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Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine For 19 Years
Mike writes "As lighting manufacturers phase out the incandescent bulb, and CFLs look set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years (if used 5-1/2 hours a day). With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced. They are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Let's hope that as the technology is refined their significant cost barrier will drop — $40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs."
incandescents have the advantage of putting off a lot of heat, if you're going to use one as a cheap heat lamp and light provider.
$40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb,
one that saves 23$ a year, which lasts a whopping 19 years ? yup, some people are stupid.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
That's 38,143 hours. Not great for LEDs, actually. Most newer white LEDs are rated for 50k to 100k hours.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
If this is the longest one lasting, then how come the Philips led 'bulb' I have says 20 years?
Here's the secret to immortality:
I hope they put a capacitor in there with a bridge rectifier instead of just ignoring half of the 50/60 Hz cycle.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
You know in a few years, those Pollock jokes about solar powered flashlights aren't going to be too far off the mark, judging by recent events.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
In my experiance, LED bulbs have a very high faliure rate. Granted i got the cheapest ones i could find, but still...
The LED lights I've seen are too directed. They don't light up a room all that well. Whatever spot the LEDs are aimed at is more illuminated, and everywhere else less illuminated than with CFLs or incandescents.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
till you break them and contaminate the room in mercury. Professional remediation is about $3000.
You forgot to finish your thought with "if you compeletely and unjustifiably overreact.
Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years
TFA
The bulbs use only an eighth the power of incandescents. That means a 60-watt-equivalent LED bulb would cost only 300 yen (about $3) a year instead of 2,380 yen ($25.80)--a significant savings over a lifetime.
The box pictured on the right has "6.9w", which if as good as a 60 watt incandescent, is probably only a watt or two better than the equivalent CFL.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Does it mean they have tested that technology for 19 years and their bulb just died ?
Man if MS could test their product that way ! :)
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I'll believe when I see it.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
My main problem with LEDs that I have seen is that their light is to cold and white. It hurts my eyes and causes migraines. I didn't see a temperature quoted in the article.
$3000 se ms a lit le high to me too. I pai ted a gar ge once and fou d some merc ry rol ing arou d on the floor as I was pres ure wash ng. I just sco ped it up with a du tpan and put it in a jar. I'm perf ctly fine, it's not like I'm dead or hand ca ped or anyth ng now.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
$40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs
You must be an accountant living on the outdated system of monthly and quarterly figures.
To have an amortisation within 2 years and outright profit for 17 years afterwards sounds like a pretty damn good investment.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
For instance, the good old light bulb. This one is going for over a hundred years and still counting.
I wonder how long it will takes before LED bulbs beat that (yes, at least a 108 years)
While I wouldn't mind using LED as replacements when the existing CFL wear out, particularly if they are less toxic when discarded, what I really need is a replacement for halogen small US base and bayonet, along with a few "candelabra" small base bulbs. Dimming would be a plus.
Anyone making those yet?
I was talking to the facilities manager at the local University... about cost to replace bulbs in some of his buildings.. In some cases it is literally in the many tens of thousands of dollars range. They have to bring scaffolding in with a small crew to erect and move around. (Doors too small for a lift.)
He would be more than happy to pay $42/bulb IFF it meant he didn't have to go back in for two decades.
I think anyone that knows anything about lighting technology knows that LEDs are the future and that CFLs are just a temporary replacement for incandescent. It wont be long before the cost gets down and LED becomes vastly superior to CFL. The municipalities that are mandating CFL are very short sighted.
That is, until something appears that is superior to LED, but that thing isn't even on the horizon yet.
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The mercury release caused by burning coal (burning coal releases quite a bit of mercury into the air) to produce the extra energy to run an incandescent for a year is more than the mercury contained in one CF.
Should CFs be disposed of properly? Yes.
Is one broken CF a hazmat issue? No.
Things don't become useless just because they are marginally suboptimal. 38k hours really is close enough to the 50-100k range you quoted, unless you're playing horseshoes or hand grenades.
Colour me stupid but what is 5-1/2 hours a day?
Did someone steal the decimal point off your keyboard? Or maybe even the comma, if you're from that part of the world?
C'mon, behave yourself.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
But how dim they get over time? It's pretty pointless to have a LED light that lasts 19 years, if the light gets so dim after few years that it is practically unusable.
"Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the Maine Ambient Air Guideline (MAAG) of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp. "
study
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...is power cycling them, not burn time.
Lets see how they fare when power cycled a few thousand times.
I've never had a CFL last more than a year or so. Mythbusters did some interesting testing on lamps a few years ago. IIRC they set up a rig that turned all the lamps on and off every 2 minutes, 24/7. Within a month I think they were all dead, except for the good old cheap to manufacture, low carbon footprint to manufacture, dimmable, yet inefficient filament incandescent bulb.
They always lie about the amount of radiated light.
Put a 60W incandescent, "equivalent" tube, and "equivalent" LED next to each other. The good old light bulb is clearly brighter than the other two, and the LED is clearly even dimmer than the tube.
How come those manufacturers get away with such obvious errors?
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
CFLs contain mercury and I assume that most people just throw them in the trash when their done..either not having a clue they shouldn't be doing it or they just don't care. They consume much much more energy to make than normal bulbs and can emit UV if there are posphor issues.
If LED lighting is soo effiecient why do all bulbs I've ever seen that output any reasonable amount of light come with massive heatsinks? The output spectrum is hollow and the led lighting I've seen looks like crap. LEDs may be effecient but not significantly more so than CFLs.
Until vendors get their act together with a real solution that actually works I will keep buying the old incandescent crap.
I don't like new bulbs, no matter what is claimed watts, it still feels like it is too dark in the room.
LEDs die by fading over time, they don't just go kaput. Over the 19 years, the brightness is sure to fade, the question is by how much until they determine that it needs replacing?
unless you're playing horseshoes or hand grenades.
You got that backwards. It is "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"
I will now proceed to rant...
Equivalent to a 60W bulb is still too dim. I used to use 100W or 150W bulbs as standard before I switched to CFLs. Now I can't dim any of them. I have a dimmable CFL but can't find a suitable dimmer that is rated for dimming the 20W CFL. I hope this situation improves soon. And I hope LEDs bulbs don't make me wait another few years for dimmers rated down to 5W (assuming dimmable LED bulbs become available). I guess the best way to dim LEDs is inside the bulb itself and to use some kind of data signal from the dimmer switch to control it instead of trying to do it the old triac way.
