce the radiation in the UV and IR, but you aren't going to get rid of it. Running hotter (the Halogen way) ups the UV content which gets filtered out or flouresced down (and if you have a flourescent coating, why not just have a compact flourescent).
.14 kwh power cost), so that at the register you actually see what the bulb will cost.
This is mostly a Political Marketing statement, trying to forestall bans or taxes on incandescent bulbs, as although incandescents costs more in the long run, they are cheaper when you pay at the register so people still buy a lot of them.
Personally, I'd not want a BAN on incandescents, just a "wattage tax" on lightbulbs, say $4/100W tax on bulbs regardless of the mechanism (LED, CFL, incandescent). Just something equivelent to 1 hour a day use for 1 year (assuming
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Good god I hope California does put in a minimum efficiency rather than just outlawing Incandescants....
I decided to be a good citizen and replace the burnt out bulb in my bathroom this weekend with a Daylight CFL that's rated at "42 watts but gives off as much light as a 100w incandescant". I put it in, turned it on, and could get the damned thing out of there fast enough. The light color just sucked... was far too "flourescent" for anyone to stand. I'm sure *someone* out there likes the sterility and coldness of flourescent light, but it sure ain't me and my wife. I went back to Home Depot, returned the bulb, and bough a high effeciency Halogen that takes 27 watts but puts out as much light as a 100 watt bulb. The perfect color of light, higher effeciency than the CFL, and lasts two years.... and it's an "incandescent" that would be outlawed.
LED's are the way to go if you ask me. Long life span, great performance, more color availability (more "soft" colors/natural looking lights). LED flood lights put out 200-300 lumens @ 7-11 watts of power. I replaced 16 external lights with LEDS and while it was a bit upfront cash my power bill has dropped drastically and no more whipping out the ladder every 2 months to replace burned out bulbs or ones damaged in the weather.
less garbage over the lifespan, less electricity, less footprint. Seems a dollar short and a day late if you ask me.
If this is so wonderful, why is GE closing one the two remaining Incandescent light plants in the US? http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories. nsf/story/8D30EC3A4F735E358625728C000EE86C?OpenDoc ument
W. has given a series of tax breaks to Coal and Oil and has our troops guarding major pipelines where the oil companies are having issues (Iraq comes to mind). In addition, he has dropped a number of needed environmental protections and possible fines. IOW, he has artificially lowered the costs of Oil and Coal. He is pouring money into hydrogen research, while trying to cut all other avenues.
OTH, there has been damn little incentives for nukes or Alternatives. Now you have states offering incentives for highly unprofitable solar or even ethanol production (which is still unprofitable)and saying that they will ban products. What is needed is for gov. to drop all the incentives and the playing games with picking techs. If they want to encourage us to move away from imports and dirty items, then simply increase the tax on a good in such a way that it encourages alternatives. In particular, rather than banning incandescents, a simple tax based on energy usage would have a much higher impact on creating alternatives. In fact, if they go the route of taxing the energy, then they should tax the pollutants such as the mercury. But this approach of gov. encouraging a particular tech is fool hardy and will lead us down the same road. Basically, it will put the west on a single type of tech which will give us the same damn problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Of course there should be skepticism, because it sounds like GE pulled some amazing innovation of out their subsidiaryhole just in time to fend off legislation.
Of course any legislation that talks journey rather than destination is misguided -- it is efficiency and other measurable metrics (e.g. amount of waste per unit, for instance) that matters, not how you get there. Putting specifics into the wording sounds more like some lobbyists got their money's worth.
Having said all of that, anyone who walks into a store and buys an incandescent is either a) stupid, b) very stupid, or c) they live in an apartment with unmetered electricity. I have a house full of CFs, and have had them for half a decade now, and not only is the colour pleasing with the modern ones, and there is zero flicker or start-up lag, but in the entire time I've owned CFs I've changed two whole bulbs, one being used outside in -25C temperature when it was only rated for indoor use.
30 lumens/Watt. Thanks for coming out. Here's your little yellow "I Participated" ribbon.
There are prototype white LED's at 150 lumens/W, supposedly to hit 200 lumens/W by years end.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
True, Diesel's
Diesel's what? His engine?
have come a long way in the noise department...but still, when you have pistons the sizes of a small child's head, it's difficult to make a Diesel quiet:-)
I'd beg to differ. A Lexus RX330 we have stabled here has obnoxiously noisy gasoline injectors which are far louder at idle than a friend's Jetta TDI (Volkswagen Turbo Diesel). Not all Diesel engines are built by Caterpillar.
Primary stumbling blocks to Diesel adoption her in the states have been our strict particulate and NOx emissions rules, particularly in California and other states that have adopted California Air Resource Board rules. Urea injection will help to solve the NOx problem, and ultra-low sulfur and advanced fuel injection technologies will do the rest.
