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Selling Incandescent Light Bulbs As Heating Devices
Csiko writes "The European Union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology (most of the energy is transformed into heat). A company is now trying to bypass this restriction by offering their incandescent light bulb products as a heating device (article in German) instead of a light device. Still, their 'heat balls' give light as well as heating. So — every law can be bypassed if you have some creativity!"
What's wrong with that, it's not as if they're being misleading. That "wasted" energy has to go somewhere and if it's being used to heat up your home in the winter, then it's hardly "wasted."
Making lighting more efficient could increase energy use, not decrease it
But precedent suggests that this will serve merely to increase the demand for light. The consequence may not be just more light for the same amount of energy, but an actual increase in energy consumption, rather than the decrease hoped for by those promoting new forms of lighting.
check the answer from the paper's author in this week Economist. they clearly state that the journalist misunderstood the conclusions...
This is not news to anyone who's ever owned an Easy Bake Oven.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
This is the primary heating element in an ez bake oven. So they must remain available for the children.
We should ban them. Too much of the energy is emitted in the visible spectrum, not as heat.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The heating effect is important here too.
I don't know where you buy your CFLs from, but the ones I have come on like any normal incandescent light build does. Also, there are ones that are coiled, and ones which have a normal glass covering - these typically have light filters which give off varying colours of light: I have soft light CFLs in the living room, but more cooler, white light CFL's in my workshop. Unless you looked closely, they appear just like normal incandescents. The difference being that instead of the bulb being HOT after some usage, it's just warm (ok. pretty warm, but still touchable.)
Stop buying the cheapest shitty bulbs you can find.
Won't anyone think of the children?!?
The European union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology reasons (most of the energy is transformed into heat).
If these items are generally better, in terms of energy consumption, and are likewise sold at a reasonable price, they OUGHT to make sense to buy. (Or make cents, as it were.) If they don't then people should be free to wait until they do.
On the inverse, if there's a law requiring they be the only kind of bulb, then they can be built without concern for energy savings, and sold at any price. After all, the law says you have to have them, so why not profit from the artificial demand.
Oh, and by the way, all that artificial demand is damaging the economy, which will likely lead to war, which is about the least 'green' thing imaginable. Why is it that we love to talk long term about climate change and human behavior, but can't seem to do so about economics? I'm astounded mostly because while the former is a natural phenomenon that could be influenced by humanity, the latter is entirely human and will cease to exist when we do.
Just astounding.
We live in a rural area. We aren't on city water, we have a well. About 3 or 4 times a year it gets cold enough that we turn on a light in the pump house to help raise the temperature to protect our already well insulated pipes. This is a very effective solution for us and safer than using a space heater. The space heater costs a lot more than a lightbulb and isn't considered 'safe to leave unattended.' We also have chickens. We have a heatlamp in there, and they can move in/out of it's light to control their own temp (don't want them cooked... yet...)
Do we NEED more fucking regulations? Give me a break.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
"I care about the planet as much as the next guy"
In oher words, you don't give a shit?
You assumption is wrong. I'm not buying crappy lights.
I can't help but notice it takes three bulbs to light a room when two used to do the job nicely. I think that's going to nullify much of the energy saving goals over time. I wonder how many people have added a new lamp or two in the house after converting to new bulbs?
And, at least where I am, I have a hell of a time trying to get rid of them when they die
Just do what 99.9% of everyone else does. They go in the trash where they can be sent to a landfill, the mercury can leach out and into the soil where it will enter into the food chain.
You save the planet by eventually storing all that evil mercury in your organs.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Although it is not approved by the FDA as an ingredient in foods [to replace HFCS and/or Aspartame] Stevia is being sold as a dietary supplement and more recently as a sweetener that may be added to foods by the end user. Sweetleaf, a sweetener as natural as sugar simply can't get the approval that high fructose corn syrup and aspartame have been able to acquire. So, instead, it is sold as "something else."
You're just not using them right. CFLs should not be placed in enclosures with no air flow, anywhere that there are extreme temperature fluctuations, anywhere that there are high on/off cycles, anywhere there are below freezing temperatures, anywhere they would be exposed to moisture, or on any circuit that could have power fluctuations. I've had one turned on at the bottom of my basement stairs (because you can't see and there is no switch at the top) since I moved in my house 3 years ago, it's been on the whole time. Yes, this light has been on for more than 20000 hours. Every other one in my house has been replaced with incandescent because they are far cheaper and last about the same amount of time in the enclosure or position that I use them since the CFLs all died in a year or less.
