Slashdot Mirror
Incandescent Bulbs Get a Reprieve
An anonymous reader writes "A new budget deal reached today by the U.S. Congress walks back the energy efficiency standards that would have forced the phase out of incandescent bulbs. 'These ideas were first enacted during the Bush administration, via the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Incandescent bulbs were unable to meet the standards, so they would eventually be forced off the market in favor of LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs. But Republicans have since soured on the bill, viewing it as an intrusion on the market and attempting to identify it with President Obama. Recent Congresses have tried many times to repeal the standards, but these have all been blocked. However, U.S. budgets are often used as a vehicle to get policies enacted that couldn't pass otherwise, since having an actual budget is considered too valuable to hold up over relatively minor disputes. The repeal of these standards got attached to the budget and will be passed into law with it.'"
I'm not sure whether to be happy about this or not. We need energy efficiency, but I still hate CFLs :)
Does this go all the way back to the 100W bulbs that were banned a while back? Or only the recent banning of >40W?
Just like the ethanol mandate there are always unintended consequences to government interference. In the case of CFL's, it's the spread of noxious poisons through our households, communities, and landfills. Not to mention that the claimed efficiencies and lifespans are grossly misleading due to very specific assumed patterns of use -- if you leave the lights on all the time, CFL's are great; but if you turn them on and off frequently, like as you walk into and out of rooms, then the advantage breaks down rapidly.
That's good to hear. Each attic or rarely used closet doesn't need a $30 light bulb when a 30 cent light bulb will do just fine.
Using CFLs in such roles wastes 95% of the resources used to make them. There's a reason CFLs are so much more expensive -
that cost represents resources used in their manufacture, wasted resources for rarely used locations.
Also my ceiling fans have built in dimmers. Other than the one fan/light we use often, it would be stupid and wasteful to throw out all our ceiling
fans and buy entire new ones just to have a CFL capable dimmer.
With all the charm of prison block lighting, CFLs are a joke. Don't tell me the new ones have the same warmth and quality. They don't.
Light bulbs are technology. I'm shocked anyone would advocate for government (!) to have the power to outlaw technology they don't "like."
Most of the heavily used areas in my home have already been retrofitted with CFL bulbs, but there are a few places where traditional incandescents make sense - the closet under the stairs, the furnace room and the basement storage room are all excellent candidates for cheap incandescent bulbs. In each case, the light is only turned on for a couple of hours each year and the cost of replacing those bulbs with LED or CFL equivalents far outstrips the potential energy savings pver the next few decades.
Why not just gradually tax incandescent bulbs higher over time? Give the alternatives time to ramp up economies of scale.
And, that tax money could go toward renewable energy R&D.
Table-ized A.I.
This legislation does not repeal the new light bulb efficiency standards. It just de-funds them.
AFAIK, this means the law stands, but will not be enforced. Not the same as repeal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/14/heres-a-breakdown-of-whats-in-congress-1-012-trillion-spending-bill/
But the last US incandescent bulb production line already closed down so well done on fighting unemployment there, chaps.
..where incandescent bulbs are banned.
The prices of bulbs will soar, even for the transition period and quality remains the same. The cheap LEDs are far from natural color, and compact fluorescent bulbs will not illuminate as much after a year or so.
Just look at us - and don't go down this route..
Get LED. They dim.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That's good to hear. Each attic or rarely used closet doesn't need a $30 light bulb when a 30 cent light bulb will do just fine.
Using CFLs in such roles wastes 95% of the resources used to make them.
OR, it's an excellent use of them. Since they're used so rarely, it should be *years and years* before they need to be replaced... Also, a CFL or LED bulb for a closet or attic would cost less than half of your ridiculous statement of $30... Hell, the currently available Cree 60w 2700k bulbs for $10 at Home Depot would be fine for both cases, and CFL's are available for a few bucks (or less)...
Also my ceiling fans have built in dimmers. Other than the one fan/light we use often, it would be stupid and wasteful to throw out all our ceiling
fans and buy entire new ones just to have a CFL capable dimmer.
Dimmable CFL and LED bulbs exist -- my house has multiple of both, and they're the same price (or within a few dollars) of their non-dimmable counterparts.
bork bork bork!
Halogen bulbs use a vapor cycle where the tungsten burns off the filament, collects on the quartz envelope, then vaporizes off of the hot envelope and recollects on the filament. Used with a dimmer, the temperature won't be high enough to vaporize it and the lifecycle becomes tens of hours rather than thousands of hours.
Let me repeat that last part - they WILL last for 10,20, maybe 50 hours with a dimmer. Then they die.
Particularly those families that have [small] children, since a broken CFL releases mercury, which is toxic
As a parent of three rambunctious children myself, I can confidently assert that I'm far more worried about the kiddos hurting themselves on the broken shards of glass than on the small amount of released mercury.
