Yeah, I *did* say nearly. I've replaced every bulb (outdoor spots, recessed, lamps with shades that clip on the bulb, torches, ceiling fixtures, dangly paper lamps, small-socket ambient lighting, etc...) in our house except the light bar in the bathroom. It's on a dimmer, and takes G25 globe bulbs. I can find dimmable CF bulbs, and G25 globe CF bulbs, but no dimmable globes. We never actually dim the thing, so one of my future projects will be removing the dimmer so I can replace the bulbs.
It's a little impractical to have a dedicated mini lizard-size heat pump. A heat lamp is a reasonable solution, and since I assume you have the light configured to heat his relatively small cage rather than your entire house-- it's a whole lot more reasonable than using ceiling-mounted lights to heat the top six inches of your living space at a rate 2 to 4 times more energy intensive than a garden-variety heat pump.
The ban is silly. It means well, but it's technology-specific, not result-specific as it should be to best achieve their intent of reducing power consumption by lighting.
I did want to point out, however, that CF bulbs result in less mercury dumped into the environment after about six years compared to incandescents. Wikipedia has a handy graph:
Burning coal releases lots of mercury. Using a CF bulb uses less power, which releases less mercury, and after about six years the savings offset the mercury in the bulb. The bulbs last a while-- I'm still using the first ones I bought in 1997, although they are dimmer than when they were new and have been relocated to the basement.
While I agree you should have the choice, you can easily replace your 100W halogen and your outdoor spotlights. I replaced ours. In fact, the CF replacement for the halogen bulb is brighter at about a third the power usage. The spots were off-the-shelf replacements for the big outdoor reflector spotlight bulbs, and with the reflector housing you'd never even know they were CF.
As to your turn signal, there are obviously applications (like blinking lights) that are terrible for CF. And good for LED, which is what you're starting to see on cars.
Aren't they pretty close to 100 percent efficient?
Yes, but a plain old air-coupled heat pump is 200% to 400% efficient, since it's just *moving* heat instead of creating it. One watt puts 2-4 watts of heat in your house.
It's a wash if and only if you are using resistive electric heating as your home's heat source. Light bulbs (and resistive heaters) have a Coefficient of Performance of roughly 1.0-- a watt of energy makes a watt of heat.
Modern heat pumps have COPs in the 2-4 range for air-coupled units, and higher for water or ground-loop units. A watt of energy pumps 2-4 watts of heat into your house from outside.
And lastly, gas heat doesn't suffer transmission loss to the degree that electricity does, since it is burned on-premises instead of being burned far away, used to make power (at a loss), pumped over transmission lines (at a loss), and *then* made into heat in your house.
Somebody had to point it out. Not all CF bulbs are dimmable, but dimmable ones are fairly easy to find if you look. I have a few recessed dimmable R30 reflector CF bulbs. You can find a replacement for nearly anything.
You sure it was only one year? I'm pretty sure the penny collection I had as a kid had three years of steel pennies in it. It's also possible that I just had three of the same year. I'll have to dig it out of the attic and check.
"I could agree with you, and concede the point, but I consider using words which mean the opposite of what you are trying to say in normal conversation to be extremely silly.".
There are a few states that don't yet require net metering where the power companies there aren't doing it voluntarily-- but in most of the US, you can make power and get paid for it when you're producing more than you are using.
Modern panels are net-positive on their manufacturing energy in less than five years (as little as two, depending on type)-- and are often warranted for 25 years, with life expectancies even higher.
Nuclear power is great. It's not a financial gain yet to install solar panels. Insulation and CF Bulbs are a better first step. We agree on the broad strokes of your post-- but I do want to make a few small corrections. Most solar panels these days are break-even on the energy required for production in less than five years, some types in as little as two. Most are also warranted to produce 80% of their original output for 25 years, and have life expectancies closer to 40 years.
Solar panels are definitely net energy producers, by a rather large margin. What they are not is profitable for a homeowner. Yet.
