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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.'"
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.
I really suspect that generations from now, the human race will look back at CFLs and say WHAT were we THINKING?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
It's something that wouldn't have passed in the first place if it had been a stand alone bill. So while the problem may also be the cure, the damage may already be done. There may now be enough of a disruption to supply that incandescents are dead anyway.
Either way, I've got my stockpile and most of my house is converted to LEDs which I'm very happy with. CFLs still suck and should be banned.
Not mine - Dems and Pubs are both asshats. Any change that reduces the intrusion of government into my daily habits is a good change, regardless of party.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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/
More like: they thought it was a good thing to ban a simple glass tube with a filament in it and replace it with a circuit board with electrolytic capacitors and a glass tube with mercury vapor in it?
Well, Bush signed it into law and now Obama is repealing it. Does that affect your opinion?
Probably not. Obamaphone is the moniker applied to the assistance program started by Reagan and expanded by Bush. The origin of a program does not seem to matter.
Most children already do it the other way around - they say "incandescent bulbs - WHAT were we THINKING?
They make no sense and CFL's make a ton of sense.
Simple way to tell who's right and who's wrong - look at which side is lying. CFL side repeatedly tells the truth, while the incandescent people repeatedly lie about things like price and pollution.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think you mean CFLs.
Poor people still won't buy them, because the incandescent ones will still be cheaper. It's one example of why it's so expensive to be poor.
I read the internet for the articles.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, CFLs.
But At prices like these (4 pack for $3.54) even people without a lot of money can afford them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They make no sense and CFL's make a ton of sense ... CFL side repeatedly tells the truth, while the incandescent people repeatedly lie about things like price and pollution.
They both make sense in different applications. I have vanity lights that take 6 bulbs. They are on only briefly, when shaving or my wife putting on makeup. Color balance is important, as is the instant-on, and they arent on long enough to matter a whit about energy use. Incandescent beats CFL and LED there. I use CFL's anywhere lights are left on for any period of time. And LED's where they are hard to change and color matters. For outdoor floods I use one CFL and one halogen, because they literally take 10 minutes to get anywhere near full bright when its 5 below outside. LED floodlights are crazy-stupid expensive.
If people are too stupid to select the proper bulb technology, I dont think sweeping laws that ignore intended use are the answer to that stupidity. At least I stocked up; four cases of every incandescent I use. Hopefully that sees me through until LED's get better color rendition and come down in price a bit more.
Incandescent bulbs suck. They break easily, don't last long, and are a fucking fire hazard when used incorrectly (as simple as putting materials too close or putting too bright a bulb in a fixture with inadequate insulation and thin wiring).
CFLs suck less than incandescent bulbs. They don't get nearly as hot, they draw roughly an order of magnitude less current. Are they perfect? No, there are still issues like what to do if one is broken (shattered) and with deteriorating light amount over time on some of the earlier CFL models.
LEDs suck less than CFLs. They draw a bit less power and don't have some of the other CFL trade-offs.
The douchiness is in reactionary fucking morons who scream "waah CFLs suck because of LEDs, therefore we should all go back to incandescents" which is a really fucking stupid comment as you watch them make it.
Wow, someone needs to drink a beer or smoke a joint (if you live in Colorado).
Using government services that we all pay for with taxes is not the same as not wanting someone telling me what kind of fucking light bulb I can buy or soda I can drink or etc. etc.
They are NOT the same thing.
CFL's take about 30 seconds to come to full brightness. At full brightness, they are still dimmer than incandesants. These are in fact, actual issues with the tecnology.
May the Maths Be with you!
In fairness, The life span of early CFLs, back when they were, oh, $12 each, was pretty good. I have two that are still working almost 20 years later with daily use. But the CFLs you buy today in the blister pack of six for $9.99 are pretty much crap. Lots of infant mortality, and on the average they don't appear to last any longer than incandescents used to.
I like the LED technology, but I'm afraid they'll follow the same path.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
LEDs have about the same efficiency of CFLs, though they're SLOWLY getting better (LEDs had horrible efficiency before - thanks to the ban, the R&D effort at making LED lights mainstream has really kicked in).
