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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.'"
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.
Ethanol? What unintended consequences? It did exactly what it was supposed to do:
Drive up corn prices artificially.
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.
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?
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!
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.........
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.