The main issues to look for with LEDs is some of the cheaper ones give out a horrible ghostly white light. The box should say what colour temperature they output, and the best ones output 3200K warm white light similar to traditional incandescents. You wouldn't even know its an LED unless you stared at it. The other issue is only some bulbs work with dimmer switches, but there are models which do that too.
The case for LEDs in other kinds of fixtures is probably less clear cut. LEDs are fairly directional so they probably require some refractive covering to be useful in hang down bulbs. But in the meantime there are plenty of CFL solutions which again save a lot more than traditional incandescents. I really don't see why anyone would bother with incandescent bulbs unless they are ignorant of how much money they're losing or they have have highly specific needs that other kinds of bulbs do not provide.
$40 for 19 years sure is nice, but who wants to make that kind of investment, assuming there's 10+ bulbs in the house to replace? I'd rather pay $4 for a 6-pack and have to replace them in a few months.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
They figure better than half of electricity goes to lights. Lets say with modern electronics it's more like a 1/3 in a standard home. How many bulbs amount to 90% of the lighting in your house? What 5 or 6? Replace those bulbs for around $250 to $300 and you cut a 1/3 off your power bill. How much is your bill? Odds are you'll hit payback in a year or two at the most. I have bulbs in my house that run 12 to 15 hours a day since I work at home. Usage will determine payback. If everyone went to these bulbs and high efficentcy appliances easily 50% of of the power could be saved. The could start shutting down coal plants and wouldn't need nuclear plants. Conservation is the easiest way to address need not to mention cheapest. There are solutions but building more power plants is no solution.
A coal-burning (for instance) power plant converts only 30-40% of the energy in the fuel to electric energy. The rest is lost in form of waste heat at the power plant.
Now your incandescent lights convert this to heat quite efficiently, but you still get only the above 30-40% of the heat that was originally in the coal. It would be far more efficient to throw an extra briquet into your stove at home, to stay with the coal example.
The above will become irrelevant once all power generation is changed to renewables. But at that point, I guess the price per kWh of electric power will be much higher too. So you will have an economic reason to get efficient devices.
C - the footgun of programming languages
But compact fluorescents cost $2, save almost as much power/year, and last about 10 years. They are the most cost effective.
Indeed, CFLs are the most cost effective, as long as you don't actually use any math.
However, I do like math, so I shall try using some.
First, let us look at the cost of the bulbs themselves. The Panasonic's cost $40 and are rated for 40,000 hours. A batch of 60 watt equivalent CFLs I have in my hand (Bright Effects brand that I purchased at Lowes) cost $12 or $2 per CFL. The CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. So I will need five CFLs instead of one LED bulb.
Now let us look at energy use. The CFLs use 13 watts each and the LED with the highest light output draws 6 watts. Over the life of the led bulb, that works out to 6 watts * 40,000 hours = 240,000 watt hours = 240 Kwh. The CFL will use, over the same time span, 13 watts * 40,000 hours = 520,000 watts = 520 Kwh.
The question now becomes, what do you pay for a kilowatt hour? Where I live in the Orlando area, we are paying about 15 cents/Kwh. The LED bulb would wind up costing $36 for power and the CFL would cost $78.
This gives us total costs of:
LED: $40 (the bulb) + $36 (energy) = $76 (total)
CFL: $10 (5 bulbs) + $78 (energy) = $88 (total)
This analysis also assumes your time is worthless. If you put any value on your time, the numbers obviously get better for the LED. The quality of the light is also ignored here. LEDs come on instantly, while same CFLs can take a bit of time to reach full output.
Personally, reducing the number of bulbs I have to replace by a factor of five is quite valuable to me. My house has about 120 bulbs, and the ones that are very hard to reach or that are on all the time (about 20 of them) are already LED based. As the LEDs get cheaper, I'll replace the remainder.
Obviously, for people with cheap electricity, CFLs will still come out ahead (as long as little or no value is placed on the time for changing bulbs).
Half of what concerns people now (or should concern them) is what goes into making the light bulb. It's all very well it lasting 19 years, but if it's full of toxic materials that need special treatment on disposal, then no thanks.
I am talking specifically about mercury.
The things contain a switch mode power supply, like just about every small mains powered device nowadays. The SMPS converts input to a current output for LEDs, which is what they need for best efficiency. It does this on both halves of the AC cycle. This added complexity contributes to the cost, but not as much as you might think.
Early LED bulbs that ran off cheap transformers used for SELV lighting used series resistors, but the current is very variable and they are, basically, crap. They got away with it because big arrays of cheap LEDs were used. A long term solution really needs not more than two or three high power LEDs in an envelope, because this helps to drive down cost. But this requires an advanced power supply.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Old fashion fluorescent lights have far more mercury in them. I have had at least one of them in every house i have ever lived. No one gives a rats dirty end if you break them. So why all the fuss over CFL? On and a lot of street lights have even more mercury in them.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Light output - total light output, not how bright a spot it can make on a wall - is measured in lumens.
The bulb above - look at the box shot - says 450lm for 6.9W.
That's 65lm/W - this is very close to the 60lm/W that most of my CFLs claim.
It's significantly below the 100lm/W that you get from linear flourescants.
The best LEDs at the moment get around 114lm/W - http://www.cree.com/products/xlamp_xpe.asp - and ones sampling now from the same maker get 140. It's not possible to get more than maybe 300 - as then you're getting close to the fundamental amount of power needed to make a watt of wite light.
I did a basic design for a 100lm/W lamp - from AC to replace 100W of lightbulbs.
It needed 15 1W LEDs, a high efficiency supply, and would cost perhaps $60 in bulk.
If you drive the LEDs harder, you can use half the number, and get about 2/3 the efficiency, and maybe $40 cost.
This was for relatively small numbers.
In a lamp test by a Finnish magazine the 3 EUR fluorescent lamp died at 3000 hours. The more expensive ones are still going on but starting to show longer warming times, stains/cracks and other problems. In addition to these problems fluorescents are hazardous waste and should be recycled. At 10x longer lifespan the LED light sounds like a good deal to me.