Look at it this way: even if everybody cut their energy usage in half, we'd still be using a lot of damn power. It's got to come from somewhere. The folks who soothe their consciences by buying in to tech like this early do us all a huge favor-- they're paying the R&D costs for the systems, paying for refinement of production techniques, paying to give installers experience and exposure, and paying to be long-term guinea pigs for something very few people have done.
Early adopters might not be doing things the way you'd want them to in a perfect world, but they're a step better than the folks who do nothing. And their choice will pay dividends for everyone as the kinks get worked out of the process and manufacturing costs go down. Let them do it. It's the most positive choice they're likely to make, and we all see some benefit.
The cheapest ones I've found at Lowes (a 6-pack for $9.98) are all instant-on. I use 'em all over the place, and I've burned out a whopping total of two in nine years.
The light they make is close enough to regular incandescents that we can't tell the difference. They do stand stand out a bit if you mix them with halogens, though.
Also, if meatless diets are so obviously better for your health, why do so few health experts choose meatless diets for themselves? Perhaps the evidence is not as clear as you think it is.
This is a little bit silly. Doctors are people, too-- just because there's evidence for something doesn't mean they're all going to live perfect evidence-based lives. There are fat doctors, alcoholic doctors, and doctors who smoke, and the evidence for those things being unhealthy is well beyond doubt by this point.
What would be interesting to see is what percentage of doctors do all of those things compared to the general population.
I got an LCD recently, too, and thought it was like yours. Turns out there's an option buried in the onscreen menus that allows you to choose between a 14w instant-on standby and a half-watt standby with a longer startup time.
It's still on faster than my old CRT, so I'm quite happy to use the low-power standby mode.
Mine's one of those cheapo Westinghouse units, so your mileage may vary.
"How do the emissions from driving a pickup truck all the time compare to sending a delivery truck as needed and driving a small car the rest?"
or
"Is sending a delivery truck with deliveries for multiple people on a circular route with many stops more efficient than every individual driving to and from the store?"
or
"Is it more efficient to send a single flatbed then to make two or three trips with a pickup for large loads?"
I tried to be clear, but it's not coming across. I'm not suggesting that a car with four seats works for families of five who ride together. That's obviously not true. I'm not suggesting that folks who routinely tow a trailer or a boat can get by with a subcompact. Nor would I make the dubious claim that someone who lives in the country where the roads aren't plowed shouldn't have a vehicle capable of getting them to a hospital/drugstore/bar in an emergency in winter.
*All* I pointed out is that home construction projects are feasible with small cars. Deliveries and rentals are not expensive, and a thoughtfully planned project will only need one. Particularly when you compare them to the cost difference between a pickup and a civic. It seems like people can't justify paying a delivery or rental fee now and then, when the alternative is paying significantly more every month for your car loan and fuel whether you use it or not.
Like you said... utility is handy. But it seems awfully expensive compared to just getting things delivered.
Incidentally, I'm not trying to suggest that people's needs are not different. Towing a boat, for example, is not possible with a Civic. But large home construction projects are, and that is the only thing I wanted to point out.
This was a 15-month project done in my spare time. Just becase I got a stack of stuff delivered doesn't mean the project has to be done immediately. It helps to sit down with your floor plan for an hour and walk through your build order to prevent having to move the pile at a later date. (ie, don't stack your stuff where you're going to frame a new wall.) The pile of material was 4x8, and about five feet tall. Lumber on top, then drywall, then subfloor-- and build in that order.
But it's not rocket science, and it saved me an immense amount of time and effort. If, like us, your hardware store charges $50 for a delivery-- I'd be willing to bet you can afford a couple of those a month based *solely* on the monthly car payment difference between a V8 pickup and a Civic.
Incidentally, while we didn't NEED a pickup truck, it did make sense for us since we're remodeling our house and landscaping during the summer.