I don't know where you buy your CFLs from, but the ones I have come on like any normal incandescent light build does.
I guess you either live somewhere that's warm all the year round or you heat your rooms 24 hours a day. In winter mornings my room temperature is about 5 degrees C and it takes a minute for the CFLs to reach normal brightness. My wife insists that we keep the stairway light on all night so that the stairs are well lit, so I am not exactly sure we save any energy.
Wait, you really let your house interior get down to 5C (that's 41F to most of us in the USA)!?!?!
Oh, I get it, you live in a tent. How did you find one with stairs?
Seriously, put some insulation in the walls and roof before you complain that modern lamps don't work in your house, or move from the freezer to a modern house.
Putting moderation advice in your
at Costco and Home Depot they run just over $1 per bulb. with the energy savings you have to be crazy to keep on looking for incandescent bulbs
That is true of anything. If it uses electricity, the plant efficiency is the same.
However that doesn't imply wastefulness, it would well be a hydro, solar or nuclear plant. Also in some areas, natural gas isn't available. Where my parents live you heat your house using electricity. There just isn't natural gas hookups to be had.
Electrical radiant is not at all an inefficient way to heat your house. The original poster didn't know what he was talking about.
CFLs result in lower lifetime mercury emissions than incandescents.
Or mercury in coal. If you're in an area served by a coal-fired power plant, an incandescent bulb causes more mercury to be released into the environment than a CFL over the same time period.
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It would help if you understood the current situation regarding bulb regulations better, before prescribing changes.
As usual, the price of incandescent light bulbs does not include the negative externalities their use implies. And also, people typically don't look at the life-cycle cost of the things they buy, just the up-front price. So the market, as is so frequently the case, is broken, and requires government help to get fixed.
Many types of incandescent bulb, including heat lamps, will remain available even after the regulations come fully into effect. As for your question, if the choice is between continuing to send supertankers full of dollar bills to Saudi Arabia, and producing sensible regulations that will at least somewhat cut down on this wholly unnecessary expense, I'm in favor of the regulations.
Three things:
First, the lifespans of CFL are based on on/off cycles, not time on. I haven't seen anyone who's in any way informed claim that CFL are good for places like bathrooms. In fact, other than a refrigerator, I can't think of many places where it would be worse to use a CFL. If you're putting a CLF into a bathroom, (or a refrigerator) you're using it in the worst way possible. Yes, it will suck for that. Those are places where we should be using incandescents. Use CFLs properly, and they last a damn long time.
Secondly, the quality of CFL varies a ton. I have one that does what you noted - a long period of dim, sickly light, then a brilliant dazzle. I have another that's nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent. The only difference is that it turns on at like (an equivalent) 90 watts instead of 100, and a quarter of the time I think to myself, "isn't that usually a little brighter...?" The rest of the time, I don't notice. After a couple minutes, it hits the full 100+ watt equivalent. It's bright and warm too. It's also been the primary bulb in my living room for 3+ years now. It gets turned on when it's getting dark, and stays on until I go to bed. That's how you use a CFL. And in that case, it doesn't matter that it's a tiny bit dim when it first comes on. If you need instant, 100% intensity light, you should be using an incandescent in that application.
Lastly, would you all stop panicking about mercury? It's fucking obnoxious. The WHO sets a limit for mercury exposure at 5x10^-4 grams per day. A CFL has about 4-5 grams of mercury in it. Yes, if you punch a hole in a CFL and inhale all the mercury out of it, it will be bad. But when you break one, the mercury vaporizes. What's the volume of the room you break it in, compared to the volume of the CFL? If you're in a room that's substantially larger than the inside of the CFL, (hint: you are!) the mercury quickly disperses in it. Ventilate, and you'll be fine. In fact, even if you don't, you should be fine, unless you break a bulb every couple of weeks inside. And each bulb has on the same order of magnitude of mercury that each adult has in their mouth in the way of fillings.
