Probably not, I was going off what the store had last time I looked. Mind you, the 'damned lies' are for their incandescent equivalency rating, not anything else. So maybe Cree aren't inflating their equivalency ratings, but it was rather egarious, so the point that somebody who simply picked up X 'wattage equivalent' LED bulbs, not knowing to check lumens, to replace their incandescents could end up in a situation where it's much darker than they really had, or want. I'm going to have to check up on the cree bulbs, but this is what I'm talking about: Standard 60W Bulb: 855 CFL '60W': 825 - 96%, within tolerances. (13W) LED '60W' equivalent: 630 lumons. 74%, which is better than I remember, but still closer to a 50W incandescent, not a 60W. Now, it uses 7W, not 12 for the Cree.
It's the same sort of phenomenon as with ranges for wireless devices - 'UP TO XXX FEET!' when in reality you'll only get that range with no intervening objects/walls, with the antennas lined up perfectly, in a radio isolation chamber.
A minimum power panel for a house is 100A. At 120V this amounts to 12 kW per phase. A 200A panel will give you 24 kW per phase. Both of those numbers are high enough for any reasonably priced PV system (in other words, your PV system will not overload the grid - you'd run out of PV installation money first.)
You are aware of the concept of 'oversell', right? Just because every house has a 100/200A connection doesn't mean that EVERY house can pull that max, or even a substantial fraction of that max, simultaneously without popping something further up in the grid.
Utilities do charge that fee; therefore they are not entitled to tell you in what direction to transfer the power, as long as it is within technical constraints of the grid.
That's the thing; YOU are fine. It's when you and all your neighbors go to solar that technical and fiscal problems arise. The technical constraints of the grid are currently that not all points are fine with bidirectional power transfer. As long as power generation is low enough that power supply at those points never reverses they're fine. Whether that's at 5% of homes, 10%, or even 30% depends.
Perhaps in AK this is not such a hot item, but CA has plenty of sun.
Electricity is expensive enough here that there's a fair amount of interest. We also get LOTS of sun in the summer, and solar panels are actually inefficient when it's 'blazing sun' out because they get too hot - not a concern up here even during our 23 hours of summertime sun.
Though I'll admit that I've been more interested in solar heating - basically build an insulated box under the house and dump the thermal energy there during the summer, draw back up during the winter.
Sorry about the chopped submission earlier. Got distracted, thought I was on a different page. Anyways: To continue my point, if you're producing that much extra power you're a utility, not a consumer(in context). Coal power plants don't get to 'exchange' power with it's neighbors at the full rate, instead it generally gets less than half. The rest is considered a marginal charge for the power company in order to help guarantee power and pay for grid costs proportionally to use.
if I buy 1 kWh for 30 cents, why can't I sell it for 30 cents?
30 cents a kwh? Wow! Where are you? I don't even pay that and I have some of the most expensive electricity in the USA...
Here's a question: Let's say that you somehow come into possession of quite a bit of gasoline. Should the local store be required to buy it from you at their posted price? There's various expenses in there. They have to run the pumps, assume risk(holdup, accident), etc...
In the case of your power to me, there's power transmission losses, which increase the further you go. It's not a big deal when only 5% of the homes in a 'circuit' have solar, but when it gets into the double digits you start looking at significant power transmission out of the neighborhood, and at that point complexities, waste(transmission and power conversion losses), people not paying their bills all add up. You might have to generate 12kwh in order to get 10 to the ultimate consumer. At your proposed 'generous' 29 cents a kwh, the power company would have to charge 35 just to break even. In order to keep their rates stable, they'd have to only pay you 25(and that doesn't include other losses!). As the number of homes generating power goes up, as the number of businesses that have them go up, the further they have to ship the power to get it used, and if you bust 20% of total energy generation you stop turning more generators on/up during the day and start shutting them down. Electricity generation systems are cheapest when run continously at a specific level.
Or, perhaps, for 29 cents? 3% is a good profit for the utility for doing nothing special.
Profit is after expenses. Having an overhead around only 10% would be exceptional for a power company, but still 3X that of what you assume.
But the utility wants to buy my power for 10% of retail - and/automatically/ resell it for 100% to you. Nice racket they have here. Why would I want to sell my excess power? I'm burning it up on house heating instead.
Perfectly acceptable use in my mind.
All they block is trading energy between those who live on the sunny side of the hill and those who live on the shadowy side. How would that be antisocial?