I just finished a 1000 sq. ft. basement using only a Honda Civic. I needed exactly one delivery from the hardware store to drop off the lumber and drywall. Why load the stuff into a truck yourself, when you can have somebody else drop it off with a forklift? And why pay for the truck all the time when it's only needed once or twice per large construction project?
A few times I needed a couple more boards when I fudged a cut or underestimated quantities-- but 8-foot lumber fits in a 2-door '01 Civic with the trunk closed, and 12-foot can stick out the back in a pinch.
For me to need a truck, I'd have to be engaged in a project of that size every week or two before it became a justified expense.
Extremely high quality, very low prices. Their component video cables are so huge and heavily shielded it's ridiculous. I think they're actually made from RG-6.
Anybody paying $30 for six feet of fiber optics or $50 for USB's ugly cousin HDMI is just tossing money away.
Try someplace like monoprice.com. 6ft. HDMI is $6.37, 15ft. HDMI is all of $8.07. Yes, you have to wait a couple of days for them to ship, so it's no good for last-second replacements. But for the price, you might as well just buy two of everything and store the spares.
My apologies for the sarcasm. Even with this months' drop, prices for gas are going up. There are, of course, shorter-term anomalies in both directions-- like when it was $0.79/gallon during the early 90s, or when it was almost $4/gallon right after some hurricane crushed a major supply channel for the US.
Yes, it's down this month. But that doesn't mean much for the overall trend.
To be fair, there's less data present in a 2MP digicam shot than you might think. There aren't actually two million color pixels-- there are 1 million green pixels, and 500,000 red and blue pixels arranged in a grid. So, you've got 2MP of decent luminance data and significantly less color information.
On a nice 1600x1200 monitor, you should be able to see an increase in sharpness by viewing a scaled-down 8MP image over a 2MP image, all other things being equal. The scaled-down image will have complete color and luminance information at each pixel on the monitor, not a dodgy interpolated version of it.
And, of course, you're acting like there aren't any monitors above 1600x1200-- when Dell will happily sell you an LCD with a native 2560x1600 resolution. And let's not forget actually printing your pictures out at a size above 5x7.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I *did* say nearly. I've replaced every bulb (outdoor spots, recessed, lamps with shades that clip on the bulb, torches, ceiling fixtures, dangly paper lamps, small-socket ambient lighting, etc...) in our house except the light bar in the bathroom. It's on a dimmer, and takes G25 globe bulbs. I can find dimmable CF bulbs, and G25 globe CF bulbs, but no dimmable globes. We never actually dim the thing, so one of my future projects will be removing the dimmer so I can replace the bulbs.
It's a little impractical to have a dedicated mini lizard-size heat pump. A heat lamp is a reasonable solution, and since I assume you have the light configured to heat his relatively small cage rather than your entire house-- it's a whole lot more reasonable than using ceiling-mounted lights to heat the top six inches of your living space at a rate 2 to 4 times more energy intensive than a garden-variety heat pump.
The ban is silly. It means well, but it's technology-specific, not result-specific as it should be to best achieve their intent of reducing power consumption by lighting.
I agree with the silliness of mandating this.
r y_use_environment.svg
I did want to point out, however, that CF bulbs result in less mercury dumped into the environment after about six years compared to incandescents. Wikipedia has a handy graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CFL_bulb_mercu
Burning coal releases lots of mercury. Using a CF bulb uses less power, which releases less mercury, and after about six years the savings offset the mercury in the bulb. The bulbs last a while-- I'm still using the first ones I bought in 1997, although they are dimmer than when they were new and have been relocated to the basement.
While I agree you should have the choice, you can easily replace your 100W halogen and your outdoor spotlights. I replaced ours. In fact, the CF replacement for the halogen bulb is brighter at about a third the power usage. The spots were off-the-shelf replacements for the big outdoor reflector spotlight bulbs, and with the reflector housing you'd never even know they were CF.
As to your turn signal, there are obviously applications (like blinking lights) that are terrible for CF. And good for LED, which is what you're starting to see on cars.
Aren't they pretty close to 100 percent efficient?
