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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 :)
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.
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.
Does this go all the way back to the 100W bulbs that were banned a while back? Or only the recent banning of >40W?
I'll let you in on a little secret: 100W incandescent bulbs are still available. The ban had a loophole for "hard usage incandescents" used in (for instance) outside industrial applications. They're available on Amazon, cost about $2.50 each, and last significantly longer than commercial incandescents. Now that the longevity of CFLs have been value-engineered to worthlessness, I'm switching back to "hard usage" incandescents as my CFLs burn out. I'm interested in LEDs, but I suspect that by the time the price drops significantly, they will also have lost much of their longevity advantage.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
I assume "hard usage" won't burn out as a porch light every 6 weeks?
I'm old enough to remember the electric company giving out free bulb replacements for burnt out ones (early 1970s). They lasted a lot longer, like indestructible bakelite landline phones you rented.
They stopped because of another government intervention -- a lawsuit by Phillips claiming Edison and others were, by giving them out for free, restraining trade.
So government fucks you and interferes one way or another. God damn, is their no limit to their interfering presience?
Follow the money, AKA follow the politics, AKA follow the money. Somebody, well, two somebodies get their pocket lined, burping up feel-good memes that will, if designed properly, latch your mind and drive you into behaviors wbich support their spread.
It's religion, stripped of the legal power to force itself on you, with that power regained, just stripped of the word "god".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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