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Congress Voting To Repeal Incandescent Bulb Ban
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN Money is running as story about a bill Congress is going to vote on today to repeal the 'incandescent light bulb ban' that was put into place during the Bush administration. The bill is supported by Republicans in Congress who are claiming this places unnecessary restrictions on the market. For those of you wondering, it does bring up the standard issues of energy efficiency, mercury (in both the bulbs and that emitted by coal power), and cost of the bulbs. The bill was introduced by Texas Congressman Joe Barton."
There never was! There are new efficiency standards, which both GE and Osram Sylvania say they can meet with new incandescents. The whole thing started as a talking point for a Republican primary, and took off when the punditry caught a whiff of it and smelled red meat.
Funnily enough, setting efficiency standards for lightbulbs (which most incandescents made at the time the law was passed did not meet) is exactly what the law did. Calling it a ban on incandescents is propagandizing. (Most incandescent manufacturers now have bulbs that meet the efficiency standards.)
This maybe offtopic, But this guy also introduced legislation to legalize online poker.
why not simply ban inefficient bulbs?
That is exactly what the law does.
If incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient, it'd be silly to have to repeal or modify a law later.
Some companies have in fact done just that, and they are now upset at the prospect of having the law revoked after having spent all that money to comply with it.
I'm in the same boat ... given the massive increase in cost, and the claims for bulb life ... even one or two failures basically means you've wiped out any savings for the next decade or so. Which means as soon as they start dying anywhere less than the claimed lifespan, you start replacing with old school bulbs.
They might think it, but I seriously doubt people are doing it.
I'm definitely not impressed so far with actual bulb life vs claimed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Starting in 2012, standars would slowly keep increasing until reaching the peak in 2020. So, that means that none should have yet disappeared, and depending on their caracteristics some of them could still be sold for a while. Anyway, that was all in TFA, but this is slashdot, so, that was expected :)
Or, you could not be an idiot, and realize that incandescents were not banned. There was an efficiency standard put into place. There are many incandescents that do meet that standard.
He's also the guy who apologized to BP for all the heat they were taking in the Gulf last year. Showing that he's no friend of rights; rather just a big business shill.
Given that the most of the country's power comes from coal it really doesn't matter anyway. If you do a life cycle comparison between the power consumed by both bulbs, the resultant mercury released by coal fired power plants and the mercury dumped into the environment by the bulb itself you will find that the CFL still comes out far better than and common incandescent.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I thought similar until I saw the numbers. Electric heat is one of the least efficient forms there is. For homes with gas heat, relying on incandescent lamps for their heating is just wasteful. It's much more efficient to minimize electricity use by using CFLs and use more efficient gas for actual heating. When trying to cool your house the savings go way up by not having so much heat load.
Something else is all the people complaining about the cost of CFL bulbs. Even with failures, the electricity savings by using CFLs is huge. I have those light bars in my bathrooms that could either be 360 watts of incandescent lamps or, with CFLs, just 90 watts for more light output. I use CFLs everywhere that I can. The only exceptions are the oven, refrigerator, and the ceiling fans that have candelabra base bulbs and maybe those are available as CFL now.
There was a very easily noticed drop in my electric bill when I switched over - especially in the summer due to the reduced heat load for the air conditioning.
It all adds up, folks. The electric savings due to using CFL lamps is huge. That's a hell of a lot of coal and natural gas that isn't being burned and it cuts the need for nuclear.
There is a bigger picture than just that you had to pay a buck or two for a CFL instead of 50 cents for an incandescent.
given the massive increase in cost, and the claims for bulb life ... even one or two failures basically means you've wiped out any savings for the next decade or so.
Complete and utter BS. A CFL runs less than $1.50 each in 4 packs at Home Depot. A regular incandescent is about 10 cents each I suppose. So that's a difference of $1.40, so let's see what it takes to make that up.
If you replace a 100w bulb with a CFL, you save approx 75 watts. That means that bulb consumes 0.075kwh per hour, or 0.00125kwh per minute. At a rate of 12 cents per kwh (pretty typical...not to many places are much lower, but some are quite a bit higher), that means switching to a CFL saves you about 0.015 cents per minute of operation. To make up that $1.40 difference, you need to operate the lightbulb for 9,333 minutes. Spread that across a year and that comes to about 25 minutes per day. So, if your light is on for 25 minutes per day, and you need to replace it once per year, then you break even on the cost.
Your claim that it wipes out your savings for a decade indicates you have a light bulb on for about 2.5 minutes per day and still have to replace them annually (doubtful), or you replace the things every month (in which case you've got some shitty electrical wiring in your house, or you've got these things on a dimmer circuit). My experience has been that I'll replace maybe 1 to 2 bulbs per year through the entire house, and I can say that the combined runtime of all lights in the house is a LOT more than 50 minutes per day.
Check my manufacturer? Reputable ones? Replacement guarantees? Complex ones?
