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Light Bulb Ban Produces Hoarding In EU, FUD In U.S.
Lucas123 writes "The very thought of losing that pear-shaped giver of warm, yellow light drove Europeans to hoard Edison's invention [Note: Or possibly Joseph Swan's invention; HT to eldavojohn.] as the EU's Sept. 1 ban on incandescent light bulbs approached. China's ban on incandescent lamps starts Oct. 1. And, in the U.S., the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 effectively began banning the 100W bulb this year and will ban the most popular bulbs — the 75W, 60W and 40W screw-in incandescent bulbs --over the next two years. The end standard requires bulbs to use 65% less energy by 2020. But Republicans in Congress continue to fight the ban by hamstringing the energy efficiency standards through appropriations legislation, cutting off funds for the enforcement of the light bulb ban."
Agreed, cigarettes are harmful too, but it's still legal to sell them. They just get taxed into oblivion. The same should be true for incandescent light bulbs.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
> the spread was too narrow.
Yup. We put up some track lights and found the LED bulbs would illuminate a small patch of floor, but blind you if you looked directly into it.
In order to have lots of light and stay within the current rating of the track, I mixed them 50/50 with halogens. The halogens lit the room, the led were set to be pointing at things like desks that benefit from better illumination.
LED room lights have a way to go before they're a complete replacement.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Came here to say the same.
I could mod you up, but instead I'll just say, every time I bitch about warm up time in one of these threads, someone replies that I should buy a bulb made this century or by a good manufacturer. Yet no one ever has an example of which ones are the "good manufacturers."
I had a service come in to do an energy audit on my home. I expected to hear a lot about insulation and drafty windows. Instead the guy just went through and changed all the bulbs he could to CFLs. I've also purchased CFLs in the past. These are GE and Sylvania bulbs.
1. These bulbs do not last as long as advertised. I've been in my house for 8 years and there are fixtures that have had bulbs burn out at least twice (ie, fixtures on their 3rd CFL bulb in 8 years).
2. Dimmable? If you consider going from off to warming up to on dimmable, then yes. If you mean on demand dimmable with a dimmer switch, then no not dimmable.
3. Warm up time. True story: a couple days after I had my "energy audit" I'm a the foot of my stairs and flip the switch for the lights at the top of the stairs.
Nothing happens. It's a 3-way with the other switch at the top, so I flip it back, wondering if the lights were on and I had just turned them off. But still nothing. I give another few flips, still nothing. I'm very puzzled, because light switches are usually very reliable. I don't remember ever having to replace a regular light switch that stopped working.
Then I look up. The switch is working. The lights are coming on. It's just they are so dim, unless I am looking directly at the bulbs, I can't tell if they are on or off.
My daily routine used to be to come home from work, go to my bedroom, turn on the over head light, change out of my work gear in to evening wear, and then go about my night. Now, I come home, go to the bedroom, turn on the over head light, turn on the night stand light, make sure I leave the door open with the hall light on, so I can see while I'm changing. By the time I'm done, all the bulbs have warmed up and I'm squinting from the brightness, but by then I'm leaving the room and turning all those lights off.
So if someone has a line on CFLs that don't need minutes to warm up, please share! Until then, I'm going through what CFLs I have and as they burn out, replacing them with real light bulbs that work.
I realize technologies take time to mature and I understand the concept of a public beta test, but CFLs are being pitched as a final product when they aren't nearly as good as the thing they are supposed to replace.
I can attest to this - I have retrofitted (over a year or so) my whole house with the Philips LED bulbs.
I have a fixture with multiple bulb sockets, I put in a 60W incandescent in one and the Philips LED in the other, and I could not see a difference in colour temperature at all. They stay warm-ish to the touch so you don't have to worry about spot heating problems in your home, they're great. Now they just need a bulb that can operate in an enclosed fixture.
It did help that our local power utility subsidized these bulbs, they're expensive - between $40 - $50 a pop. I got mine for half price because of the subsidy.
All electric heaters are 100% efficient. Now, sometimes, some of the energy gets (temporarily) stuck as visible light, or sound or something else, but it all, eventually ends up as heat. It's just as efficient to heat your house with incandescent light bulbs (or even compact florescent light bulbs) as traditional baseboard heaters -- as long as you keep your curtains shut.
