I've made recommendations before, but since we're not talking about anything that's objectively measurable, what you want and what I want are going to differ widely. What I currently recommend is that you buy a bunch and try 'em out. If you don't like the color, put them in your attic/garage/basement/closet/shed where you'll occasionally need light, but aren't too concerned about the decor.
What you're asking is along the lines of "how do I find clothes in my favorite color?" without telling us what color you like. The answer is "go look at a bunch of clothes."
Now, if you're talking about reliability, and the wiring in your house is good... I don't know what to tell you. My first CF bulb turns 10 this year, and the only two I've ever had burn out was connected to a bad circuit. What's around the house is a mishmash of bulbs-- some, like the first one, were as much as $35 when new. Others came in six-packs for $10. There's probably a half-dozen brands and ten different types inside and outdoors. They just don't burn out for us.
"Some have horrible colors and a relatively long (.5 to 1 second) warm up time."
But bulbs with warmup times in the 2-minute range are not entirely uncommon, either. There are good ones out there, though. You can find bulbs that light up right when you flip the switch, come on at almost full brightness, reach full brightness in just a few seconds, don't hum, and don't make awful bluish light. It may just take you a while to find the ones that work for you.
My first CF bulb turns 10 this year. It was $35 when I bought it.
It's a huge chunk of space set up to power 10,000 homes, when it's a safe bet that the rooftops of 10,000 homes have more surface area than this power plant already. Some of them won't have a clear view of the sky, and some of them will be at lousy angles-- but I'm sure you could do it.
I suppose centralizing it makes maintenance easier, though. Things like this seem like they would make more sense in the southwestern US. I'm sure we could spare a few square miles of desert, and the power production would be much, much higher.
Seriously, that's awesome that you live somewhere so fully green. But, as you pointed out-- 10% of your power is *still* dirty, and according to a quick google, residential lighting accounts for roughly 9% of total residential power consumption, which you will notice is a full percentage point lower than the amount of non-renewable power generation in your area. (even assuming that there is nothing but residential use, which is fairly certain to not be the case, skewing the figures even further in favor of switching) I've also given you the benefit of the doubt on your "renewable" power sources and assumed that none of them produce any emissions at all.
You would be hard-pressed to find *any* location in the United States where it doesn't make sense to switch to CF bulbs, even assuming nobody is recycling them, and every single bulb ends up in the landfill. It's a net power reduction, and a net pollutant reduction across the board.
Even with 90% zero-emission renewable power (something that is vanishingly rare in the US)-- the switch to CF bulbs is a gain without even recycling them.
Throwing a CF bulb in the garbage at the end of its life produces releases about half as much mercury as a coal plant powering an equivalent regular bulb. Note that this figure includes the smaller amount of mercury produced powering the CF bulb.
Given that coal is roughly 50% of all the power generation in the US, and that lighting is less than 50% of all power usage-- switching all standard bulbs to CF will result in a net reduction in environmental mercury *in addition* to reducing numerous other pollutants produced by generation.
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
Indeed! I blamed my mistake on the cat. Stupid cat. Always chewing on my calculations.
Given the size of those little dots representing the total area we'd need to replace our power use-- I imagine it would mostly fit on rooftops. We probably wouldn't even need to pave the desert with silicon... just gradually re-roof everything with it instead.
E.g., they do cast a shadow, just like any other 3D object, so an area filled with those is pretty much an area where you can forget about growing anything, trees included.
What? Yes, they cast a shadow. It's fairly narrow. The only wind farms I've ever seen have been in the middle of growing things, though. Including a big one I drive past now and then in Illinois that is an actual farm. The shadows are tall and skinny, and since the earth rotates, they're not in one place for very long. In fact, midwestern farmland is often practically ideal for windfarms. Easy access for construction, very little issue with "ruining the view", and the land still functions as a farm underneath.
E.g., build enough of them, and you're whacking birds left and right.