Not only that, compact florescent lamp aren't worth the £2/3 price tag (hell, they aren't worth 1/10th of that). Ever try reading by a compact florescent bulb? The experience will pull your eyes out of their sockets and leave you blind by the time your thirty. Here in the UK incandescent bulbs are getting difficult to find. For many months I found myself trying to read by the highest-wattage crapola "green" bulbs you're allowed to buy, and damaging my eyesight in the process. Luckily you can still get halogen bulbs, but now they're talking about banning those too because they don't save enough energy. Better to be blind than burn a few extra kilowatt hours. What's even stupider, people are burning four times as many "green" bulbs in a vain effort to get their rooms as brightly lit as they once were with incandescent bulbs (for those not in the UK, try looking at pictures of interior designs for UK and European housing. See all those lights in the ceilings? Dozens and dozens, where once a track with 4 120 watt Incandescent bulbs sufficed. Great for the light-bulb industry, lousy for the environment and your eyesight, because even with all those goddamn lights rooms still feel like a dark cave and you still can't read a book without tearing your eyes out, and yes, I still have 20/20 vision, though I miss the 20/15 I had before going green).
LEDs look very promising: power saving, long lasting, and bright. Well worth $40 if they work as advertised. And no toxic chemicals in your house to boot, unlike these still-dim-despite-propoganda-to-the-contrary, toxic so-called green bulbs industry and government are trying to brainwash and coerce us into buying. Hopefully the US will go straight from incancescent to LED ... not mandating mecury-filled compact-florescent bulbs and banning incandescents to save a little energy is one of the few things the US really is getting right (and the EU dead wrong).
As you've probably guessed this particular subject really hacks me off -- mandating an extremely modest improvement in industrial effeciency would save orders of magnitude more energy than these asinine not-fit-for-purpose bulbs, but it's easier for the politicians to stick the average citizen with a load of busy work and darker rooms, than it is to stand up to industry and require a little more effeciency from their energy-intensive manufacturing processes.
I miss my incandescent bulbs, my bright living room, and the ability to read a book for hours on end without getting a headache ... something I can now do only on sunny days thanks to the fools touting this energy-saving bulb crap.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The CO2 stampede will fade out, the environmentalist crooks will be getting rich with tributes paid to save the Moon, and just when my current stock of incadescent bulbs will be about to finish, I will again be able to buy fine classical bulbs in a shop. This is my 70 year old mother's opinion.
TestDiary :)
Day 82 - these things are great almost 3 months and no signs of slowing!
Day 83 - Uh oh. its getting darker these things better not be used constantly
Day 84 - they are all burned out now. Marketing says they last 19 years!
Day 85 - slashdotted
comment directly in my journal
Any significant source of vibration seems to cause them to die prematurely. This is based on personal experience.
As in, garage door openers. Though I think the use cycle there may not exploit them much. I could not keep the CFLs mounted near the openers either, however the one in the utility room accessible through the garage has lived a long time. Near doors where the kids just love to slam them shut. Not a fan of them in ceiling fans, though the enclosed "candle style" CFLs for some reason outlasted the exposed ones.
My concern with LED and even CFLs is the heat they build up in their bases. Can they be used in enclosed fixtures? I was surprised how warm some globe lights became after going from 60w incandescent to 10w/15w CFLs
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
that claim has been debunked by snoopes
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I could understand if the Weekly World News mistakenly called it a '60-watt' bulb meaning that it's about as bright as an ordinary incandescent lightbulb, but this is meant to be news for nerds! According to the article, it uses only about an eighth of the power of an incandescent bulb, in other words about 7.5 watts.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The last set of fluorescent bulbs I purchased came with a 7 year replacement warranty. Of course, I would need to send a burned-out bulb back and pay postage, so on CFL's the warranty is nice, but its real value is a bit dubious once you count the cost and inconvenience. However, on a $40 bulb the economics improve since return postage would be a much smaller fractional cost of the individual light bulb. It is also much more likely that I would actually use the warranty on a $40 bulb than a $3 or $4 one. If Panasonic were to warranty this bulb for, say 19 years, I think I'd be game to try it.
I love the idea of LED bulbs (much more so than CFLs, since those die quickly in our 25-year-old house), but they've currently got the same problem that CFLs do: they won't work with a dimmer. Yes, I know that some CFLs are dimmer-compatible now, but they're hard to find.
I'm nothing resembling an electrician or electrical engineer, but I have a conceptual idea of how you would make it work. Add a microcontroller that reads the incoming voltage. As the voltage steps down, turn off individual LEDs in the array in a fixed sequence. Half voltage == half of the LEDs are off, for instance.
Is the science sound on this? And would it add more than, say, $2/bulb?
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
I recall reading somewhere about the health impact of UV radiation in indoor lighting. Fluorescents (CFLs included, right ?) seem to have more UV radiation than incandescent lamps. I am interested in how white LED performs in this parameter. I found the claim that white LEDs are better. Any comments or further info, slashdotters ?
How many does one need to break?
I'm about to leave a flat you see, and I really hate the landlord. Plus the new place will not fit my grow room.
Glad to see snoope dogg went from rapping to debunking myths.
There's the Centennial Light, which only consumes 4 watts, and has been continuously burning for over 100 years. http://www.centennialbulb.org/index.htm
Anyway, the popularity of CF is just because it's a direct replacement of the power-hungry incandescent bulbs, which are almost always used in the most impractical way possible for the sake of "beauty". Not only they're usually enclosed or covered to lessen the intensity, there's no reflective surface anywhere, and are also often used against walls instead of in the center of the room. It's the exact complete opposite of how circular fluorescent lights are used.
Another example of beauty over practicality is the stupid idea to use incandescent bulb(s) in a ceiling fan (if used for cooling). Anyway the beautiful, non-aerodynamic blades are useless, except when used as a canoe paddle.
You forgot to finish your thought with "if you compeletely and unjustifiably overreact.
That's pretty much what businesses and schools do in our litigious age. A local school in my area was recently closed for two days over an old barometer that got dropped in one of the science classrooms. They brought in a professional cleanup crew and spent $80,000 to have the mercury spill cleaned up.
Now I can understand closing off the classroom where the spill happened but closing the whole school seems rather excessive to me. $80,000 for cleanup seems really excessive. But that's what they have to do in this day and age. Otherwise some parent would freak out ("OMG, you mean my kid was within a quarter mile of spilled mercury?! I read someone that stuff is as dangerous as Dihydrogen Monoxide!") and they'd be writing that $80,000 check to a law firm instead of a cleanup crew.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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I recently bought a couple of LED desk lamps at Target for $10 each. They seem like they are about 30 W equivalent. So that would be half the price for the whole fixture, a sort of goose neck clip on thing. The transformer is at the plug. Seems like one must be paying for the form factor in the Phillips product. LEDs are durable goods so it might make sense to consider them in a different light. Change fixtures rather than bulbs?