Yes, but a plain old air-coupled heat pump is 200% to 400% efficient, since it's just *moving* heat instead of creating it. One watt puts 2-4 watts of heat in your house.
It's a wash if and only if you are using resistive electric heating as your home's heat source. Light bulbs (and resistive heaters) have a Coefficient of Performance of roughly 1.0-- a watt of energy makes a watt of heat.
Modern heat pumps have COPs in the 2-4 range for air-coupled units, and higher for water or ground-loop units. A watt of energy pumps 2-4 watts of heat into your house from outside.
And lastly, gas heat doesn't suffer transmission loss to the degree that electricity does, since it is burned on-premises instead of being burned far away, used to make power (at a loss), pumped over transmission lines (at a loss), and *then* made into heat in your house.
Somebody had to point it out. Not all CF bulbs are dimmable, but dimmable ones are fairly easy to find if you look. I have a few recessed dimmable R30 reflector CF bulbs. You can find a replacement for nearly anything.
You sure it was only one year? I'm pretty sure the penny collection I had as a kid had three years of steel pennies in it. It's also possible that I just had three of the same year. I'll have to dig it out of the attic and check.
"I could agree with you, and concede the point, but I consider using words which mean the opposite of what you are trying to say in normal conversation to be extremely silly.".
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
There are a few states that don't yet require net metering where the power companies there aren't doing it voluntarily-- but in most of the US, you can make power and get paid for it when you're producing more than you are using.
Modern panels are net-positive on their manufacturing energy in less than five years (as little as two, depending on type)-- and are often warranted for 25 years, with life expectancies even higher.
Nuclear power is great. It's not a financial gain yet to install solar panels. Insulation and CF Bulbs are a better first step. We agree on the broad strokes of your post-- but I do want to make a few small corrections. Most solar panels these days are break-even on the energy required for production in less than five years, some types in as little as two. Most are also warranted to produce 80% of their original output for 25 years, and have life expectancies closer to 40 years.
Solar panels are definitely net energy producers, by a rather large margin. What they are not is profitable for a homeowner. Yet.
Look at it this way: even if everybody cut their energy usage in half, we'd still be using a lot of damn power. It's got to come from somewhere. The folks who soothe their consciences by buying in to tech like this early do us all a huge favor-- they're paying the R&D costs for the systems, paying for refinement of production techniques, paying to give installers experience and exposure, and paying to be long-term guinea pigs for something very few people have done.
Early adopters might not be doing things the way you'd want them to in a perfect world, but they're a step better than the folks who do nothing. And their choice will pay dividends for everyone as the kinks get worked out of the process and manufacturing costs go down. Let them do it. It's the most positive choice they're likely to make, and we all see some benefit.
The cheapest ones I've found at Lowes (a 6-pack for $9.98) are all instant-on. I use 'em all over the place, and I've burned out a whopping total of two in nine years.
The light they make is close enough to regular incandescents that we can't tell the difference. They do stand stand out a bit if you mix them with halogens, though.
This is a little bit silly. Doctors are people, too-- just because there's evidence for something doesn't mean they're all going to live perfect evidence-based lives. There are fat doctors, alcoholic doctors, and doctors who smoke, and the evidence for those things being unhealthy is well beyond doubt by this point.
What would be interesting to see is what percentage of doctors do all of those things compared to the general population.
I got an LCD recently, too, and thought it was like yours. Turns out there's an option buried in the onscreen menus that allows you to choose between a 14w instant-on standby and a half-watt standby with a longer startup time.
It's still on faster than my old CRT, so I'm quite happy to use the low-power standby mode.
Mine's one of those cheapo Westinghouse units, so your mileage may vary.
Another reasonable question might be:
"How do the emissions from driving a pickup truck all the time compare to sending a delivery truck as needed and driving a small car the rest?"
or
"Is sending a delivery truck with deliveries for multiple people on a circular route with many stops more efficient than every individual driving to and from the store?"
or
"Is it more efficient to send a single flatbed then to make two or three trips with a pickup for large loads?"