While this is true of small, high-speed windmills, a modern commercial windmill has blades turning very, very slowly. A *maximum* speed of 14rpm.
It's already been pointed out that you fudged the calculation and are off by three orders of magnitude (I did the same thing last week figuring up the usable power output of my roof area on a napkin).
So instead, I'll leave you with this map of what the required area to meet our energy requirements with solar power would look like.
Note that this map assumes a whopping 8% efficiency for collection, too.
Are you arguing with the guy who appears to agree with you, or was there a post in between that got modded into oblivion and disappeared?
Either way, I'll toss in my agreement-- even basic research would reveal that solar panels reach manufacturing energy payback in 2-5 years, depending on the type of panels. They have lifetimes in the decades.
BTW -- warmer conditions mean more plant growth, so more C02 is a likely RESULT of a temperature rise, not a percussor.
I would like to take this moment to point out to everyone that plants absorb CO2, keep the carbon, and spit out oxygen. More CO2 is absolutely the opposite of what happens when you have more plant growth. The more they grow, the less CO2 you'll have.
One time, yes you do. But you also need to do that for a shot straight from earth. So that's pretty much a wash, agreed? The problem comes from multiple moon ->mars shots.
Are you saying that it takes the same amount of fuel to make a heavily-loaded fuel run to the moon, land, and then climb out of the moon's gravity well and land on mars as it does to go from the earth to mars?
I went to a big superbowl party. The house it was hosted at was equipped with a humongous (65"ish) toshiba HDTV and a Motorola/Comcast DCT6412 HD DVR. The box was configured wrong (probably set up for his previous television) and was scaling the HD signal back down to 480p, and cropping it to 4:3 (cutting off the edges). This picture was then stretched to fill the widescreen, so we not only miss the edge of the picture, but everybody looks short and fat.
Out of the 60-odd people there, I only found three other people who recognized that we weren't seeing HD, and we were soundly voted down to take a second to fix the settings on the box. The overwhelming majority of people think anything they see on an HDTV is HDTV, even when it is cropped, stretched, 4:3 SDTV on a tv big enough to count the pixels. Most people won't know the difference if you don't stand there and flip back and forth between SD and HD for them.
Don't buy cables from a store like Best Buy, ever. The markup is ridiculous. Use a company like monoprice.com, who will happily sell you your choice of a bajillion cable types for just a few bucks. Six foot HDMI? $6. Ten feet? $7. Fifteen feet? $8.
I shudder every time I see some poor sap spend $60 for a single cable at a retailer.
"Pro-Abortion" is an entirely different stance. I think you're looking for "Pro Abortion Rights." An actual "Pro Abortion" individual is probably pretty rare, although I imagine you could find one, possibly in some sort of eugenics or strict population reduction movement.
Responsible scientists don't do the things you describe. Nutbag enviro-protestors do. Does the fact that there are nutbags attached to the cause negate the good science being done?
Do all gun owners run fortified compounds or militias? Do all Christians protest gays at military funerals? Do all anti-abortion activists murder doctors? Do all vegetarians dump red paint on people with fur coats? No. It behooves us all to avoid grouping people together based on something as simple as broadly-categorized beliefs.
Step back, and look at the science without any hype from the "concerned followers" on either side. The hype, as in nearly everything in life, is a distraction that detracts from reasoned debate on BOTH sides of the issue. You don't want your advice on the environment from a crystal-grabbing pyramid hippie any more than you want it from the owner of a hilltop-removal and strip-mining coal operation.
Sorta. They approach a COP of 1 somewhere between -5F and 0F, from a quick google. It does get colder than that for part of the year in a lot of non-arctic places. But it's also warmer than that for a chunk of the year, too.
So... you can either use electric resistive heating with a COP of 1 all the time, or you can use a heat pump that gets a COP of 1 when it's really cold but gets a COP of 3 or 4 in the spring or fall when it's merely cool.