What Republicans? I miss Republicans. The people marching under the GOP banner are a whole different animal than the Republicans I grew up with. I really enjoyed hating Reagan, and I kept up the fight against Bush 1 even though I knew that in many ways, he wasn't so bad. It really got bad with Bush 2--not so much the man, but his ultra-right brain trust--and the election of a (in the eyes of his detractors) mulatto kenyan indonesian communist fascist nazi muslim anti-white racist intellectual just boiled the right-hand fringe to a froth. That "froth" are not, in my eyes, Republicans. They're like the Republican version of a zombie invasion.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Have you ever taken a CFL apart? I have. There's an astonishing amount of electronics in that small base; it's required to transform line voltage into a potential sufficiently high to ionize the gas in the fluorescent tube. How much energy goes into the manufacture of these electronic components? How much of the electronics is either re-used or recovered as raw material when these bulbs are 'recycled', as opposed to the materials, (and the energy that went into their manufacture), being disposed of in landfills? I have been unable to find answers to these questions, and I think they're important. There's a lot more 'stuff', in a CFL, with a much wider range of chemical compositions, than in an incandescent bulb, so it's harder and more energy-intensive to fully recycle.
Then there are the special interests of the various stakeholders and their lobbyists - for a discussion of this, see http://ceolas.net/#li1ax . Does anyone really believe that 'saving energy' is a primary, or even an important, motivation for the manufacturers and patent holders of CFLs? Given that, what might they be hiding, and how much spin has been applied to the figures the provide vis-a-vis total energy savings?
If the powers that be were really serious about saving energy and the environment by encouraging CFL use, they would mandate two things: 1) A a high minimum standard of longevity for the electronics in the bases of CFLs, and 2) A means of replacing the tube only when it burns out, so the most complex and least homogeneous part of the bulb, (the base with its electronic circuitry), can be re-used numerous times. But guess what? That reduces the profit margins and raises both the cost and the price, making the whole proposition both less economically attractive and less politically palatable. If 'energy saving' was the true motive behind this legislation, these things would have been incorporated into CFL design by now.
The problems of the EMI and RFI that CFLs generate, and their crappy power factor, are points for further investigation for those interested. As are the problems with LED lights and their greater negative effects on melatonin production, with the accompanying decrease in health for those exposed to them.
This whole topic is a lot more complex and nuanced than most people realize, and I suggest that anyone reading this might want to do a little digging before giving in to a knee-jerk reaction of either "But, but... the environment!" or "But, but... I like the old ones!"
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Actually it's even better than that - almost all other types of modern heaters heat the air, which then heats everything else, especially the ceiling where the hottest air pools. As a result much of the heat gets sucked out of the house through the walls and ceiling and any air-gaps.
Infrared heaters instead heat the things in the room - people and surfaces - and if aimed well you can keep much of the heat off the walls and ceiling. One of the major benefits of this is that you can keep the air temperature significantly cooler, which reduces heat loss as well as allowing your body to regulate it's temperature more easily.
If you think about it IR heating is the traditional norm - an open fire sends virtually all hot air straight up - what warms you is the IR. Likewise standing near a sun-warmed rock or a Scandinavian style tile oven/masonry heater which can keep a whole house warm all day with just a few handfuls of sticks - the folks who've been living with serious cold for centuries long ago figured out that heating the air is silly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You are arguing the wrong thing, a heat pump can produce a BTU load of more 3,415 BTU per hour per kw which is where the efficiency of greater than 100% is coming from. Sure, they aren't creating more than 3,415 BTU per hour per kw, but most people don't care about the thermodynamics of the universe, just the energy that is required to heat or cool their domicile.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Heat pumps work by moving heat from a source to a sink, not by generating heat (although of course they do generate heat because they aren't 100% efficient in what they do: pumping heat). So as long as your source has heat to move, you can deliver significantly more heat to the sink than you could get by putting the same energy into a resistive heat emitter. Our house in Vermont is heated by a single 12.5kbtu air-to-air heat pump. The source is outside air; in the winter, we cool the air passing over the exterior device, but a fan continually blows air across it so that we are never cooling the same air. You may think winter air is cold, but tell that to a space alien with liquid helium blood. To them it's fatally hot. So the air is maybe ten or twenty degrees cooler after it passes through the exterior heat exchanger, but there's a relatively endless supply of warm (say, 0F) air to replace it. Consequently, we get a nice multiplier over resistive heat: while the net heat delivered to the system as a whole is the same, the heat delivered to the conditioned space is three times greater. Physics is full of win.