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Trump Administration Dims Rule On Energy Efficient Lightbulbs (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If it's been a few years since you shopped for a lightbulb, you might find yourself confused. Those controversial curly-cue ones that were cutting edge not that long ago? Gone. (Or harder to find.) Thanks to a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush, shelves these days are largely stocked with LED bulbs that look more like the traditional pear-shaped incandescent version but use just one-fifth the energy. A second wave of lightbulb changes was set to happen. But now the Trump administration wants to undo an Obama-era regulation designed to make a wide array of specialty lightbulbs more energy efficient.
At issue here are bulbs such as decorative globes used in bathrooms, reflectors in recessed lighting, candle-shaped lights and three-way lightbulbs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that, collectively, these account for about 2.7 billion light sockets, nearly half the conventional sockets in use in the U.S. At the very end of the Obama administration, the Department of Energy decided these specialty bulbs should also be subject to efficiency requirements under the 2007 law. The lighting industry objected and sued to overturn the decision. [...] NEMA argued that Congress never intended for the law to apply to all these other lightbulbs. After President Trump took office the Energy Department agreed and proposed to reverse the agency's previous decision. Critics say if the reversal is finalized it will mean higher energy bills for consumers and more pollution.
At issue here are bulbs such as decorative globes used in bathrooms, reflectors in recessed lighting, candle-shaped lights and three-way lightbulbs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that, collectively, these account for about 2.7 billion light sockets, nearly half the conventional sockets in use in the U.S. At the very end of the Obama administration, the Department of Energy decided these specialty bulbs should also be subject to efficiency requirements under the 2007 law. The lighting industry objected and sued to overturn the decision. [...] NEMA argued that Congress never intended for the law to apply to all these other lightbulbs. After President Trump took office the Energy Department agreed and proposed to reverse the agency's previous decision. Critics say if the reversal is finalized it will mean higher energy bills for consumers and more pollution.
...it has nothing to do with the benefit to either the consumer or the industry and is totally about trying to erase anything Obama did as a way of getting his petty revenge.
They do that by design. If LED lightbulbs don't have an MTBF similar to old incandescent bulbs then the manufacturers stand to lose a lot of money. So they are intentionally made like crap. Everyone thought that with LEDs we wouldn't have to change lightbulbs anymore. That was naive. Incandescent bulbs can last much longer than what we were used to as well. But there is no money in it
I haven't really had many reliability issues with LEDs. We have many throughout the house and elsewhere. I have had one (1) of them break, a Philips Hue (sadly the most expensive of the lot). I've had a few bad purchases where the bulb would emit a nasty greenish light instead of nice white. Other than that, few issues (and certainly more reliable than incandescent ones)
Try IKEA bulbs. They sell them really cheaply and they've been reliable so far, with good quality light as well. We use them in our rental properties where they are used hard in the common areas.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Many specialty bulbs are very odd shapes. CFL and LED lights are difficult to fit into these shapes, and end up being highly unreliable. For what the special nature of these bulbs, the conventional style works more reliably.
Very odd? Most of them are round, round is not an odd shape. If they could fit a filament into it, with their space requirements etc., there should be no problem fitting an LED into one. I have LED candelabra bulbs which work quite well, is there a shape more awkward to fit into than those?
Don't trust everything you read on Twitter?
the light from LED bulbs seems more harsh
I personally find "daylight" bulbs very harsh, and I'm wondering if you got one of those. They are slightly brighter than "warm" bulbs but I don't like the color.
Ironically we say "warm" bulbs for bulbs with a lower color temperature. Color temperature is measured using the number of degrees that an ideal black-body radiator would be to glow at that color. "warm" bulbs are 2700K, and "daylight" bulbs are 5000K. The hotter color temperature means the light is shifted toward blue, so it's brighter. The "warm" temperature is less bluish. (We are used to fire being considered warm, and it's only red-hot; blue-hot is hotter. But ice looks bluish so I guess we think bluish colors are cooler.)
I have Cree brand tube bulbs that replace fluorescent tubes and they are 3000K color temperature. I like 3000K; the "warm" temperature of 2700K seems kind of yellowish to me. I found that Cree has some 3000K bulbs on the Home Depot web site (I've never seen them in a store) and I plan to try buying some.
Also, bulbs have a metric called "CRI", which I believe is "Color Rendering Index". A CRI rating of 100 is theoretically exactly as nice as sunlight. Higher is better. The most expensive Cree bulbs have CRI of over 90. Your "harsh" bulb may have a low CRI.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And although Trump may have been left unscathed by Mueller's probe
All we've seen so far is a summary written by the guy who literally covered up Iran-Contra. And even that summary explicitly states the report did not exonerate Trump:
While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him
Btw, one of Barr's "interesting" legal positions is that you can not be charged with obstructing justice unless you can be charged with the crime you obstructed justice to hide. Which would seem to fit extremely well with that quote. It's also an insane opinion that isn't backed by anything other than convenience to the powerful.
Yes, I agree with all of that, and have made similar points in other stories. Please see my reply to gtall above.
Barr's claim that there was no obstruction because there was no crime of conspiracy is ridiculous. Tell that to Martha Stewart, who was not convicted for insider trading, but was convicted for obstructing the investigation of her alleged insider trading.
And it gets better with Barr. He maintains that the President cannot obstruct justice. Not hard to see how he got the nod from the WH to be the new AG.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
They sort of work for some use cases. They are not remotely a good replacement, though, for a whole host of reasons, from spectrum differences to brightness differences to not existing in the same sorts of globe styles. But you're right that they're better than they were.
Any regulation of residential lighting was always a waste. It's not about helping the environment. It's about virtue signaling, proving by forcing people to give up their incandescent bulbs that they're serious about the environment. Why do I say this? Three reasons:
Trying to solve global warming by reducing residential lighting electrical usage is like trying to stop crime by finding a criminal and driving at 5 MPH in front of him or her with your car for a block. It is patently absurd, and anybody who says otherwise hasn't seriously thought about the numbers. We can't conserve our way out of this problem. We have to change the means of energy production, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy or nuclear power. That's the *only* approach that can *possibly* have an effect that is big enough to be worth the effort.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.