I've switched to CFL's from incandescent bulbs in many of the light fixtures in my house. However the fixture in my bedroom is controlled by an X10 switch/dimmer module so we can adjust the lighting from the bed. I have not yet found any CFL bulb that will work with this dimmer. Several 'dimmable' CFL's I've tried would work with a dimmer switch in other rooms of the house, but NOT with the X10 modules. So for now my bedroom will still use incandescent lamps. Because they are gas discharge lamps, CFL's don't dim evenly, or go down below about 30% output. You must use matched bulbs if you want to dim a fixture using more than one bulb. LED lamps should work better with dimmers. I'd be willing to pay $30-40 a bulb for LED lamps, IF they work with the dimmer as well as incandescent lamps and will last as long as promised. BTW about half of the CFL's I've installed are still working, and the other half burned out as quick as the average incandescent. About the range of quality I'd expect from crap made in China!
Though in terms of migraines, in the past I have been sensitive to the 50/60Hz flickering that fluorescents gave off (at least a few years ago), and I found halogen or incandescents to be better. I suspect the modern CFL's have better ballasts than previous models, but I still dread the 2012 cutoff when incandescents are supposed to be removed.
Of course, "The RfC [300ng/m3] is an estimate (with uncertainty spanning perhaps an order of magnitude) of a continuous inhalation exposure to the human population (including sensitive subgroups) that is likely to be without appreciable risk of deleterious noncancer effects during a lifetime." From the MAAG. So, you could either pay $3000 to clean up the 4 mg of Hg, or you could open a window and try not to break a bulb every week.
Edison's original Light bulb is still working, and that is 100 years old. I guess that they don't make them like they use to...
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
He'd have to get up there to clean the fixtures every so often.
This seems great and all but how bright is it? All the LED lamps I've seen are too dim to be used to replace a standard incandescent. Give me an LED lamp with an output of as many lumens as at least an 80W incandescent and we'll talk. Otherwise it's no good for anything but a reading lamp.
Also, CFL's are notorious for interfering with WiFi.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
The question is not whether the amount exceeds the standards set by the government (they are almost guaranteed to), but whether the amount actually absorbed into the body through the lungs is even near the amount absorbed by eating a piece of tuna. I don't have supporting evidence, but I would be willing to bet the tuna would lead to much more absorption. My main reason for guessing this is that the mercury in tuna is in organic compounds which are more likely to be absorbed than elementary mercury. It also turns out that organic mercury is what is actually dangerous (read: carcinogenic) about mercury.
I recently started switching over to CFLs and was impressed at the color temperature of the newer models. The 2700k models really do look exactly like an incandescent (if that's what you want). What I wasn't expecting was the terribly slow warm up... Maybe I have a few bad bulbs, but it takes a full minute for the bulb to warm up, during which time I'd say it ramps up from the equivalent of about a 20W to its full 60W... The color also seems to stabilize as it warms up.
I wish all CFLs were required to list their color temperature, CRI, and warm up time on the box, so that consumers could know what they are buying.
60 watts * 5.5 hours/day * 365 days/year = 120,450 total watts = 120 Kw. Around here electricity is around $0.10 / Kw, so your total power cost for a 60 watt bulb under these usage parameters is around $12/year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm going to save $23 on something that costs $12 to operate. Not that I'm against saving the electricity. I just don't like it when the numbers don't add up.
I switched the whole house to CFL. Every light. These bulbs are supposed to last 3-5 years.
I have replaced EVERY CFL BULB IN THE HOUSE within a year. EVERY ONE. GE Brand. No electrical voodoo in the house (I have a line conditioner even at the main). EVERY ONE. I shipped every damn one of them back to GE and Philips for a refund and explaination on why they failed. ZERO response.
Yeah my electric bill went down. $4 a month after replacing EVERY BULB in my house. That is 38 bulbs. You only save oodles of money provided you run them 5 hours a day constantly to cover the cost of the bulb. If have those 5 minute hall and closet lights along with perhaps 2-8 bulbs on for 5 hours (reading lamp, kitchen lights) you lose money. I barely saved money due to the living room lights being on all day. The livingroom, kitchen, and my office are the only high use lights and effectively had to subsidize all the other lights in the home. The $4 a month doesn't cover the $90+ spend on the bulbs...
Now every bulb was replaced back then as the old incandescent ones died off. So they were replaced over a 6 month period when we moved in (The old bulbs were at the oldest 4 years old.) So it can't be blamed on a bad batch of bulbs or a specific store (Target, Home Depot, Menards, and Walmart were sources for the bulbs)
So the CFLs being cheaper is pure bull shit as far as a home is concerned. That useless philips halogen crap in the garage that was supposed to be a 5 year bulb worked out to 8 months and didn't survive the winter.
Total scam in my opinion on CFLs. Until they can get an LED to match a 100 watt bulb (because I like to be able to see in my house rather then some crap ass 60-watt equivalent...) get it as cheap as a normal bulb, I keep my nice 100 watt incadescents thank you. When they burn out I don't have to fork over $3 to replace them.
I won't even get into the discussion about the quality of light from CFLs and LEDs vs. Incandescent bulbs... more useless ineffective crap to protect your new found god...
Telling us it saves $25 bucks a month if bullshit. I'll buy 1. It goes in my garage. If it can survive 3 years I MIGHT consider buying a second one for the bathroom and if that survies another 3 years... then we'll talk. So far this low-energy lighting scam is just that.. a scam as far as my experience has gone.
My criteria from now on: Full Spectrum, 100 Watts, NO STROBING, NO FLICKERING.
CFLs are a joke and LEDs have a long way to go. Too bad it looks like government has to subsidize and legistate to prop up yet another failure... How long till they ban those nice incandescent lights... oh wait...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I've got a few recessed lighting spots in my house that are up crazy high and are a major pain to change a bulb in. I'll buy the darn things for those spaces if for no other reason.