On top of that, a ground-loop pump works no matter how bad it gets outside, unless you live on exceptionally deep permafrost. It uses the subsurface temperature (somewhere in the 50s where I live, even though we see occasional dips to -20F) as the starting point rather than outside air.
I have a CFL bulb in a motion-detector light that specifically says "don't put CFL bulbs in here." It turns on and off dozens of times a day. It has a cheapo lowes six-pack bulb in it that probably cost $2, and it's been running for three years without issue.
There's one in my garage door opener, too. It goes on and off with the door, as well as via a motion detector in the control pad, so it sees more cycles than most of our lights, too.
These are cheap indoor CFL bulbs in outdoor environments with temperature ranges from 0F to 95F in rough-voltage circuits with motion detectors and repeated short on/off cycles-- and they've been going strong for three years.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I had one go in two weeks in a ceiling socket over the dining room table.
...but it's one that is widely addressed. Solar intensity is certainly variable. It's also easily measurable. So here's the question: given how much more energy we're getting from the sun, are we as warm as we expect to be? The answer is currently no. We're warmer than we can account for by solar intensity alone.
Responsible scientists are not simply talking about warming. They're talking about climate change that is both more complex than simply "it's warmer" and they're talking very specifically about change that they can't account for when they take everything else they know about into account. Natural greenhouse emissions (methane, CO2), solar intensity, how long you leave your XBox 360 on, etc... if it's warmer than we expect from all of those things, then we've got issues.
The COP drops pretty significantly starting right around your morning temperature, somewhere in the -5F vicinity, probably varying by model. At some point it approaches one, and it becomes the same as resistive heating (most of the heat is actually being made by the compressor working its little heart out at that point). It's better to run a resistive element on those days. Odds are that even in your climate, you see significant parts of the year where the pump would be beneficial, though.
The way around this limitation is if you use a ground-loop heat pump. A length of pipe is run about eight feet underground and coolant is circulated through it. Since the temperature underground is relatively constant year-round, you're "pumping" heat from the ground where it's about 50F rather than from the much colder air at the surface.
If you're considering one, look carefully at the COP and the specified temperature range. Ground-loop installs are obviously more complex, but if it's that cold where you're located then it's likely you have a fairly steep heating bill as it is, and you may be able to justify the expense with savings.
No argument there. It's like the radiation released from coal power plants vs. nuke plants. Nuke plants make less per watt, but it's all in one place and highly toxic.
Are you disagreeing with me? Your documentation seems to back my points-- it says, rather clearly, and with nice charts what amounts of energy are required to produce heat in various ways. Those are:
Gas/Electric heat (electric fans and gas heater): 68% source-to-delivered Air-source heat pump with COP=2: 58% source-to-delivered Ground Source heat pump: 111% source-to-delivered Advanced GS heat pump: 167% source-to-delivered Pure electric heat: 30% source-to-delivered (see his assumptions page for this number-- he is using a 70% loss estimate for electrical generation and transmission.)
This is exactly what I said-- resistive electric heat (which is the category you'd put a lighbulb-as-heater in) is the worst of the bunch. Gas is better, heat pumps are better, etc... and how much better your heat pump is depends on its COP. 2 is pretty low-- you can get 4 from an air-coupled unit without even going crazy with ground-loop stuff.
It's a heat pump not a heater. It moves thermal energy from outside your house to inside your house. It can do so even if it's cold outside, because "cold" to people is still a long way from too cold to extract usable heat from.
It's just like running your air conditioner in reverse, except that the waste heat produced by running the pump is also useful when you're heating rather than cooling.
There are certainly transmission losses with gas, but you don't have the "double hit" you get between generation loss and transmission loss with electric heat.
Of course, I've been wrong before-- if gas is actually less efficient net than electricity, I'll happily change my tune if you can point me to the relevant documentation.
Ohhhhhhh, that's right. It's been so long since I was into the collecting that I had forgotten about the mints. That's why there were three spaces for steel pennies.