Because it's unsustainable under the current costing system. They want to buy your power at 3 cents because that's the rate for 'we'll buy it anytime' power. If you had a battery system(let's say 100kwh) that lets you store your electricity and release it in a fairly massive surge only at peak times as requested by the power company(and not just the generalized 'more power used during the day'), they might pay you your 30 cents a kwh. Other than that it's something of a 'you're too small beans for us to bother much with'.
Should we, the neighbors, create our own power grid for those purposes?
As long as you recognize the consequences. Such as needing a storage/generation system for nights and cloudy days, assuming you don't overbuild your panels.
The society will suffer from that, as it is suffering now. Today I am not selling excess power to you, and I'm not even investing into more PV panels to keep your house lit and warm, because - by executive fiat - this is a money drain. Make it even reasonably profitable, and I will invest. The choice is yours alone - I have my PV setup already.
But I don't understand why you want me to stop at N PV panels instead of more? I have space. I can install 10x as many. Don't you want power? I will sell you power, and you will receive it for the same price that the utility charges you. It will be just a trade between us, using the utility's power grid for which we pay $8/mo separately.
Nice idea, but maintaining the grid infrastructure in a generalized fashion between you and me costs more than $8/month. Heck, the connection charge in my area is closer to $35/month. Labor is expensive and conditions are extreme. In fact we have the worlds 'most powerful battery' in my town.
B. CFLs only fail because people don't use them properly (and I don't mean turning them on and off repeatedly. That only affects shitty electronics.) They install them in enclosed areas, heat kills the electronics. They install them upside down when they're not rated for that, heat from the tungsten electrodes in the base of the bulb fries the electronics. They get cheap ones that you can hear rattling around in, and fucking use them anyways, and complain when they break
The problem with this? I've bought MANY packs of CFLs. Do you know how many I've seen that mention the upside down thing? The enclosed area thing? NONE. Not even any instructions on the inside. And I actually read what comes with the bulbs, because I'm looking for warranty information.
You have a standard power conditioner unit installed next to your electrical service panel inside your house. It will also protect your TV and computer and other electronic equipment, which are all apparently under a dire threat of zapping out even as we speak.
I'd just go with a whole-house surge surpressor that can be had for under $100. A power conditioner is much more capable, but also far more expensive. One sized for a whole house would probably be around the size of a washing machine, and cost well over $1k.
For example: Eaton Powersure 700 240V*200A=48kVA, so we need the 50kVA unit - it's 66.0 x 29.0 x 35.5 in inches and weighs 1176 pounds. Runs around $19k.
The modern switching ballast that would work for this bulb wattage/setup is wired completely differently in the fixture, so I can't just wire the new ballast in where the old one was. It was less hassle to just replace the entire fixture for a new one with the ballast pre-wired (only cost about $10 more than the ballast alone)
It's not complicated to change - we swap ballasts regularly at work, a lot of the old ones are magnetic, but it is somewhat complicated until you know the wiring.
What should be then done, if I say that light bulbs are not a big deal? Reduce the vampire load of PCs, TVs, and everything else.
Nice rant, but it disregards that the federal government has MANY programs attempting to improve energy efficiency. The bulb thing is mostly seen as low-hanging fruit. For example, your mention of vampire load here - it's being addressed by the energy star program. The site is horrible at numbers, but right now the requirement is Promote and sponsor home automation, so that smart homes automatically activate lights where they are needed. Create water heaters that have Ethernet interface, so that when the house is not occupied they do not heat water. Same goes for thermostats. Promote efficient pool pumps and filters. Change the law so that owners of solar panels can sell their excess power not at generator rates but at retail rates (this will make PV setups more appealing.)
1. Motion sensor/timer lights 2. Water heaters can take hours to heat up. Still, there are programs out there to help ensure that water heaters only operate during non-peak power periods. Energy star water heaters are more insulated, highly efficient, to the point that shutting a traditional type off won't save you as much energy as simply using one of the more efficient ones. Heat pump water heaters, for example, are rather slow, you don't want to turn them off when you're gone for the day(as opposed to going on vacation). Don't forget that that ethernet connection consumes power as well. 3. They recommend programmable thermostats 4. Pool Pumps, you say? 5. Sell electricity at retail? Ever heard of 'net metering'? It's close to what you say, as long as you're only installing as many solar panels as what you use. Allowing them to sell excess at retail dings the power companies too much(in my opinion).