[signature]
I have three reasons for not liking CFL's. 1. They don't last in areas that the lights are not on that long. If you use them where you turn the lights on for 5 or 10 minutes, they die very quickly. 2. They don't like being cold. The time it takes to turn on in a cool house (set back thermometer) can seem to be forever. 3. Dimmers. I have yet to see one that works on a dimmer. I have purchased some LED lights (spot) for less than US$5 each on-line. They work as great desk lamps but the beam width is to narrow. They didn't work on dimmers (main reason to purchase them) but that is due to the current regulator within the bulb. I see that there is a new current regulator that works with standard dimmers. I hope to change all my gu10 and pars with LEDS when they are dimmer compatible. I also forgot, CFL's don't come in formats for all the types of bulbs that are out there. LED's will. There is also the option of color choices. I have seen red, blue, green and multicolored ones on-line.
How does a 60W LED bulb save energy over a 60W incandescent bulb? I mean, 60 watts is 60 watts no matter how you're dissipating it. /tic
Exactly. I've broken the bulb, swept up the pieces, and opened a damn window. Keep the kids out of the room for a few hours. Mercury isn't plutonium. It evaporates and dissipates.
Besides, I live in a major city (NYC). I'm pretty sure the regular air is toxic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The best way to pick up mercury is with scotch tape.
Seriously. Sticks right to it.
Indeed* they do! The only downside is that they tend to be on the small side.
They even make heat pumps that interface with boiler systems to provide hot water for heating.
Electric resistance heat is definitely the most expensive, but I guess in apartments it can make sense.
It all depends on your area, but especially if you already have AC, replacing/supplimenting it with a heat pump version might be cheaper than leaving your house cold and 'making up the difference' using spot heating.
But then, I use an electric thermostat, keep the house at 50 when I'm not home, and wear a sweater(house set to 65, not spot heating).
One thing you can do is figure out how much power you're using with spot heating, it's cost, compared to how efficient/costly your central heating is. Heat pumps in warmer areas(IE not -30) are often efficient enough that it'd be cheaper to just heat the house all the way.
As always, consider adding more insulation - in the USA at least(not assuming you're here), there's generous credits for upgrading your home right now. I think that's true in Europe and elsewhere, just the programs are different.
*Not an endorsement, high hit on google.
I don't read AC A human right
The mercury in a barometer isn't even THAT dangerous. You don't want to eat it, or lick your hands after you play with it, but it's not serious danger like some mercury compounds, or even mercury vapour.
Seems they've been refining the idea: http://www.solareagle.com/sunmate_flash.html
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Apparently there are still early light bulbs in museums that still work.
They fail not too quickly, but quickly enough to create a false economy.
I was talking to the facilities manager at the local University... about cost to replace bulbs in some of his buildings.. In some cases it is literally in the many tens of thousands of dollars range. They have to bring scaffolding in with a small crew to erect and move around. (Doors too small for a lift.)
He would be more than happy to pay $42/bulb IFF it meant he didn't have to go back in for two decades.
So, did you tell the guy to spend his money on widening the doors so they can bring a lift in next time?
Costco started selling LED "bulbs". I immediately bought a pack.
They're not ready for prime time, but I wanted to play with them and show Costco that LED "bulbs" would sell.
But like every other consumer LED bulb I've seen sold (Home Depot has a few, and there's the one in TFA) they are directional -- essentially spots, not bulbs. One at home depot has a distributing lens, but it breaks the light from a beam into a plane, rather than diffusing it around. I could use a bulb with less than 360 x 360 degrees of diffuse light, but I need better than a bizarre ring/plane of light, and a spot is no good to me as room lighting.
HD and Costco both sell products which really don't give off enough light, either.
Double the watts, double the elements inside (make them as bright as real incandescents), don't point all the elements in all the same direction, maybe put a diffusing layer on top, and charge more for the bulb. The economics work. We'll buy them. We don't like the mercury in CFLs, we don't like the startup time or the failure rate. The LEDs are just hugely better. Come out with a decent product and watch it take off.
The one from Panasonic, pictured in the article has a diffuser, but it's still in a spot configuration. New homes can/are be designed to use these better, but existing/older homes are all about BULBS, and that's the huge market to get replaced. A house can save hundreds of dollars (or more) a year by just replacing all the darn bulbs.
Make a friggin' BULB.
As an owner of about 25 LED lights, I find they are acceptable for the house. They are directional, so you do have to shop for light fixtures that will allow you to adequately direct the light as you want it. Some rooms you may want to buy a fixture with 4 bulbs instead of 3. There are 2 colors(generally). Cool white and warm white. Cool white is more like the sun(and a more pure white imo) while warm white is equal to an incandescent light. I've spent about $600 on light bulbs, and I find it awesome that I can turn on every light on my ground level and use about 150 watts.
LED light bulbs vary in quality, design, etc. quite a great deal. I had to buy quite a few models before I found ones I really liked. The ebay LED lights from China are horrible. I've bought 2 and they weren't worth the price of shipping and lasted less than 3 months. The others I've had for about 4 months and I'd never go back. I sent some to my mom in Phoenix and she finds that she doesn't see a difference in color or any "directional" problems with the lights.
They are a rather large investment to start, but since I have no central A/C in the house, being able to turn lights on in a room and not cook is very useful.
I typically buy bulbs from www.eternaleds.com or www.earthled.com.
I highly recommend them, but you must do alot of shopping. Don't feel bad if you have to buy a few 1 packs just to figure out what you like and such.
Check you county ordinances. Here where I live disposing of a CFL in the trash is a $200 fine. You have to bring it to the hazerdous waste dispoal drop off (same place for paint, oil, etc.) and they charge $1 a bulb for disposal.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I'll be a convert in year 2 of this move to LEDs in the household. (whem competition brings the prices down)
I've been waiting for this day.
After Christmas a few years back I bought a pile of the LED Christmas lights (Sale...) and life got easy. No more dicking around with broken bulbs, burnouts, Testing, heat, blah blah. They're interior / exterior and bulletproof. The wires will probably disintegrate before the bulbs.
I can see gradually converting the house over to these new LED house lights in time (All at once would cost me over $1,000 at starting prices). I see the long term payoff but really who had $1K sitting around to buy lightbulbs. Starting with my exterior front door light which we keep on all night.
Overall this is a wonderful change. Can't wait!
Aye. The EPA itself has some reasonable guidelines for cleaning up CFL's. The main point is the ventilate, and don't use a vacuum or anything that will put the dust into the air until you've picked and cleaned up everything else that you possibly can. Really, common sense shit.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
5.5 hrs / day * 365 days * 19 yrs = 38142hrs of use.
