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Toshiba Ends Incandescent Bulb Production After 120 Years
angry tapir writes "Toshiba has stopped production of mass-market incandescent light bulbs, putting an end to a 120-year manufacturing history of the products. The company, which is one of Japan's largest makers of lighting products, had planned to halt production next year but brought up the date by a year. It will now focus on more energy efficient products, including LED (light-emitting diode) lights, which contain a handful of white LEDs and draw a fraction of the power of incandescent bulbs."
...but are Toshiba bulbs available over here in America, possibly under a different name? I don't recall ever seeing Toshiba-branded light bulbs on shelves here...
Living With a Nerd
Excellent! Glad to see that they're moving into LED lighting; I love LED lights. I've been testing out several of the early model LED lights in my house, and they have been working great-- low power requirement, long life. And the technology has been getting better very rapidly.
(And, unlike incandescent and CFLs, they're not particularly fragile).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
>>>unless you insist on buying the cheapest POS you can find.
I have Philips bulbs. I timed my 60watt-equivalent (13 watt actual) and it took 4 minutes to reach full brightness. And no it wasn't just a bad set, because identical bulbs I bought a year later still exhibited the same behavior.
I was not aware Philips make crap products?
And then there's the expense. Why should I spend $3.50 per bulb when I can get an incandescent for around 25 cents. And the incandescents have not been stagnate. New laser-carved filments inside old incandescents can produce the same brightness as a 60 watt, but only use 40 watts.
So CFL v. old bulb == savings of about 25 watts * 1 hours a day (typical) * 30 days == 3 kWh saved off my 3000 kWh bill. Wow. Times 9 cents per kwH == 27 cents. Holy crap. Now I can buy one-third of a twinkie!
POINT:
Shouldn't our priorities be focused on more energy-expensive things like heating/cooling? If all new home standards were increased to "PassivHaus" standards, which bring heat/cooling to almost nothing, we'd save HUGE amount of energy.
I tried the whole CFL deal.
For fifteen years.
And now I'm switching back
Incandescents are the better technology due to simplicity (it's a resistor), cheapness (even poor people can afford them), ease-of-disposal (no need to empty the room like EPA recommends), cleanness (not reactive power), and does not interfere with radio waves (like radio, tv, wifi, et cetera). After fifteen years of testing CFLs, I've concluded they are inferior.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"color temperature" is only the beginning. The color-resolving power of CFLs is horrible, and this is absolutely obvious to me and others. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm a photographer and might be a little more visually-tuned than others. Maybe you can't notice the difference, maybe most people can't, and that's fine. However, CFLs put out ugly light; I have yet to see one that doesn't. LEDs too. Not slightly ugly, like extremely ugly. While they are light bulbs in the first-order sense (they put out light) and thus are good where you simply need some light (I use them in my handheld shop light) I can't imagine anyone using them to light a well-decorated interior or do anything else, really. Switching to an incandescent is like a breath of fresh air, even my wife can notice after adapting to those horrible, horrible phosphor emissions. Human eyes are adapted to looking at black body radiators.
captcha: "spectrum"
CFLs are strobe lights. That is just what they do. I cannot perceive it in most bulbs, but there is a good reason that they tell you not to plug in the florescent lights in you garage to the same circuit as your table saw. In theory they strobe fast enough that humans cannot see them, but given that florescent lights can trick your eyes if they are in sync with your table saw, it is clear that the strobing is not 100% outside of human perception.
I tried to move to CFLs early on, and had to go back to incandescent until recently. The problem was that the IR the CFLs would produce would cause so much noise that remote controls frequently didn't work, and even worse, sometimes the bulbs would issue commands on their own. The first time that I was sitting at home alone with the curtains closed, and the TV started changing channels on it's own, I got a bit freaked out. After searching the house for whoever was screwing with me, I eventually figured out it was the CFLs changing the channels and volume.
I am 95% CFL now, and this seems to be a problem that has been resolved.