Other things that can help is examining the amount of exterior lighting we do, insulating our ovens a touch more, etc...
but the silly "renewables" (with the possible exception of wave power)
If you think that wind fails to offset the carbon involved in it's construction over it's life, you'd hate to see the figures for wave power - which normally requires even more steel and other metals(sacrificial anodes, for example) to operate, with intensive maintenance requirements.
My 'carbon neutral' power mix is ~40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc...)
Sounds like you could use one of these. BTW, this unit will also help protect the expensive electronics in your home, above any power strip type surge suppressors you might be using(IE add up their protection).
Assuming he doesn't have a wierd power problem like his house voltage is under specification, I think it'd be the 'damned lies' that LED bulbs are rated equivalent to. Look at the 60W equivalent, a CFL and LED equivalent, and the CFL will be rated at about 10-20% fewer lumans, the LED will be rated at ~40% less, making it actually substantially dimmer.
So you actually have to buy 60W equivalents to replace 40W bulbs. 100W equivalents to replace 60W(if you can find them that bright). If you're used to slapping 100W bulbs everywhere, LEDs will seem very dim. As usual, I'd actually recommend replacing the fixture with one that's designed for LED's in mind. Better performance for the price over the bulb's lifetime, and fixtures aren't normally that expensive.
As for quickstart - most CFLs sold today are 'instant-on', IE even faster than 'quickstart' unless they're 100W+ equivalents. In which case I normally appreciate the warm-up time as my eyes adjust.
Stop buying the crap CFL's from Menard's and/or Lowe's. I've been in AK for 4 years now(moved from ND), and brought a bunch of CFLs with me. I'm still running the same ones, other than a 4 pack I bought from Menards that all quit in about six months. Bought better ones, long life.
Three-way incandescent bulbs are still going to be sold under an allowance for specialty bulbs.
Which I find funny because I've seen 3 way CFLs for $7 and LED bulbs for $25, though the LED maxes out at 60w equivalent, while the CFL maxes out at equivalent to a 150W incandescent.
Given that the LED maxes out at 20watts for 60w equivalent(1/3) while the CFL uses 29 watts to be equivalent to 150(1/5th), and that LEDs are expected to live roughly twice as long as a CFL*, $25 vs $7 doesn't really work out.
*That's one thing that always gets me - everyone compares LEDs to Incandescents. The equations become a lot tougher when you put them up against CFLs, much less FLs when you're replaceing the fixture.
Use heat tape next time - a drop of water won't shatter the bulb and leave you without a generator.
I also wonder about the whole heat thing - We run snowblowers, generators, and more just fine even in the dead of winter here in Alaska. I doubt the midwest gets that cold.
But yeah, a bit of heat tape would do the same thing. Or just get the carb fixed.
Irrelevant in this case when we're talking about the 'positive' of inefficient bulbs generating heat when it might be wanted because incandescent bulbs aren't heat pumps.
Matter of fact, if you have a home that obtains it's heating and cooling from a heat pump you want energy efficient bulbs precisely to gain that 3X advantage when heating IS necessary and avoiding the extra cooling. A light bulb can make sense in a limited spot to prevent freezing, but the proper answer there is probably more insulation, or failing that some heat tape which will only turn on when necessary and last years vs months.
Also, oil boilers can be over 80%. Down south I'd think more would be on natural gas/propane. As mentioned above, while electricity might 'technically' be 100% efficient inside the house, that's disregarding the 60% efficiency of the generation plant, or the ~10% losses in the transmission lines getting to you. If you're using a (geothermal) heat pump it's more efficient than burning in the house, but only if you're doing that. If you're using resistive heating, then it flips back because resistive heating is ~3 times more expensive than heat pump, with oil/gas heating somewhere in the middle of there.
In the mean time, I need to go out and get a new bulb.
Which is part of the reason why I think LEDs should be parts of fixtures, not stuffed into individual bulbs. Go with the long tube flourescent model - have a seperate power supply. While you're at it make it modular so you don't have to mess with wirenuts and such.
This also gives you an advantage because the ideal lighting patterns between incandescents and LEDs are quite different. I'd rather see a fixture designed with them in mind, especially given that with regular usage most LED bulbs would be the life of the owner/longer than most renovations. Still, make the bulbs replaceable with nothing more than a screwdriver
Typical "dim"wits like yourself assume a light that generates heat is wasting energy.(Hint: stop believing the MSM) Wrong. At least 2/3rds wrong
I'm living in Alaska; my electricity prices are such that heating my house with electricity is approximately 3 times as expensive as heating it with oil. Plus, no AC but it still gets hot in the summer. As such, electricity efficient bulbs are very handy.