Current commercial LED downlights have a warrantee for 50,000hrs @ 70% lumen maintainence (meaning after 50,000 hrs the fixture will still poduce 70% of initial lumens)
The numbers initially sound good, but are average for well engineered LED downlights in today's market.
That's pretty much what businesses and schools do in our litigious age. A local school in my area was recently closed for two days over an old barometer that got dropped in one of the science classrooms. They brought in a professional cleanup crew and spent $80,000 to have the mercury spill cleaned up.
Meanwhile my junior high school only closed 4 directly effected classrooms when the roof paritally collapsed and dumped asbestos insulation all over.
Just like the lady in the story, school officials are capable of overreacting as well.
I don't read AC A human right
Some here have pointed out that, especially in colder climates, these bulbs aren't as much of an improvement in effiency as stated in the article. They argue that incandescent are cheap and produce waste heat which is useful in the winter. Now, this may be true, to some extent, but in many places electricity happens to be one of the most expensive forms of home heating. That blunts the advantage of the waste heat provided by incandescent bulbs. Also, there is still the summer months where not only is the LED bulb more efficient than the older bulbs, but the AC would no longer have to fight against the waste heat to keep your house cool. In the end, it is true that the true cost savings may be less than the stated $23 a year (even if you do use the bulb as much as is assumed) but that number shouldn't be as low as some people think. It may only be something like $18 per year.
The question is, so what? The real issue is that many of the people on this forum have the patients of a 5 year old. If it doesn't provide immediate benefits they think it's garbage. Even if the savings are only half (just under $12 per year), you would still make back the cost of the bulb in under 4 years. Sure, the up-front cost is high compared to the older bulbs, but we aren't talking about something like solar panels, a new furnace, new appliances, new windows, new insulation, or ground source geo-thermal heating. Even replacing all the most commonly used bulbs in a house wouldn't come close to those, more common, energy saving measures. And, do you know what the best part about these bulbs are? Unlike most of the things I just mentioned, if you ever choose to move you can take them with you. Most large improvements in energy efficiency are invisible to new buyers and can be hard to get back in sale price. With LED bulbs, you don't have to worry about it. Sure, one or two might get broken, but if the rest last even half of their rated 19 year life-span they'll make up for those lost bulbs many times over.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
10 years? I've yet to have the spiral CCFLs last over 1.5 years.
Then I would question either the quality of the power in your house, the quality of your bulbs, or maybe you are selectively picking data from just a few bulbs. I have a house with far more than the average number of CFL bulbs (around 100 total including 72 in one indirectly lit room) - more than enough to get something close to a normal distribution. Roughly 5% of them have burned out or been bad to start with in the last two years. Most have been working just fine - those that fail usually do so within the first few weeks.
When Compact Flourescent bulbs first came out, I spent $10 each on two bulbs that were supposed to last 7 years. The first died in less than a month. The next in less than a year. Get back to me in 19 years when your research team isn't less important than your marketing team.
You mean canceled, not cancelled. Oh, and pedantry aside, ...
"Canceled" versus "cancelled" depends upon whether you are writing American English, or British English, et cetera. For example, I have spell checking turned on in my browser yet it complains about neither "canceled" nor "cancelled" because my spelling dictionary is set to Canadian English (we Canucks are a little schizophrenic that way eh).
Really? With a 19 year lifespan?
$23/year * 19 years = $437
$437 / $40 = 10.925
19th root of 10.925 = 1.1341
13.41% annual return is pretty good.
That's for a rather cheap one, and you likely install it yourself.
Mine technically isn't between the mains and the breaker box, but installs between the neutral and hots on a dual pole breaker. The idea is if voltage goes over a certain point it directs the excess voltage to ground.
Provides protection H1-N, H2-N, H1-H2.
The way I look at it, $100 bucks to protect the whole house is easily worth it compared to me spending $60 for a surge protector for each computer.
I don't read AC A human right
That happened with a new science teacher here. He found some spilled Mercury (from a broken thermometer) in the science storage room and they closed the school for a day and cost $8,000 to clean it up. Seems pretty stupid since its not *that* dangerous. But your right about the liability part, if some over reactive parent found out I'm sure there would have been legal costs.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
But that's what they have to do in this day and age.
And want to do, since that's $80,000 more being pulled through the business of administration.
If there's one thing you can count on with government, it's that they're quick to spend other people's money. The US government of today absolutely dwarfs the US government of only 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people. The reason is that more spending -- and more power which can be leveraged for even more spending -- benefits the people in the business of government.
CFLs *hate* heat. CFLs hate cold. CFLs hate humidity. CFLs hate dimmers.
I have CFL's above my stove, in an unheated garage, on my porch (get's below 0F where I live) and in both of my bathrooms. Never had a problem with any of them in 3 years. I also have about 70 (yes 70) CFLs on dimmer switches in my house due to one indirectly lit room. I have had very few bulbs burn out in the last 3 years - maybe 5 total. True, most CFLs don't work with dimmers, but some are ok for select applications. You just have to get the right bulb. While CFLs aren't the right choice for every application, they work just fine in a wide variety of environments and circumstances.
New technologies have allowed folks like GE to build 60 watt incandescants that only use 30 watts while still providing the same brightness. So the net usage is the same as the CFL.
GE discontinued development of those bulbs and the other companies experimenting with them have found they use 70% of the power of regular incandescents which is still much higher than CFLs. 70% of 60W is 42W versus the 15W-18W required from my 60W equivalent CFLs. Sorry but if I have a choice it's going to be a CFL. Most of the time I'll save money in the long run AND have to replace fewer bulbs.
CFLs hate being turned on and off. Rapid cycling makes them die as quick as an incandescent bulb.
I have over 110 bulbs in my house total - mostly CFL and some incandescent. I've replaced maybe 5 (out of over 85) in the last 2 years and I turn them on and off all the time. The rest of the bulbs are incandescent and I've replaced most of them at least once in that time. Frequent cycling really hasn't been a problem for me.
CFLs have a warm-up time. Turn it on to read your paper, and you have to wait 5 minutes before you can see the writing.
There are plenty of "instant on" CFL bulbs on the market. They reach usable brightness almost immediately. I don't have to wait at all for most of the bulbs in my house. Your information is wrong.
But that's what they have to do in this day and age.
Wrong. What you have to do is home school your kids.... after all, how can you possibly let kids out into a dangerous world?
Anything else is irresponsible.
So...?
Mercury is a problem if you are constantly exposed to it, or are exposed to a massive dose.
