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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.
Your HVAC is the big energy consumer in your house.
And a lot of that power is spent pumping out the heat from the lights. So if the lights result in less heat, the HVAC runs less and also uses less power. Win-win.
Standard incandescents run about 2.2% efficiency. So for one unit of light energy they burn over 45 units of power. It all ends up as heat for the HVAC to pump out on cooling days.
Modern LEDs run about 1/10th the power for a given amount of light. (The 1/5th of TFA is a couple years out of date.) Cutting your lighting power by a factor of 10 is a lot. (LEDs are now only a couple more doublings from emitting nothing but the light, with no waste.)
While cooling your lights is only part of an HVAC's work, it's a BIG part. (A resting person, for instance, only emits about 75 watts of heat, so even a single table lamp may be loading the HVAC more than a person.) That part is reduced proportion to the reduction in the heat from the lighting . HVACs in cooling mode have an Energy Efficiency Ratio in the ballpark of 3.3. So for every three watts of power you save on your lights, you save about another watt on HVAC power on cooling days.
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Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way