And compared to CFLs, LEDs are superior - instant on (80% brightness instantly, 100% within a few seconds), no mercury, practically solid state (the only hard part is a switching power supply).
Government regulations have a nasty habit of kicking industry at times - and the bans on inefficient lighting has forced industry to look at alternatives and research them. High efficiency LEDs are becoming common, and only a few years ago they finally surpassed CFLs, and now, they're becoming super-cheap.
And it's revolutionized other industries - aircraft lighting is rapidly going LEDs - even though a LED bulb is $150 or so (for a landing or taxiing light), being able to change a power hog of a light from 20A down to 3A for the same or better brightness? Airplane batteries are tiny in light aircraft - barely enough to start the engine. Being able to have courtesy lights on and not drain the battery badly is a huge benefit.
Ironically, when analyzed fully, an incandescent light typically emits MORE mercury into the atmosphere than the metallic mercury in a CFL. And when recycled, the mercury is recovered, while the emitted mercury isn't. The mercury comes from the fact that a good chunk of the US power grid still uses coal, and the added energy use of the lightbulb can translate into additional coal consumption and mercury emissions. (And metallic mercury is "safe" - it's not bio-available. But there are many bio-available mercury compounds that are and contribute to mercury poisoning).
You know...I think most everyone would be tickled pink if our government would stick to and ONLY be involved in such activities that I think we can all agree on, are helpful, and non-intrusive to our personal lives.
Past these things...for the most part, we need to reign govt back in. We don't need them for everything we do in our daily lives. We certainly don't need them sweeping up, keeping and analyzing metadata from all our communications.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Fire, police, and emergency are all entirely locally provided. Go to the next town over, they have their own fire and police. Internet and cable are provided by locally regulated monopolies. The roads are provided (mostly) by my state and local government.
Clean air and water are subject to state as well as federal regulation, as is food safety. The safety of most of the products I use is ensured by a private group called Underwriters Laboratories, whose name points out who other than the government is concerned about safety: insurers. TV is pretty much federally regulated, for broadcast. And the post office is mentioned right there in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, so I'm pretty sure it's on safe ground.
So yeah, the interactions I have with government are mostly what they should be: local. I know my city councilman personally. If I get upset with the mayor, I can go downtown and meet with him. I know my state representative. I can call him at home if I want to. Hell, I even ran into the governor at the liquor store once. But my congressman? Well, he had 15 minutes for me. The senator sent his aides. And I'm fairly sure that even a flawlessly written and beautifully argued letter to the President or a Cabinet secretary is never going to see their eyes. Washington should do the stuff that we made the government to do: protect our liberty. There's a reason that they left the rest of that to the states. You don't see me bitching about Massachusetts raising its taxes, nor California, because I don't live in either one and if they want a high-tax, high-service state, that's their choice. Go for it. Just like it's supposed to be done.
I've just moved into a new place. I've replaced all the frequently used built in lights with soft-white LEDs which honestly, have a perfectly nice light. For less frequently used spaces, I have some spare CFLs I'll use up.
I did spend about $70 on seven "60 watt" and two "40 watt" LED bulbs, but it's a good investment. There is one light that will be on about 10 hours/day. A 60 watt bulb there would use 0.6 kWhrs/day, or about 219 kWhrs/yr. At 12c a kWhr, that's $26.28/year for that light if incandescent. The LED is a 9.5 watt bulb, 0.095 kWhrs/day, 34.7 kWhr's per year, $4.16/yr in electricity.
So that one one bulb will save me $22/yr -- almost 1/3 of what it cost me to buy all of the bulbs combined. Between all of them, I'll probably have them all paid off in energy savings by next year, and by then, all those incandescents would have popped anyway and needed to be rebought, saving me some more money.
I know $22 isn't much, but by the same token, I wouldn't pull a twenty out of my wallet and then just drop it on the street for no reason.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As it turns out, your $250 "GE 26 Watt Energy Smart CFL - 100 Watt Replacement" bulb is now on sale for $13.40 each:
http://www.amazon.com/Watt-Energy-Smart-CFL-Replacement/dp/B000UYF80S
If we extrapolate, by tomorrow the price should be about 4 cents each.
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.