Time was we used to put very fragile tubes filled with mercury in our kids mouths whenever they got the sniffles. I think we can learn to deal with the hazard of having it in bulbs.
There have always been halogen replacement bulbs. CFL's and LED's are not the only alternative options.
* most of you, not all.
I replaced several CFLs, of two different brands, after they were in place for about a year and had been turned on for a total of maybe 20 minutes.
20 minutes of light for about $10-$15 is really, really wasteful.
"A wise investment that saves you money over a period of 10 years - even if you rarely used the bulb."
!?!? How much do you think several minutes of power costs? Apparently you think it costs thousands of dollars per hour to turn on a light?
A 50 watt bulb costs less than one penny per hour to operate. So that bulb in your attic costs less than a dollar for your entire life. Spending $10-$15 on an "energy efficient" bulb in your attic is dumb, dumb, dumb. That WASTES energy because it takes a lot more energy to make that CFL than the incandescent would have ever used.
Have gnu, will travel.
Many places still exist for incandescent 100W bulbs, really nice when my pipes freeze I want to slowly thaw them, and be able to see any leaks. I could run out and buy a heater tape for $10 and a light, or one. Similar for keeping things like a baby chicken, Lizard, etc warm and visible
That sounds like an awfully specialized use for a 100W bulb, and you'd be better off with a rugged service bulb (which weren't covered by the ban) with a rubber coating so a drop of water doesn't shatter the bulb overnight so instead of thawing, your pipes are freezing (again). Heat tape will heat more pipe than a single bulb.
You do realize of course, that the wall switch and dimmer for your fan/light fixture can be replaced, without replacing the fan?
Really? Please come to my house and do so.
First of all, I've only found one fan module that doesn't support dimming. Works fine in my Hunter ceiling fans.
In my Hampton Bay fans, not a chance. The motor drive is on the same PCB as the light control, and there is no room in/near the light kit to even consider mounting the aftermarket module.
Frankly, if anyone has a solution that doesn't involve "remove and replace ceiling fans", I'm all ears.
And the worms ate into his brain.
$15?
The Cree 60W Equivalent Soft White (2700K) A19 Dimmable LED Light Bulb is $10 at Home Depot, quantity 1, without any sort of bulk, deal, or coupon shopping.
Lighting is relatively small in power usage in comparison to the good ol' electric clothes dryer. You don't see the environmentalists clambering about the virtues of clotheslines. Other "big hitters" are air conditioners. Heck, house sizes have also dramatically increased, increasing demand on air conditioning, heating and lighting. Most of this incandescent hoopla ignores the real energy wasters IMHO.
I replaced nearly all incandescent bulbs in my house with bulbs similar to these from Lowe's the first few months after I bought it a few years ago. They cost a little under $3 per bulb, so you're off by an order of magnitude there.
They turn on instantly, and it wasn't difficult to get used to the color difference. Anymore, the color quality of incandescent looks odd to me.
My only real gripe is that when I started using CFLs, I learned that the equivalency rating to incandescents in power consumption just isn't right. A 13 watt CFL looks a hell of a lot dimmer than a 60 watt incandescent. Maybe it's just me. I've found 18 watt CFLs to be acceptable replacements for 60 watt incandescents.
You have a valid point about dimmers. That would be one application I'd probably keep incandescents for, but I don't have any dimmers in my house. If I were looking to purchase one, I'd seriously consider a CFL dimmer, but I haven't looked into how much more the upfront cost is.
That being said I don't need the federal government to get me to make decisions that will reduce my power bill, and I find it appalling that the federal government apparently has the power to prohibit the production of a product that does no more harm than eat a little over 3x as much power as a competing product.
What governments should be doing if they want to engage in market manipulation is subsidizing installation of solar panels for roofs. That would probably be more productive than forcing everyone who wants to keeps their incandescents to moving to a bulb that they're not happy with. Hell, it'd probably help the economy, too.
Another thing governments can do is investigate what we would need to build new fission power plants and move away from coal and natural gas. Perhaps some kind of anti-NIMBY legislation and some real critical thinking about how we safely build and operate fission reactors without allowing greed and bean counters from creating disasters.
A third alternative is stopping this nonsense with corn ethanol and promoting biodiesel. Petrolchemicals may be the best way to store energy, corn ethanol is not the best petrochemicals to use for that purpose, and maybe plants are the best way to harvest energy from the sun.
We're consuming energy at an increasing rate as a species, and we're only going to need more and more. That isn't a bad thing. The bad thing is being dependent on fossil fuels. Those are only renewable on scales measured in millions of years, which isn't of much utility to human progress.
Forcing people to use a bulb that, judging by comments here, even the thought of using causes visceral rage will probably be no more than a drop in the bucket compared the above.
At the end of the day, it's your power bill. It's not like you're somehow using incandescants and only being charged for the power consumption of CFLs. Hell, I'd bet certain individuals who seem to be physically incapable of turning a light off once they've left a room would see more of a savings from doing that than switching to CFLs.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Similar for warming chicks.