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I've made recommendations before, but since we're not talking about anything that's objectively measurable, what you want and what I want are going to differ widely. What I currently recommend is that you buy a bunch and try 'em out. If you don't like the color, put them in your attic/garage/basement/closet/shed where you'll occasionally need light, but aren't too concerned about the decor.
What you're asking is along the lines of "how do I find clothes in my favorite color?" without telling us what color you like. The answer is "go look at a bunch of clothes."
Now, if you're talking about reliability, and the wiring in your house is good... I don't know what to tell you. My first CF bulb turns 10 this year, and the only two I've ever had burn out was connected to a bad circuit. What's around the house is a mishmash of bulbs-- some, like the first one, were as much as $35 when new. Others came in six-packs for $10. There's probably a half-dozen brands and ten different types inside and outdoors. They just don't burn out for us.
But bulbs with warmup times in the 2-minute range are not entirely uncommon, either. There are good ones out there, though. You can find bulbs that light up right when you flip the switch, come on at almost full brightness, reach full brightness in just a few seconds, don't hum, and don't make awful bluish light. It may just take you a while to find the ones that work for you.
My first CF bulb turns 10 this year. It was $35 when I bought it.
It's a huge chunk of space set up to power 10,000 homes, when it's a safe bet that the rooftops of 10,000 homes have more surface area than this power plant already. Some of them won't have a clear view of the sky, and some of them will be at lousy angles-- but I'm sure you could do it.
I suppose centralizing it makes maintenance easier, though. Things like this seem like they would make more sense in the southwestern US. I'm sure we could spare a few square miles of desert, and the power production would be much, much higher.
Seriously, that's awesome that you live somewhere so fully green. But, as you pointed out-- 10% of your power is *still* dirty, and according to a quick google, residential lighting accounts for roughly 9% of total residential power consumption, which you will notice is a full percentage point lower than the amount of non-renewable power generation in your area. (even assuming that there is nothing but residential use, which is fairly certain to not be the case, skewing the figures even further in favor of switching) I've also given you the benefit of the doubt on your "renewable" power sources and assumed that none of them produce any emissions at all.
You would be hard-pressed to find *any* location in the United States where it doesn't make sense to switch to CF bulbs, even assuming nobody is recycling them, and every single bulb ends up in the landfill. It's a net power reduction, and a net pollutant reduction across the board.
Even with 90% zero-emission renewable power (something that is vanishingly rare in the US)-- the switch to CF bulbs is a gain without even recycling them.
Throwing a CF bulb in the garbage at the end of its life produces releases about half as much mercury as a coal plant powering an equivalent regular bulb. Note that this figure includes the smaller amount of mercury produced powering the CF bulb.
Given that coal is roughly 50% of all the power generation in the US, and that lighting is less than 50% of all power usage-- switching all standard bulbs to CF will result in a net reduction in environmental mercury *in addition* to reducing numerous other pollutants produced by generation.
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
Indeed! I blamed my mistake on the cat. Stupid cat. Always chewing on my calculations.
Given the size of those little dots representing the total area we'd need to replace our power use-- I imagine it would mostly fit on rooftops. We probably wouldn't even need to pave the desert with silicon... just gradually re-roof everything with it instead.
E.g., they do cast a shadow, just like any other 3D object, so an area filled with those is pretty much an area where you can forget about growing anything, trees included.
What? Yes, they cast a shadow. It's fairly narrow. The only wind farms I've ever seen have been in the middle of growing things, though. Including a big one I drive past now and then in Illinois that is an actual farm. The shadows are tall and skinny, and since the earth rotates, they're not in one place for very long. In fact, midwestern farmland is often practically ideal for windfarms. Easy access for construction, very little issue with "ruining the view", and the land still functions as a farm underneath.
E.g., build enough of them, and you're whacking birds left and right.
While this is true of small, high-speed windmills, a modern commercial windmill has blades turning very, very slowly. A *maximum* speed of 14rpm.