I tried to be clear, but it's not coming across. I'm not suggesting that a car with four seats works for families of five who ride together. That's obviously not true. I'm not suggesting that folks who routinely tow a trailer or a boat can get by with a subcompact. Nor would I make the dubious claim that someone who lives in the country where the roads aren't plowed shouldn't have a vehicle capable of getting them to a hospital/drugstore/bar in an emergency in winter.
*All* I pointed out is that home construction projects are feasible with small cars. Deliveries and rentals are not expensive, and a thoughtfully planned project will only need one. Particularly when you compare them to the cost difference between a pickup and a civic. It seems like people can't justify paying a delivery or rental fee now and then, when the alternative is paying significantly more every month for your car loan and fuel whether you use it or not.
Like you said... utility is handy. But it seems awfully expensive compared to just getting things delivered.
Incidentally, I'm not trying to suggest that people's needs are not different. Towing a boat, for example, is not possible with a Civic. But large home construction projects are, and that is the only thing I wanted to point out.
This was a 15-month project done in my spare time. Just becase I got a stack of stuff delivered doesn't mean the project has to be done immediately. It helps to sit down with your floor plan for an hour and walk through your build order to prevent having to move the pile at a later date. (ie, don't stack your stuff where you're going to frame a new wall.) The pile of material was 4x8, and about five feet tall. Lumber on top, then drywall, then subfloor-- and build in that order.
But it's not rocket science, and it saved me an immense amount of time and effort. If, like us, your hardware store charges $50 for a delivery-- I'd be willing to bet you can afford a couple of those a month based *solely* on the monthly car payment difference between a V8 pickup and a Civic.
Incidentally, while we didn't NEED a pickup truck, it did make sense for us since we're remodeling our house and landscaping during the summer.
I just finished a 1000 sq. ft. basement using only a Honda Civic. I needed exactly one delivery from the hardware store to drop off the lumber and drywall. Why load the stuff into a truck yourself, when you can have somebody else drop it off with a forklift? And why pay for the truck all the time when it's only needed once or twice per large construction project?
A few times I needed a couple more boards when I fudged a cut or underestimated quantities-- but 8-foot lumber fits in a 2-door '01 Civic with the trunk closed, and 12-foot can stick out the back in a pinch.
For me to need a truck, I'd have to be engaged in a project of that size every week or two before it became a justified expense.
Extremely high quality, very low prices. Their component video cables are so huge and heavily shielded it's ridiculous. I think they're actually made from RG-6.
Anybody paying $30 for six feet of fiber optics or $50 for USB's ugly cousin HDMI is just tossing money away.
Try someplace like monoprice.com. 6ft. HDMI is $6.37, 15ft. HDMI is all of $8.07. Yes, you have to wait a couple of days for them to ship, so it's no good for last-second replacements. But for the price, you might as well just buy two of everything and store the spares.
My apologies for the sarcasm. Even with this months' drop, prices for gas are going up. There are, of course, shorter-term anomalies in both directions-- like when it was $0.79/gallon during the early 90s, or when it was almost $4/gallon right after some hurricane crushed a major supply channel for the US.
Yes, it's down this month. But that doesn't mean much for the overall trend.
To be fair, there's less data present in a 2MP digicam shot than you might think. There aren't actually two million color pixels-- there are 1 million green pixels, and 500,000 red and blue pixels arranged in a grid. So, you've got 2MP of decent luminance data and significantly less color information.
On a nice 1600x1200 monitor, you should be able to see an increase in sharpness by viewing a scaled-down 8MP image over a 2MP image, all other things being equal. The scaled-down image will have complete color and luminance information at each pixel on the monitor, not a dodgy interpolated version of it.
And, of course, you're acting like there aren't any monitors above 1600x1200-- when Dell will happily sell you an LCD with a native 2560x1600 resolution. And let's not forget actually printing your pictures out at a size above 5x7.