Audi's Diesel-powered direct injection race cars are loud - but they also won LeMans this year. Diesels look to be on the verge of a very big comeback, and a lot of money is being dumped into these efficient petrochemical engines.
Like the Diesel engine, the incandescent bulb is a product which can be made far more efficient and competitive while retaining it's inherent advantages - but only if the makers of these products are sufficiently goaded into investing in the R&D to make these advances happen. Australia and California, by proposing CFL-only laws to save energy are providing that incentive.
Well they are an IC blub, so that tells you that the light is being emmitted by passing current through a piece of wire which then glows. Normal IC blubs have tungsten fillaments, and when current is passed through these they emmit light mostly in the IR range (which you feel as heat). However tungsten also emmits about 5% of the energy in the visible spectrum (which you see as light). GE claims to have found a substance to use for wire which emmits 20% (4x efficiency FTA) of the energy as visible light. The rest of the energy will be in the UV and IR ranges. What that substance is or how it works they arent saying. I am guessing that it is still tungsten (because they claim it has the same yellowish color) but they have cut down the IR emmissions by adding some crap in with the tungsten.
It's amazing what can motivate you when the world's largest retailer doesn't want to carry your product anymore.
Typical tungsten bulbs are about 15 lumens/Watt. The HEI described get only 30 ln/W. Your old stand-by T12 fluorescent tube in the drop ceiling troffer of a old style cube farm get 50 lm/W. Currently available T5 tubes get 100+ ln/W with improved performance on the way. There are dimmable CFLs out there. Controlling fluorescent brightness is very simple in modern high frequency electronic ballast with PWM. The reason you do not see more dimmable CFLs is due to the small increased cost. In the long run, CFLs are a less optimized solution compared to separating the ballast from the bulb as you might see in many commercial (and some residential) recessed can fixtures. Why replace the ballast every time the bulb goes (hint: CFLs fit into existing sockets)? Also, the old color, flicker and lifespan issure are a tthing of the past with modern electronic fluorescent ballasts. While great tings are promised in LEDs (>150 lm/W), the best LED bulbs that I've seen are only 25 ln/W, but I'm sure there are better out there.
Recent, name-brand CFLs have mostly acceptable color rendition. Where you will notice their shortcomings is with deep red objects, like red velvet. These usually appear as brown or magenta under triphosphor CFLs, because there is simply no real red in the spectrum.
Now, there are halophosphate and mixed halophosphate/triphosphor lamps which achieve > 90 CRI, but they trade off brightness. Chroma 50 tubes come to mind.
People like to mention LEDs as a solution. They're great for low-intensity lighting, but if you want something truly bright, you'll find you have problems with heat dissipation.
For those who like truly ugly AND wasteful (but retro!) lighting, try an uncoated, self-ballasted mercury vapor lamp. 160 watts and slightly less efficient than a standard incandescent.
TANSTAAFL
Would GE have even bothered had it not been for the flourecents breathing down their neck?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Fluorescent lighting can trigger migraines for some people.
> How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
... it's also to uncouple the gasoline from the drive train so that the car becomes agnostic about its energy source and the gasoline part can be replaced more easily with a fuel cell or battery or whatever other technology. The hybrid has room to grow and improve whereas a non-hybrid car getting great mileage is still stuck on gasoline. It's just a band-aid to cling to an old technology like gasoline or incandescent bulbs.
The reason people assume innovation can't happen is that it hasn't happened in incandescent light bulbs.
Anyway, twice as efficient is bullshit. Incandescent light bulbs are so outrageously inefficient that you are still wrecking the planet even with these new vaporware bulbs.
Banning incandescent bulbs will only spur innovation in LED and other modern solutions. Complaints about the quality of light are very valid, but when you have an LED bulb that is generating the same brightness as an incandescent and the LED is using 1% of the power and has 1000x the lifespan then it is time to get the incandescent bulbs out. You can replace an incandescent with an LED and still have power left over for a notebook computer with dual processors.
These new incandescent bulbs make me think of a non-hybrid gasoline car that ekes out 50 mpg so "you don't need a hybrid" but the point of the hybrid is not just to double the gas mileage today
This poses an interesting issue for the marketers to tackle once this goes to market. Hopefully they will be able to properly convey the "light output" as the deciding factor rather than the wattage.
The flip side, however is that you can't just wish problems away or ignore them. Good engineers actively seek out the problems and figure out how to address them or work around them.
The trade press etc is full of all kinds of hype suggesting that there are silver bullets: "Use Product X and all your development problems will go away". The good engineer is no more fooled by this than the Good Housewife believes that Brand X detergent really gets your whites whiter than white!
Often the devil is in the details. A good engineer will know this.