Disposal guidelines? Mercury? Ballast? Warm-up? Flicker?
We are talking about light bulbs. I understand that CFLs are more energy-efficient than incandescents of comparable lumens. But they are a poor replacement in every other way. We are asking the world to waste more personal energy using CFLs than they waste on electrical energy using incandescents.
Odd that you don't seem to know what you're talking (but way to go, beating up that imaginary strawman in your imaginary debate). The bill being repealed actually closed a lot of US bulb production. I switched to all CFLs about 3 years ago and have been gradually switching a lot of my bulbs back to incandescents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090706933.html
Maybe where you live that's true ... and I wish that were true because they would be more cost effective. Up here in Canada, the last time I bought a 4 pack of CFLs, it cost $10, and that was on sale of 50% off ... I'm looking on a web site for a local retailer, and two pack is $10. That's a $5 lightbulb, and I've seen them for as much as $10 each, and some as much as $15.
I've bought dim-able CFLs, and had them fail within days if not hours, so I've stopped buying them. And I'm not talking off brands, I'm talking major the companies. In my experience, the dim-able ones are complete crap. I'm not prepared to rewire my 7 year old home to put in dimmers to accommodate these things.
Now, some of the other ones I've had that have burned out have been in places where the bulbs actually see a fair amount of hours of usage, so they may have legitimately reached EOL. But some of them haven't lasted nearly as long as I'd hoped.
But, please, unless you've personally bought me some CFLs and actually paid my electric bill, please don't act like you actually know what my experiences with them have been. Because my experience has been that they cost a hell of a lot more, and so far haven't seemed to last any longer than incandescent.
I'd prefer to use them, I'm just not convinced that based on the failure rate I'm seeing, they actually save me any money in the long run. Because I pay a crap load more for them than you apparently do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Funny. 5 years ago I switched my entire house to CFL's. I have had to replace ONE bulb in that time - and that was not a result of burnout, but a result of a lamp that got knocked over.
Meanwhile, it cut my energy bills by about 20%.
The link you provided has a lot of hemming and hawing, but what they fail to mention is that the one US-based plant making the incandescents? Yeah. That's IT. China was making the vast majority of incandescents ever since the early 1980s. When they talk about the bulbs made in the US needing to cost "50% more" on the shelf, what you're failing to realize is that this has been the problem of letting Republicans run things for a long time: they never do anything about the real problem of US manufacturing not being "out-competed", but out-abused by slave labor countries with crapass environmental laws like China and Malaysia.
The real answer is to get rid of our fucked-up "no tariff" situation with GATT/WTO, and stop giving corrupt shithole nations like China "Most Favored Nation" trading status. But that'll never happen as long as the Chinese are happy to buy up the Republican Party.
Not really true.
Name brand, expensive, modern "instant on" CFL's still produce dismal light for the first few seconds and then take up to a minute to achieve full brightness. I restrict them to locations where the lights will be on for many hours per day. I do not like using them in rooms I will go into, turn the light on for a few minutes and then leave.
LED's are much closer. I have a good GE bulb with fins with good color and light pattern BUT it's only 40 watts. I have a good Sylvania bulb with good light and light pattern but it is 60 watts lower and distinctly red. It works well in lamp fixtures with brown shades.
I no longer see flicker from CFL's. But they do last much less than advertise. While technically still working their lumens diminish to the point they are visibly dimmer within 12 to 18 months of 5 hours a day usage. So far all my LED's are running at full intensity after between 4 and 1 years. Even my 230 lumen "60 watt" LED bulb which is relegated to the porch ($36 bucks 4 or 5 years ago) is still chugging along -- 24 hours a day burning 3 watts. I need to put a photo cell socket in it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Of couse that's not the purpose or original intent of the commerce clause. It's simply one of the many ways the Constitution has been abused and disregarded. Read the writings of the founding fathers....try the Federalist papers. Try Federalist 56. Here's one possible article about this topic specifically: http://federalistblog.us/2011/06/no_power_over_interstate_commerce.html
The current government and its traitorous Supreme Court judges have simply told you that it gives them the power to regulate interstate commerce because the want to usurp that power.
Did you know that the word "regulate" as used in the Constitution didn't mean what it means today? Back then it meant "to make regular" or "to treat evenly"; i.e. the job of the federal government was simply to make sure all states are treated evenly with regards to interstate commerce. Today, the definition has been warped to mean "to control". Naturally, that's what government is all about: power and control.
But the writings of those who wrote the Constitution make it clear what the original intent was.
...and REDUCES the amount of overall mercury in the environment, due to mercury not being released by coal power plants.
That's called living in a free market society. There was a time in China when you could only buy one kind of bicycle, and you didn't have to shop around at all. Workers' paradise, right?
Plus, there's this new thing called the Internet, which can be used to find the best deal/bulb/widget/pron to suit your needs.
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