So no, while I'd have to discount the 'waste' heat by about a third, it's still costing me money if I use incandescent bulbs.
There's a bit of difference between the dozen or so tubes in the old TVs, and I remember using the Rayovac machine to test tubes myself as a kid with my dad. I'm sure he could have done it faster himself, but I loved doing it.
As for the tubes in the computers, I think they were about the same reliability - smaller and more complex, but also built to a higher standard. It's just that going from ~12 tubes to 60k ones means that you're going to have them fail more often. In addition, many of them could still operate even if tubes were blown, and you could hot-swap many of them.
First, vacuum tubes lasted much longer than 6 months, Second, that's what PM is for. Preventative Maintenance would have you replacing the tubes before they're reaching EOL, increasing system reliability.
You just have to accept a few hours of downtime every few months while they swap out thousands of tubes.
According to the notoriously unreliable source you quoted, official fire investigators are trained in no less than 13 different aspects of fire investigation, not to mention the requirement to be accredited by several different organizations.
You miss the part about them messing up which quadrant test fires start in over what they'd get with random guessing? Heck, they only reached parity with their choices with the last testing 5 years ago(and I don't expect all investigators to even be that competent).
And on the right sidebar under 'powertrain' it calls it a transmission.
So I looked up Transmission and got: In British English, the term transmission refers to the whole drive train, including clutch, gearbox, prop shaft (for rear-wheel drive), differential, and final drive shafts. In American English, however, a gearbox is any device that converts speed and torque, whereas a transmission is a type of gearbox that can be "shifted" to dynamically change the speed-torque ratio such as in a vehicle.
So I suppose it's better to call it a Gearbox in American terminology because it can't be 'shifted'.
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You aren't looking at the same LED I am then.
Probably not, I was going off what the store had last time I looked. Mind you, the 'damned lies' are for their incandescent equivalency rating, not anything else. So maybe Cree aren't inflating their equivalency ratings, but it was rather egarious, so the point that somebody who simply picked up X 'wattage equivalent' LED bulbs, not knowing to check lumens, to replace their incandescents could end up in a situation where it's much darker than they really had, or want.
I'm going to have to check up on the cree bulbs, but this is what I'm talking about:
Standard 60W Bulb: 855
CFL '60W': 825 - 96%, within tolerances. (13W)
LED '60W' equivalent: 630 lumons. 74%, which is better than I remember, but still closer to a 50W incandescent, not a 60W. Now, it uses 7W, not 12 for the Cree.
It's the same sort of phenomenon as with ranges for wireless devices - 'UP TO XXX FEET!' when in reality you'll only get that range with no intervening objects/walls, with the antennas lined up perfectly, in a radio isolation chamber.
A minimum power panel for a house is 100A. At 120V this amounts to 12 kW per phase. A 200A panel will give you 24 kW per phase. Both of those numbers are high enough for any reasonably priced PV system (in other words, your PV system will not overload the grid - you'd run out of PV installation money first.)
You are aware of the concept of 'oversell', right? Just because every house has a 100/200A connection doesn't mean that EVERY house can pull that max, or even a substantial fraction of that max, simultaneously without popping something further up in the grid.
Utilities do charge that fee; therefore they are not entitled to tell you in what direction to transfer the power, as long as it is within technical constraints of the grid.
That's the thing; YOU are fine. It's when you and all your neighbors go to solar that technical and fiscal problems arise. The technical constraints of the grid are currently that not all points are fine with bidirectional power transfer. As long as power generation is low enough that power supply at those points never reverses they're fine. Whether that's at 5% of homes, 10%, or even 30% depends.
Perhaps in AK this is not such a hot item, but CA has plenty of sun.
Electricity is expensive enough here that there's a fair amount of interest. We also get LOTS of sun in the summer, and solar panels are actually inefficient when it's 'blazing sun' out because they get too hot - not a concern up here even during our 23 hours of summertime sun.
Though I'll admit that I've been more interested in solar heating - basically build an insulated box under the house and dump the thermal energy there during the summer, draw back up during the winter.