You generally want long service life and don't really care about luminous efficacy.
Also 2 or 3 lower wattage bulbs are better than 1 big one (better distribution and redundancy).
Or, you could use a radiant heater so you can separate lighting from warmth and not have to stress the chicks with 24x7 lighting when it's cold and don't need light, or with unnecessary heat when it's warm and you do want light.
You have put the cart before the horse. Government depends on society, people, and business providing products and services. We pay taxes and suffer interference with our lives, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. The US constitution, widely imitated by other nations, provided for minimal government and led to decades of prosperity and happiness for American colonials. As time passed, the cancer of government grew, and along with it, an increasingly lazy and irresponsible public ignored the peril. Now, we see people so ignorant of human history that they foolishly claim in public forums that government is necessary for anything beyond providing a common defense and preserving domestic order. Thomas Paine would be amazed at the lack of "Common Sense." All of the benefits you describe above, without exception, were provided by the private sector until government moved in and took over. If you want to live like a troglodyte, just keep on parroting government propaganda and buying in to their nihilistically incompetent schemes.
Those with power have always lorded it over those without, regardless of the form of government. As such government is not a cancer, it is exactly what those with power have chosen it to be. The founding fathers valued freedom from the tyranny of the king and that is the government they created. After the depression, those in power wanted to protect against monopolies and corruption and that was the focus of government. In the 60s, those with power, felt the government should solve many of the countries social problems and that is the government they created. Today's people in power are mainly large capitalists and they are shaping the government towards their values.
What al lof that means is that unless you are the ones in power, you will always be on the outside and the government will be seen as infringing on your rights. Government is not the problem. The people running the government (both elected officials and those that support them) are.
Am I crazy, or do even LED lights have a bit of a flicker? It's fine when I'm looking straight at them, but during saccades suddenly I experience the flicker. In a room lit by LEDs I quickly get a headache, which came as a surprise to me since I thought LEDs could finally deliver on what CFLs can't. So sadly for myself I still haven't been able to use anything other than incandescent, although I've put in CFL or LED lights in places like the entranceway where I won't be spending extended periods of time.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I was president of a condo association for 5 years. I made the costly mistake of replacing all outside incandescent lights with CFLs:
- all CFLs, regardless of brand, failed within two years. Outdoors CFLs don't last as long as the cheapest incandescents, despite all caterwauling to the contrary. Please don't tell me about your special brand: I've tried it and it failed prematurely.Please don't tell me to return them to the store under the 3-year guarantee: if I did that all my time/gas would be spent driving to/from Home Depot/Lowe's/Light Store and changing bulbs.
- CFLs were frequently stolen. This was an unanticipated cost.
LEDs are even worse: thieves can spot an LED from 100 yards away and will stop at nothing to steal them (since they're so damn expensive). Great to spend $300 replacing a weatherproof floodlight receptacle and the electrical tubing because a thief tore it off an outside wall to get a $50 LED floodlight.
CFLs break frequently when used in an outdoor environment. This was especially true in the carport area, where taller delivery/postal/visitor SUVs and trucks would back into a spot and break the bulb, scattering fragments over the vehicle roof and an area larger than the parking space. Cleanup consists of sweeping a strip of driveway and searching for the SUV that has the broken bulb fragments atop it. This is not nearly so worrisome for an incandescent as for the mercury-laden CFL. When one considers that most SUVs belong to parents with children, who are the most likely to be adversely affected by mercury, this is even more troublesome.
After 3 years I gave up and went back to incandescents, which we will use forever. Savings due to CFLs low electrical usage are not recovered when you include failure and theft in the equation. In fact, incandescents are cheaper even when you include the cost of the rugged models.
There are good reasons why incandescents have been used for so long. And, as others note, you can heat the chicken coop, keep pipes warm, and do other useful tasks with incandescents. CFLs were a political solution to a non-problem.
Who cares as long as he's paying for it? The strain caused by his usage should be reflected in his bill, thus he and his ilk end up paying for a slightly beefier power grid.
That is, if government regulation/pricing isn't blocking the companies from doing the necessary work/expansion.
Besides, residential power usage has been falling for quite some time, indicating to me that people ARE replacing their power hungry appliances with ones of less appetite. I was surprised when my LCD TV turned out to be using more power per square inch of screen than my old CRT, but LED TVs cut power usage quite a bit themselves. People moving from desktop computers to laptops to tablets, with a power use drop each step. MOST people I know have at least partially converted to CFL/LED* lighting, with only low usage areas remaining.
Note: Aside from 'severe duty' bulbs in things like the oven I have CFLs all through my house except for 1 closet and the crawlspace, which will probably be replaced by LED lights when the bulbs(finally) go. Note: Average usage for those lights are less than 1 hour/month.
*Though I think that fixtures designed for the different light types is better than plugging in adapting bulbs.
I don't read AC A human right