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Europe To Ban Halogen Lightbulbs (theguardian.com)
After nearly 60 years of brightening homes and streets, halogen lightbulbs will finally be banned across Europe on 1 September. From a report: The lights will dim gradually for halogen. Remaining stocks may still be sold, and capsules, linear and low voltage incandescents used in oven lights will be exempted. But a continent-wide switchover to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is underway that will slash emissions and energy bills, according to industry, campaigners and experts. LEDs consume one-fifth of the energy of halogen bulbs and their phase-out will prevent more than 15m tonnes of carbon emissions a year, an amount equal to Portugal's annual electricity usage. Philips, the lighting manufacturer estimates consumer savings of up to 112 pound ($144) a year from the switchover because LEDs last much longer than halogens and use far less power.
I suspect halogens will also still be allowed in "hard use" instances, like the lights very high up on towers in harsh weather.
Just coincidentally, I'm in the process of switching from those damned CFLs to LEDs. I say "damned" because although they initially met the promise of long life [1], later "value engineered" bulbs didn't last any longer, in my experience, than the incandescents they replaced. I'm really hoping LEDs don't fall to the same process -- value engineered to a pale shadow of their original glory.
I always felt that CFLs were a stopgap solution until we found a practical low power light bulb. It appears that LED is that solution, but it may be too early to tell.
[1]. It so happens, of the four original CFLs I bought in the 1990's, the last one -- the back porch light, stopped working last night. And will be replaced with an LED. During that time, I've had many many CFLs fail, some in the space of only a few months. In quantity, they really weren't manufactured very well.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A friend complains about exactly this. They upgraded the AC, better doors, new water heaters, fridge, dryer... Bill seems to stay almost exactly the same. Worse, we were in a drought so the water company asked everyone to conserve. We did. Our reward was a conservation surcharge since they were not selling enough water. Oddly, drought is over, surcharge remains. Shocking.
All of them. fluorescent MTBF is 25K hours, while LED is 75K hours.
Not only that, but despite the touted 30.000 hour life span of LED lights, I have already had to replace several in my house, while the old-fasioned, simple tungsten bulbs keep going, and going, and going.
It's madness.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
LED and CFL lights come with their color temperature written on the box. If you want daylight get a 4500K bulb, if you want yellow get 3000K, if you want candle light get 2000K. If you can't find the color temp you want, buy them online. If you don't like blue, don't buy anything above 4000K on the box.
moox. for a new generation.
The price is coming down. Only 18 times as much now.
They are only more expensive if you don't know how to do math (or if someone else pays your power bill).
A 16 pack of Phillips 60W (8.5W actual) LED's costs $25.37 ($1.59 / Bulb) on Amazon.
You can get a 24 pack of incandescent 60W bulbs on eBay for around 75 cents a piece. So that makes the purchase price of LEDs twice has much as incandescents.
But since the LED uses 52 watts less power, if you pay $0.10/KWh for electricity, you'd break even after the first 161 hours of using the bulb.
The incandecent bulb will last around 1100 hours (and you'll have saved around $5.70 in electricity over that time), but the LED will last an average of 10X longer. But even if you only got 1100 hours out of it, you'd still come out ahead. (you can get "long-life" 4000hour incandescent's, but they are much less efficient, putting out about half the light as a standard bulb)
Not only that, but despite the touted 30.000 hour life span of LED lights, I have already had to replace several in my house, while the old-fasioned, simple tungsten bulbs keep going, and going, and going.
It's madness.
Ah, but you see the LEDs really are good for 30K hours; it's just that the power transforming base of the bulb that's gone bad.
Free Speech does not, and never has, protected someone from the consequences of their free speech. The classic example is shouting fire in a crowded theatre, leading to false calls to the emergency services who respond and possible panic and injury among the other theatre goers
I always love the irony of people using this analogy to try and support restriction on free speech. You are obviously completely clueless about the fact that the analogy was first made by a judge in a legal ruling which ended up sending a man to prison for the "crime" of passing out pamphlets opposing the draft.