Sorry about the chopped submission earlier. Got distracted, thought I was on a different page. Anyways:
To continue my point, if you're producing that much extra power you're a utility, not a consumer(in context). Coal power plants don't get to 'exchange' power with it's neighbors at the full rate, instead it generally gets less than half. The rest is considered a marginal charge for the power company in order to help guarantee power and pay for grid costs proportionally to use.
if I buy 1 kWh for 30 cents, why can't I sell it for 30 cents?
30 cents a kwh? Wow! Where are you? I don't even pay that and I have some of the most expensive electricity in the USA...
Here's a question: Let's say that you somehow come into possession of quite a bit of gasoline. Should the local store be required to buy it from you at their posted price? There's various expenses in there. They have to run the pumps, assume risk(holdup, accident), etc...
In the case of your power to me, there's power transmission losses, which increase the further you go. It's not a big deal when only 5% of the homes in a 'circuit' have solar, but when it gets into the double digits you start looking at significant power transmission out of the neighborhood, and at that point complexities, waste(transmission and power conversion losses), people not paying their bills all add up. You might have to generate 12kwh in order to get 10 to the ultimate consumer. At your proposed 'generous' 29 cents a kwh, the power company would have to charge 35 just to break even. In order to keep their rates stable, they'd have to only pay you 25(and that doesn't include other losses!). As the number of homes generating power goes up, as the number of businesses that have them go up, the further they have to ship the power to get it used, and if you bust 20% of total energy generation you stop turning more generators on/up during the day and start shutting them down. Electricity generation systems are cheapest when run continously at a specific level.
Or, perhaps, for 29 cents? 3% is a good profit for the utility for doing nothing special.
Profit is after expenses. Having an overhead around only 10% would be exceptional for a power company, but still 3X that of what you assume.
But the utility wants to buy my power for 10% of retail - and /automatically/ resell it for 100% to you. Nice racket they have here. Why would I want to sell my excess power? I'm burning it up on house heating instead.
Perfectly acceptable use in my mind.
All they block is trading energy between those who live on the sunny side of the hill and those who live on the shadowy side. How would that be antisocial?
Because it's unsustainable under the current costing system. They want to buy your power at 3 cents because that's the rate for 'we'll buy it anytime' power. If you had a battery system(let's say 100kwh) that lets you store your electricity and release it in a fairly massive surge only at peak times as requested by the power company(and not just the generalized 'more power used during the day'), they might pay you your 30 cents a kwh. Other than that it's something of a 'you're too small beans for us to bother much with'.
Should we, the neighbors, create our own power grid for those purposes?
As long as you recognize the consequences. Such as needing a storage/generation system for nights and cloudy days, assuming you don't overbuild your panels.
The society will suffer from that, as it is suffering now. Today I am not selling excess power to you, and I'm not even investing into more PV panels to keep your house lit and warm, because - by executive fiat - this is a money drain. Make it even reasonably profitable, and I will invest. The choice is yours alone - I have my PV setup already.
There was an article yeste
But I don't understand why you want me to stop at N PV panels instead of more? I have space. I can install 10x as many. Don't you want power? I will sell you power, and you will receive it for the same price that the utility charges you. It will be just a trade between us, using the utility's power grid for which we pay $8/mo separately.
Nice idea, but maintaining the grid infrastructure in a generalized fashion between you and me costs more than $8/month. Heck, the connection charge in my area is closer to $35/month. Labor is expensive and conditions are extreme. In fact we have the worlds 'most powerful battery' in my town.
Better yet, simply put the converter in the light fixture. For most applications it shouldn't be that much bigger than a cell phone charger.
B. CFLs only fail because people don't use them properly (and I don't mean turning them on and off repeatedly. That only affects shitty electronics.) They install them in enclosed areas, heat kills the electronics. They install them upside down when they're not rated for that, heat from the tungsten electrodes in the base of the bulb fries the electronics. They get cheap ones that you can hear rattling around in, and fucking use them anyways, and complain when they break
The problem with this? I've bought MANY packs of CFLs. Do you know how many I've seen that mention the upside down thing? The enclosed area thing? NONE. Not even any instructions on the inside. And I actually read what comes with the bulbs, because I'm looking for warranty information.
You have a standard power conditioner unit installed next to your electrical service panel inside your house. It will also protect your TV and computer and other electronic equipment, which are all apparently under a dire threat of zapping out even as we speak.
I'd just go with a whole-house surge surpressor that can be had for under $100. A power conditioner is much more capable, but also far more expensive. One sized for a whole house would probably be around the size of a washing machine, and cost well over $1k.