Those of us who've been around a bit have seen a lot of activity from companies both large and small where the PR is better than reality (MS is an obvious candidate here, but almost all companies etc have a vested interest in what they are doing and telling us about). Is Bill Gates really a philanthropist or is he trying to buy karma?.
So, forgive me for restating your 3Ps in a more positive but meaningful terms:
Detailed (previously pissy): Ignore the details at your peril.
Cautious (previously pessimistic): Sure there are potential advantages, but look at the whole picture. Don't get sucked in without a healthy appraisal.
Skeptical (previously Paranoid): Why are they telling me this? What are they not telling me? What's their game plan?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Once system (to be used by Mercedes and other makers) requires a separate tank of some nasty liquid like urea which is injected into the exhaust - if the car runs out of this stuff, the computer won't let you drive the car any more.
Can you just pull over and pee in it?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The reason Slashdotters are suspicious is that a large number of, (if not all) corporations are out to deceive the public. This is not conjecture. It's cold fact. GE is a great example, btw. You should look into some of their criminal activities.
Note that micro-flourescents contain mercury that if not re-cycled ends up in landfills. Any legislating that mandates the use of mercury devices shall also mandate a recycling by manufacturers and consumers. In this instance (though I also have reservations about GE "timing) I say GO FOR IT GE. If incandescents can match or come close to mercury devices we should have it.
cursethedarkness
When you say “need incandescent lighting”, I presume you're speaking of the quality and responsiveness of the light source, not of the need for an excited wire filament inside a vacuum-sealed glass orb. (clearly more efficient as a heat source than a light source... evidenced by the common Lava Lamp®)
I mean really, what's the need about? Is it about a strong-and-steady flow of photons? Is it about a light source that can be analog-controlled to dim and brighten in smooth steps?
I may not be speaking for everyone, but for those of us that are prone to the affliction, enduring the 60-66Hz “hummm” and the barely-perceptible flicker of fluorescent is a condition I will trade-in for just about anything.
I've seen a lot of lighting fads come and go. Fluorescent seems to stay just because it's so ergonomically attractive against vis-a-vis Heat Lamps. CF is about the same, just in a smaller package. Cold-cathode lamps are nifty, but they're about as useful as Xmas Lights, and cost ten times more. (with current Consumer Offerings) My bet is on up-and-coming technologies like bright LED and HID (High Intensity Discharge; the son of the Arc Lamp) lighting.
Just this past year, I've noticed an abundance of LED lighting technologies— not in the news, but in my hand. To me, that means a lot more than “coming soon”.
Butane lighters with a small LED flashlight are now common give-away items, as are just simple promotional pocket-lights. Battery-operated LED Xmas Lighting is now just about everywhere, and in many colors. (most popular, of course, is pure-white) When a technology becomes commonplace, that is when you know its about to come into its own.
Look at cellphones and GPS; both were considered Luxury or High End at first, then the price dropped enough that everyone found a reason to buy one. When everyone on the block has the same technology, the industry is pressured to make it better. As soon as cellphones became common, it was a race to make The Best Cellphone. Though there are clear leaders, that race is still on.
You watch; this will come to the Lighting Industry as well. As the knock-off CF and LED lighting floods the market, the leaders have to come-up with innovations to make their offering (seem) better than the others. (Note the implied reservation) Though I don't doubt their ability to innovate, I do doubt their veracity in purporting innovation.
There's already a remarkable offering of Consumer LED Lighting. Compact Fluorescents already have their well-earned niche, although I personally have distaste for them. As for high-end needs, such as photography and “spectacle” uses, (WARNING: token Wiki articles) HID is slowly emerging into its own. Your street may soon be lit with HID, rather than sodium vapor. (for example)
If General Electric can make a better light bulb, I say let them. If Australia never makes it legal to use one in your home when it would be just as viable as CF, it's their loss. I think a greater question is, how long is the “better light bulb” supposed to last? (LED “bulbs” are edging towards offering Lifetime Guarantees—and by that, meaning the lifetime of the consumer! W
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Dry your paper?? Why was it wet in the first place?
You know, on second thought, I'm not sure I WANT to know.
I don't know what you see of light bulbs, but there are a lot of incandescent manufacturers (a quick search turned up http://www.globalsources.com/gsol/I/Provides/Inca
Only a very large company would have the financial standing and ability to devote major resources to such future R&D. Because of relative stability of the market (as you mention a lack of advancement), they can stockpile technical advances, file patents long before they're needed, and always be one step ahead of the competition.
According to http://www.ge.com/en/product/home/lighting.htm, GE also manufactures florescent lighting. GE Is obviously trying to keep status quo: retain current paying customers in both fields, florescent and incandescent, regardless of new laws and sanctions.
It's not the light.. it's the BIG BAG OF MUSHROOMS you ate before turning them on.
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.