Neither apply to a CFL that breaks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ya, that's completely stupid. Mercury itself isn't that big a deal, unless you start drinking the stuff. But the mercury in the CFC's enters a vapor state when broken, so it's actually a fairly serious issue. However the cleanup is pretty simple- open a window and turn on a fan.
I have yet to see a valid study that claims the CFC's actually save any energy, once you factor in the entire product cycle. Start with the mining and refinement of the special materials, costs of shipping them, manufacturing the bulbs themselves, shipping them from China, trucking them to the store, and disposing them properly (or cleaning up the landfills when they are inevitably just tossed in the trash).
But I guess as long as the extra energy use is over in China the UK and US companies and politicians just don't care, and it gives China another notch on their belt of trade exports.
They completly over reacted. Who threaten to sue them if they didn't so that? I would wager, no one.
"Now I can understand closing off the classroom where the spill happened but closing the whole school seems rather excessive to me."
You are correct
"$80,000 for cleanup seems really excessive. "
No for a professional cleanup at the level of fear your post seems to indicate. Use, it should ahve been swept up and contained and everything would ahve been fine. But for a hazmat cleanup, that price is about right.
"But that's what they have to do in this day and age. "
No, that's what some idiot in your school system perceived had to happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You live in the northeast? or at least eastern half of the US? the school district probably had to pay some union to do it, which is why it cost so much. oh, that, and buy off the EPA and OSHA.
On the other hand:
The Chemistry teacher I had in high school (in the US, Land of {Lawsuit, Overreaction . . . }) wanted to show us an example of gas pressure dropping due to a common occurrence. In this case, we looked at the water coming out of a tap. Before class began, she hooked up a mercury manometer to the tap and turned the tap on (I guess to test it, but maybe just to show something extra to kids who showed up a little early). As she had forgotten to leave adequate room for gas compared to the volume the water was occupying, the mercury was quickly and completely sucked out and shot into the sink. She immediately shut the water off and poured some powder over the spill to soak it up (and probably worked on cleaning it up more after we had left). I never though about it much at the time, but I bet a good bit made it down the sink before she could even shut off the tap. That was the end of it. No canceled school, hazmat crew, people in space suits from ET, etc.
You might say, "This was back in the good old days when people were sane" but this was 2000/2001, well into the age of lawsuits, at a public high school. Or, maybe most people are still sane, and our news is just getting really good at finding every little odd story from the far corners of the world and giving it more attention than it ever would have received twenty years ago.
I just moved into my new house, and since it's just me, I only leave two lights on most of the time (kitchen and hallway). One is a 250w incandescent set (3 bulbs, kitchen), and the other is 75w incandescent.
I got my first electric bill, and found that the kitchen light was costing me $25/month. So I looked at my alternatives:
Can switch to CFL for around 60w (save $19 /month with no change in habits).
Can switch to Philips Halogena for around 120w (save $13/month with no change in habits).
Can just be more aggressive about turning-off the kitchen light when I'm not in it.
In the end, I decided to go with the Halogena setup plus a more aggressive stance on turning-off that light. I really like the light quality of the incandescent - it is especially important because the colors of the room are all warm earth tones, and would look sick and dead under the blue/white light of CFLs. Plus, I really don't like the idea of having bulbs filled with mercury in a room with a ceramic floor (it magically attracts glass objects, and they create explosive splinters) and in a low-hanging light fixture that people constantly hit with objects. I've already had to clean-up one broken glass container in my first month living here, and I don't want to have to keep a Hazmat kit just in case the inevitable happens.
I was just surprised at how MUCH I could save by moving to a more efficient halogen, and how little on top of that you save going to CFL. Ahh, good-old Law of Diminishing Returns.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Longest burning Light Bulb in history. Now in its 108th year of illumination:
http://www.centennialbulb.org/
And just about 20 years ago, in HS Physics class, we played with liquid Nitrogen and hammered a rubber nail into a board with a Mercury hammer.
Also, why the hell isn't <sub> allowed html?
... facilities manager at the local University...
The day you install these $40 light bulbs at a University is the day before some enterprising jack-ass students with a homemade ladder will remove them all and resell them on craigslist.
This is great, though the link doesn't state how bright they are. It seems that lightbulb replacements lag behind the state of LED technology though - I once found an emitter array of 12 Seoul Semiconductor P4 chips that would output 2100 Lumens, I think at 12V, 1500mA. Cooling requirements weren't stated, but that's not a whole lot of power for that much light!
The corporations that want liability limited so that they can poison you with impunity would like you to believe that Americans are lawsuit happy, but unfortunately the data indicate the exact opposite.
Per unit population, lawsuits have been dropping for over a century. The corps just use raw numbers without per capita adjustments to scare you into repeating their self-serving "tort reform" memes. Lawyers play along because chumps will do the false analysis you just did and create more daily work for legal advisors.
If our legal system had expanded to match our population expansion, most judges would have 2 hour work days. If our legal system had expanded in the way that our elected officials have bloated their staffs, most judges would have 2 hour work weeks.
LOOK IT UP. Taking my word for it would be just as stupid as repeating corporate propaganda.
We need more judges, not fewer lawsuits. Lawsuits are already a slowly vanishing phenomena.
The transition from gas to electric light did always not go smoothly.
The available lighting affects your choice of color, detail, and texture in paint, fabrics, wallpapers and so on. It affects basic architectural decisions - the size and placement of windows and skylights.
These can be really, really tough problems to fix.
The candelabra bulb was a clumsy solution for an elegant cut-glass chandelier.
But the chandelier was often the focus of room's interior design - and far too expensive to casually discard.
... and I really wish I had saved the link, but I can't find it now. The upshot was that you had to be in a very, very, cold place for to financially break even by retaining incandescents vs. switching to CFLs. Further, unless you got most of your electricity from totally green sources, you still wouldn't break even in terms of CO2 emissions. One of the few regions in North America where retaining incandescents would make financial and environmental sense was certain parts of Quebec.
When I went to High School the science teacher passed some mercury around the class to show it as one of the elements. Everyone handled it. No one has ever gone crazy. I must kill ..ere I mean it didn't harm anyone chickens chickens chickens, and I am perfectly normal to kill all evil ants because they are tracking us down and living in our brains. Please don't try to scare people with this fear mongering.
Once in my college chem lab, the student working next to me broke a mercury thermometer. The lab assistant who was supervising us (who was either a chemistry or ChemE grad student) went rather nuts, made me move all my equipment and do my work elsewhere, and he dumped a crazy amount of sulfur on the floor. He was worried about what else he should do. All this for a few grams of mercury.