Use a quality CFL properly, and you're saving money, saving energy, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from an incandescent. Like anything, go cheap and use it improperly, and it doesn't do a good job. I agree with you about LED lighting - a few more years, and I think it will start to be competitive. Just leave off the mercury poisoning crap please. Unless you're huffing CFLs, they're perfectly safe.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Right, because lots of people want the freedom to waste all kinds of money and generate a lot more pollution. The only reason the government needs to get involved in the first place is because the sticker price on an incandescent was lower than that of a CFL - the lifecycle cost of the CFL was considerably less. And we're getting to the point, because of economies of scale, that even the sticker price on a CFL is not much more than an incandescent... which wouldn't have happened if the gov't hadn't kicked off demand. Not to mention that incandescents aren't even banned - they've just instituted performance standards for light bulbs, and many specialty types of incandescents have been exempted from that.
The government has the right to regulate light bulbs because the use of electricity has very significant negative externalities, which no one is paying for. So could we please stop with the "OMFG teh socialists are coming for our light bulbs! Man the battlements!" crap already?
The rule of thumb I have seen is that over half of produced energy is wasted in this way.
Most of the loss is within the power station. Where the heat energy is converted to electricity. Only 35-60% of the energy produced is converted to electricity int the first place (depending on generation system).
Transmission is relatively efficient in comparison.
Course in some countries (like Finland or Denmark), they distribute the "waste" heat produced by power plants and people use that in industrial processes, space heating, hot water production etc. So they have (relatively) close to 100% efficiency.
Deleted
I have lots of ceiling fixtures of the "dome" style, and CFLs are too long to fit inside them. I have wall fixtures (e.g. over bathroom mirrors) and CFLs extend below the glass shade, leading to a very annoying glare. I'd like to switch to LEDs,but there are no products on the market which both have 360 illumination and the lumen output of a 60 or 75W incandescent.
Personally, I vote for a massive increase in the cost of electricity, and let both consumers and businesses decide what type and how much light they want.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Power from hydro-electric plants have traditionally been quite inexpensive here in Norway, it is only over the last 10 years or so that we've gotten to the point where other forms of heating (particularly heat pumps) have started to become really attractive.
(BTW, since we have no domestic gas grid, we instead sell all our North Sea gas to Britain, Germany, Holland and other EU countries.)
We need some form of home heating maybe 8-9 months a year, so it made perfect sense to me to leave more or less all electric lights on all day, except in the middle of summer when it doesn't really get very dark at all.
Ten years ago I started to replace old bulbs with more energy-efficient alternatives like halogen, these days I put in LED instead.
For a new house we're having built we've decided on using very energy-efficient construction (25 cm/10") wall isolation, (35 cm/14") roof isolation, top grade glass and a balanced ventilation setup with a heat exchanger.
BTW, this is just a small step above the latest legislated minimum requirements for new homes in this country.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
What's sad is that the newer incandescents may only use 25% of the energy but the laws are based on the technology- not on the energy consumption and they ignore the mercury poisoning aspects.
Lie repeated often are still lies. The law in this case is based upon watts per lumen. If there were incandescents that used 25% of the energy, they would be legal. Also the mercury released to the environment from an incandescent is worse than the exposure from a CFL.
You may now go back to being a crybaby.
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Is that like an Oil Drilling platform being a perpetual motion machine so long as it pulls more oil out of the ground than it uses?
using incandescent globes for heating is not _that_ uncommon in tropical areas... eh? you might say... WTF? even.... well simple, you put a low wattage (20-40) in your linen cupboard to keep humidity from condensing in what would normally be a cooler part of the house and it helps stop mould and mildew forming. it would be insane to have space heating in a house like my ex's in Broome Australia that normally sees a minimum temperature of, say, 15c at the coldest and averages around 30c and with almost constat high humidity... In this case it is light that is the waste product.
Just checked; I have two Phillips bulbs and three GE ones, they're all too dim to read by, for long enough that it's irritating. I timed the GE ones and they were approaching comfortable brightness after a minute.
GE model FL12GLS/T2/827
It is no more a perpetual motion machine than a heating oil delivery truck is. A heating oil delivery truck transports a magnitude more gasoline than it burns. In a typical day of deliveries it may move 10x as much energy as it burns in its engine. In other words the energy transfered is 10x the energy used in the transfer.
In a similar fashion a heat pump simply moves heat energy. In winter it moves heat from outside (even when it is "cold" there is heat energy present). In summer it moves heat from the home to the outside. A heat pump with a COP of 4 adds 4kwh of thermal energy to the home for every 1kwh of electrical energy supplied. In comparison a resistance electrical heating adds 1kwh of thermal energy per 1 kwh of electrical energy supplied.