It's already been pointed out that you fudged the calculation and are off by three orders of magnitude (I did the same thing last week figuring up the usable power output of my roof area on a napkin).
So instead, I'll leave you with this map of what the required area to meet our energy requirements with solar power would look like.
Note that this map assumes a whopping 8% efficiency for collection, too.
Are you arguing with the guy who appears to agree with you, or was there a post in between that got modded into oblivion and disappeared?
Either way, I'll toss in my agreement-- even basic research would reveal that solar panels reach manufacturing energy payback in 2-5 years, depending on the type of panels. They have lifetimes in the decades.
BTW -- warmer conditions mean more plant growth, so more C02 is a likely RESULT of a temperature rise, not a percussor.
I would like to take this moment to point out to everyone that plants absorb CO2, keep the carbon, and spit out oxygen. More CO2 is absolutely the opposite of what happens when you have more plant growth. The more they grow, the less CO2 you'll have.
Didn't they cover this in 3rd grade?
Charles Stross
Rudy Rucker (some older, some new)
One time, yes you do. But you also need to do that for a shot straight from earth. So that's pretty much a wash, agreed? The problem comes from multiple moon ->mars shots.
Are you saying that it takes the same amount of fuel to make a heavily-loaded fuel run to the moon, land, and then climb out of the moon's gravity well and land on mars as it does to go from the earth to mars?
I went to a big superbowl party. The house it was hosted at was equipped with a humongous (65"ish) toshiba HDTV and a Motorola/Comcast DCT6412 HD DVR. The box was configured wrong (probably set up for his previous television) and was scaling the HD signal back down to 480p, and cropping it to 4:3 (cutting off the edges). This picture was then stretched to fill the widescreen, so we not only miss the edge of the picture, but everybody looks short and fat.
Out of the 60-odd people there, I only found three other people who recognized that we weren't seeing HD, and we were soundly voted down to take a second to fix the settings on the box. The overwhelming majority of people think anything they see on an HDTV is HDTV, even when it is cropped, stretched, 4:3 SDTV on a tv big enough to count the pixels. Most people won't know the difference if you don't stand there and flip back and forth between SD and HD for them.
Don't buy cables from a store like Best Buy, ever. The markup is ridiculous. Use a company like monoprice.com, who will happily sell you your choice of a bajillion cable types for just a few bucks. Six foot HDMI? $6. Ten feet? $7. Fifteen feet? $8.
I shudder every time I see some poor sap spend $60 for a single cable at a retailer.
"Pro-Abortion" is an entirely different stance. I think you're looking for "Pro Abortion Rights." An actual "Pro Abortion" individual is probably pretty rare, although I imagine you could find one, possibly in some sort of eugenics or strict population reduction movement.
Responsible scientists don't do the things you describe. Nutbag enviro-protestors do. Does the fact that there are nutbags attached to the cause negate the good science being done?
Do all gun owners run fortified compounds or militias? Do all Christians protest gays at military funerals? Do all anti-abortion activists murder doctors? Do all vegetarians dump red paint on people with fur coats? No. It behooves us all to avoid grouping people together based on something as simple as broadly-categorized beliefs.
Step back, and look at the science without any hype from the "concerned followers" on either side. The hype, as in nearly everything in life, is a distraction that detracts from reasoned debate on BOTH sides of the issue. You don't want your advice on the environment from a crystal-grabbing pyramid hippie any more than you want it from the owner of a hilltop-removal and strip-mining coal operation.
Sorta. They approach a COP of 1 somewhere between -5F and 0F, from a quick google. It does get colder than that for part of the year in a lot of non-arctic places. But it's also warmer than that for a chunk of the year, too.
So... you can either use electric resistive heating with a COP of 1 all the time, or you can use a heat pump that gets a COP of 1 when it's really cold but gets a COP of 3 or 4 in the spring or fall when it's merely cool.