The ruling was eventually overturned, but not before the defendant (and many like him) spent years in jail for voicing an opinion which is commonplace today. However the result of it being overturned is that, yes, in the united states at least, you CAN yell fire in a crowded theatre. What you can't do is engage in speech which "advocates imminent lawless action", as in you can't tell the theatre goers to burn down the building.
That's the hypothesis. Unfortunately in reality, LEDs don't last anywhere near the advertised numbers, and tend to work poorly in many conditions like too cold or too wet.
This is because unlike halogen and incandescent, the circuitry needed to control the LED is fairly complex, and tends to be the primary failure mode. Additionally if circuit board actually does last something close to advertised time, LEDs tend to become much dimmer towards their end of advertised "lifecycle", to the point where in many applications, it will have to be replaced even if it can be claimed in advertising that it "will still work for many years". Sure it will work for many years, but that work will be below acceptable.
Which is why they are being mandated, instead of allowed to be phased in gradually by market choice. Because they're actually not beneficial to end users as far as market goes, even at this stage. But if you can force their numbers to increase significantly, there's hope that development of more reliable controllers will be funded and carried out eventually, as well as LEDs become more long lasting in terms of maintaining brightness.
The downside of this is that low hanging fruit in those sectors has been long since picked. Progress forward will be costly, so it's not very likely to be carried out without a significant legislative pressure on the supply chain just like there is one on the demand chain. We'll see how that ends up, and how much people will have to pay for illumination in the end.
That's the hypothesis. Unfortunately in reality, LEDs don't last anywhere near the advertised numbers, and tend to work poorly in many conditions like too cold or too wet.
My oldest LED is 6 years old, in an upstairs hallway light that sees at least a couple hours of use nearly every day (more in the winter than in the summer). So that's over 4000 hours, about 4X the lifetime of a typical incandescent. But for this particular lamp I don't even care about the cost of the bulb or the operating cost, it's the inconvenience of changing it since it's over the stairs and I need to go borrow a telescoping folding ladder from my parents to change it, so it's a major hassle.
My second oldest LED is around 4 years old. It's in an outdoor light fixture that sees around 6 hours of use every night - in temperatures ranging from around 25F in the winter to 90F+ in the summer. So it has around 8000 hours on it now, I'm not sure what it's rated for, but it subjectively "feels" as bright as when I installed it.
I've converted 90% of my house to LED's now, the remaining 10% are CFL's in little used areas of the house that I'm still waiting on them to die.
I've only had 1 LED die so far (plus a couple that were DOA when I installed them). Nearly all of my bulbs are Phillips, I've tried a few other brands, but have been most satisfied with the Phillips bulbs.
As always, the "energy savings" touted by advocates of "Green" lighting assumes that light is the only wanted output of a light source.
The efficiency is based on light-output only, so when (for example) an incandescent is described as only 20% efficient what they mean is 20% of the energy consumed goes to light and another 80% is "wasted" as heat.
But what if you live in a climate that requires supplemental heating? In that case, the 80% is wanted output, and the incandescent is now 100% efficient (assuming the other 20% of light is wanted as well).
Where this comes into play is when (like in the OP summary) "energy savings" are proposed via a banning or switchover to "more efficient" lighting; more efficient in this case meaning more of the energy input goes to light output. What these energy savings never account for is the loss of wanted heat output in some climates or during some seasons. That lost heat must be replaced by the building's heating system, so additional energy is required to make up the shortfall.
If you're in Florida (or Portugal) then the more efficient lighting makes energy-smart sense. But what if you're in the UK (balmy 15C temperatures in August are far from rare; the BBC likes to call this "fresh" weather) or Scandinavia? Now you have cold-weather heating requirements that even an incandescent can provide, with wanted light output, at 100% efficiency.
The only study I know of that took this into account was one done by BC Hydro (Canada) that determined the amount of extra natural gas / electric / wood heat energy would be needed with a switch province-wide from incandescents to CFL bulbs. It was far from a trivial amount.