At the end of the lab period that day, I went up to him and showed him the MSDS sheets for all the chemicals we were using in that lab experiment that day. Basically, elemental mercury was less harmful than every compound we were using in that experiment. Why wasn't he running around acting like an idiot whenever we poured or moved any of the other chemicals? And this was someone who was a grad student at a major university who should know better.
I still don't understand the insanity surrounding mercury, particularly elemental mercury. The EU has basically banned it; the US is working on doing the same. Organic mercury is a real problem, and we need to worry about contamination on large scales. But the amount of mercury in a thermometer isn't going to kill anyone. An old barometer has quite a bit, and it should require careful cleanup and disposal, but anyone with some training of handling chemicals (like a chemistry teacher) is more than qualified... it's certainly no where near the most dangerous substance used in a chem lab.
One other thing -- my Dad worked in the "mercury room" at a plant that manufactured liquid mercury for industrial use in the 1960s. When he first got there, they basically had no regulations. But only one employee had ever shown significant poisoning symptoms, and he had been there for many years. Finally, they instituted some basic regulations about cleanup, basic decontamination showering, etc. after my Dad had been there a few years. Nothing like you'd see today. And yet neither my Dad nor any of his colleagues but that one ever had symptoms (one other guy apparently complained of headaches, which led to the new regulations), and they handled literally tons of liquid mercury every day without any real protection. My Dad still talks about how it was difficult to get it out of one's clothes and the color it turned your skin.
Given those stories, and the fact that I can read a MSDS sheet, I really can't understand the current mercury scare insanity. Avoid environmental contamination -- of course. But the idea that miniscule amounts of mercury constitute a reason to close a school?
That's 7-watts not 60-watts.
Chattel is the term I was using for 'Personal Property' back when I was selling Real Estate (years ago).
By the way, 'Light Bulb" "Light Fixture".
Many fixtures are portable and would be considered chattel.
That fixture the is built in to the ceiling, sure, part of the property.
Removing bulbs was not treated as a violation but was/is clearly tacky.
No brain, no pain.
Am I supposed to be impressed? This seems like a non-story to me. Here it says that the MTBF of LEDs is between 100000 and 1000000 hours. That's 10 to 100 years, 24 hours a day. (or 50 to 500 years if used 5 1/2 hours a day, assuming burnout only in operation)
According to what I have heard, metallic mercury is not as harmful as some of the organic compounds. You still don't want long term exposure to it.
The advice I was given for dealing with small spills is to spread flowers of sulphur (or sulfur in the US) over the spill. This will react with the mercury to give mercury sulphide, which is non volatile. So then you can clean it up easily and any you miss will not be quietly vapourising and turning you into the mad hatter. (Flowers of Sulphur is just finely divided powder of sulphur, you will also need it if you want to make gunpowder.)
Linux Does
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Mercury is a problem if you are constantly exposed to it, or are exposed to a massive dose.
My grandfather was a physician/dentist (before there was much to either). In medical school, he'd do autopsies of old people who had died of normal causes (MI, etc., this was 1910's, life expectancy was pretty low). When they would saw open a long bone, they'd keep a tray in front of it - to catch the large volume of mercury that would run out of them. Apparently doctors used to prescribe quicksilver for 'what ails you', and while I'm sure the mercury probably did some damage, apparently it wasn't what usually killed the poor patients.
We're lucky to have science-based medicine today,
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dimming CFLs just isn't really worth it.
If I'm at all typical, my only interest in dimmable CFL's is for use in motion sensors. I've bought a few types of CFL's that were labeled dimmable and they all flicker something fierce in my motion sensor fixtures. One that's not labeled dimmable (that I got maybe 6-7 years ago) does work. When it dies I'll open it up to see what's inside.
If I have to replace my outside motion-sensing fixtures, the cost savings of CFL's more than evaporate.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Cost of light bulbs? How about the climbing up into the rafters to replace a bulb? How about having to search all over the house for a bulb when one (always unexpectedly) blows out? How about handling bulbs at all? Ever had one separate in your hand? have to get the needlenose to get the rest out? etc etc etc - now if i don't have to do any of that for 19 years!!! Yes!
In the US and Canada at least, my understanding is that unless you have it written into the contract of sale, you cannot take any appliances or light fixtures when you sell a house - one might think that light bulbs might fall under this category. Thus, the new owners might have the ability to sue for the cost of replacements.
With that said, if we were to move in the near future, I would probably go to the basement and take the big box of incandescent bulbs and swap out as many CFLs with those as I had.
Taking the hooks off the walls and filling the holes might be considered a service.
forgot to finish:
I didn't install the surge supressor to protect my CFLs, but my home's electronics as a whole, and the CFLs lasted quite a while before I installed it.
I don't read AC A human right
Oil and electricity prices aren't really connected. Oil is an insignificant method of producing electricity in the USA, thus electricity costs should stay around the same, though they might double if EV's become common enough.
Note that I was saying you can't just plop a passivhaus everywhere, that they need to be regionalized.
For the Georgia example, it'd take more than 500 watts of air conditioner just to take the heat generated by humans out of the house. I'd be more tempted to install a solar powered absorbtion chiller personally. You're also going to want some sort of dehumidification system, maybe a cold water system, and the massive construction would help keep temperatures down when the sun sets and the active cooling stops.
You can still build a energy efficient home in Georgia, you just have to take different steps.
I don't read AC A human right
A bulb that requires a HAZMAT clean-up process when it breaks is absolutely NO GREENER than an incandescent bulb. Period.
Incandescent Bulb:
1) Tunsten wire,
2) Glass,
3) Tin-based solder,
4) Steel filament supports.
= 100% RECYCLABLE, even if broken.
Flourescent Bulb:
1) Tungsten filament,
2) Mercury,
3) Phosphors,
4) Steel filament supports,
5) Glass,
6) Tin-based solder.
=Not recyclable (mercury released when broken), phosphors and mercury not reclaimed.
Light-Emitting Diode Bulb:
1) Plastic encasement,
2) Copper,
3) Semi-conductor element,
4) Tin-based solder,
5) Steel contacts.
= Possibly recyclable, depending on the methods used to reclaim semi-conductor material.
Hopefully, these bulbs won't be the Environmental "Snake Oil" that flourescent bulbs are.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....