On top of that, a ground-loop pump works no matter how bad it gets outside, unless you live on exceptionally deep permafrost. It uses the subsurface temperature (somewhere in the 50s where I live, even though we see occasional dips to -20F) as the starting point rather than outside air.
I have a CFL bulb in a motion-detector light that specifically says "don't put CFL bulbs in here." It turns on and off dozens of times a day. It has a cheapo lowes six-pack bulb in it that probably cost $2, and it's been running for three years without issue.
There's one in my garage door opener, too. It goes on and off with the door, as well as via a motion detector in the control pad, so it sees more cycles than most of our lights, too.
These are cheap indoor CFL bulbs in outdoor environments with temperature ranges from 0F to 95F in rough-voltage circuits with motion detectors and repeated short on/off cycles-- and they've been going strong for three years.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I had one go in two weeks in a ceiling socket over the dining room table.
...but it's one that is widely addressed. Solar intensity is certainly variable. It's also easily measurable. So here's the question: given how much more energy we're getting from the sun, are we as warm as we expect to be? The answer is currently no. We're warmer than we can account for by solar intensity alone.
Responsible scientists are not simply talking about warming. They're talking about climate change that is both more complex than simply "it's warmer" and they're talking very specifically about change that they can't account for when they take everything else they know about into account. Natural greenhouse emissions (methane, CO2), solar intensity, how long you leave your XBox 360 on, etc... if it's warmer than we expect from all of those things, then we've got issues.
The COP drops pretty significantly starting right around your morning temperature, somewhere in the -5F vicinity, probably varying by model. At some point it approaches one, and it becomes the same as resistive heating (most of the heat is actually being made by the compressor working its little heart out at that point). It's better to run a resistive element on those days. Odds are that even in your climate, you see significant parts of the year where the pump would be beneficial, though.
The way around this limitation is if you use a ground-loop heat pump. A length of pipe is run about eight feet underground and coolant is circulated through it. Since the temperature underground is relatively constant year-round, you're "pumping" heat from the ground where it's about 50F rather than from the much colder air at the surface.
If you're considering one, look carefully at the COP and the specified temperature range. Ground-loop installs are obviously more complex, but if it's that cold where you're located then it's likely you have a fairly steep heating bill as it is, and you may be able to justify the expense with savings.
No argument there. It's like the radiation released from coal power plants vs. nuke plants. Nuke plants make less per watt, but it's all in one place and highly toxic.
Are you disagreeing with me? Your documentation seems to back my points-- it says, rather clearly, and with nice charts what amounts of energy are required to produce heat in various ways. Those are:
Gas/Electric heat (electric fans and gas heater): 68% source-to-delivered
Air-source heat pump with COP=2: 58% source-to-delivered
Ground Source heat pump: 111% source-to-delivered
Advanced GS heat pump: 167% source-to-delivered
Pure electric heat: 30% source-to-delivered (see his assumptions page for this number-- he is using a 70% loss estimate for electrical generation and transmission.)
This is exactly what I said-- resistive electric heat (which is the category you'd put a lighbulb-as-heater in) is the worst of the bunch. Gas is better, heat pumps are better, etc... and how much better your heat pump is depends on its COP. 2 is pretty low-- you can get 4 from an air-coupled unit without even going crazy with ground-loop stuff.
It's a heat pump not a heater. It moves thermal energy from outside your house to inside your house. It can do so even if it's cold outside, because "cold" to people is still a long way from too cold to extract usable heat from.
It's just like running your air conditioner in reverse, except that the waste heat produced by running the pump is also useful when you're heating rather than cooling.
There are certainly transmission losses with gas, but you don't have the "double hit" you get between generation loss and transmission loss with electric heat.
Of course, I've been wrong before-- if gas is actually less efficient net than electricity, I'll happily change my tune if you can point me to the relevant documentation.
Ohhhhhhh, that's right. It's been so long since I was into the collecting that I had forgotten about the mints. That's why there were three spaces for steel pennies.