For example: Eaton Powersure 700
240V*200A=48kVA, so we need the 50kVA unit - it's 66.0 x 29.0 x 35.5 in inches and weighs 1176 pounds. Runs around $19k.
The modern switching ballast that would work for this bulb wattage/setup is wired completely differently in the fixture, so I can't just wire the new ballast in where the old one was. It was less hassle to just replace the entire fixture for a new one with the ballast pre-wired (only cost about $10 more than the ballast alone)
It's not complicated to change - we swap ballasts regularly at work, a lot of the old ones are magnetic, but it is somewhat complicated until you know the wiring.
What should be then done, if I say that light bulbs are not a big deal? Reduce the vampire load of PCs, TVs, and everything else.
Nice rant, but it disregards that the federal government has MANY programs attempting to improve energy efficiency. The bulb thing is mostly seen as low-hanging fruit. For example, your mention of vampire load here - it's being addressed by the energy star program. The site is horrible at numbers, but right now the requirement is Promote and sponsor home automation, so that smart homes automatically activate lights where they are needed. Create water heaters that have Ethernet interface, so that when the house is not occupied they do not heat water. Same goes for thermostats. Promote efficient pool pumps and filters. Change the law so that owners of solar panels can sell their excess power not at generator rates but at retail rates (this will make PV setups more appealing.)
1. Motion sensor/timer lights
2. Water heaters can take hours to heat up. Still, there are programs out there to help ensure that water heaters only operate during non-peak power periods. Energy star water heaters are more insulated, highly efficient, to the point that shutting a traditional type off won't save you as much energy as simply using one of the more efficient ones. Heat pump water heaters, for example, are rather slow, you don't want to turn them off when you're gone for the day(as opposed to going on vacation). Don't forget that that ethernet connection consumes power as well.
3. They recommend programmable thermostats
4. Pool Pumps, you say?
5. Sell electricity at retail? Ever heard of 'net metering'? It's close to what you say, as long as you're only installing as many solar panels as what you use. Allowing them to sell excess at retail dings the power companies too much(in my opinion).
Other things that can help is examining the amount of exterior lighting we do, insulating our ovens a touch more, etc...
but the silly "renewables" (with the possible exception of wave power)
If you think that wind fails to offset the carbon involved in it's construction over it's life, you'd hate to see the figures for wave power - which normally requires even more steel and other metals(sacrificial anodes, for example) to operate, with intensive maintenance requirements.
My 'carbon neutral' power mix is ~40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc...)
Sounds like you could use one of these. BTW, this unit will also help protect the expensive electronics in your home, above any power strip type surge suppressors you might be using(IE add up their protection).
What exactly is making the LED dim?
Assuming he doesn't have a wierd power problem like his house voltage is under specification, I think it'd be the 'damned lies' that LED bulbs are rated equivalent to. Look at the 60W equivalent, a CFL and LED equivalent, and the CFL will be rated at about 10-20% fewer lumans, the LED will be rated at ~40% less, making it actually substantially dimmer.
So you actually have to buy 60W equivalents to replace 40W bulbs. 100W equivalents to replace 60W(if you can find them that bright). If you're used to slapping 100W bulbs everywhere, LEDs will seem very dim. As usual, I'd actually recommend replacing the fixture with one that's designed for LED's in mind. Better performance for the price over the bulb's lifetime, and fixtures aren't normally that expensive.
As for quickstart - most CFLs sold today are 'instant-on', IE even faster than 'quickstart' unless they're 100W+ equivalents. In which case I normally appreciate the warm-up time as my eyes adjust.
Stop buying the crap CFL's from Menard's and/or Lowe's. I've been in AK for 4 years now(moved from ND), and brought a bunch of CFLs with me. I'm still running the same ones, other than a 4 pack I bought from Menards that all quit in about six months. Bought better ones, long life.
Think of the children! How are tomorrows children going to learn how to bake?
Like a man? Same way I did: With the home's REAL oven under dad's supervision.
Or Mom's. ;)
Oven Light, Rough Service Bulb, Higher rated Halogen, get an EBO with the heating element(they switched back and forth over the years), etc...
Three-way incandescent bulbs are still going to be sold under an allowance for specialty bulbs.
Which I find funny because I've seen 3 way CFLs for $7 and LED bulbs for $25, though the LED maxes out at 60w equivalent, while the CFL maxes out at equivalent to a 150W incandescent.
Given that the LED maxes out at 20watts for 60w equivalent(1/3) while the CFL uses 29 watts to be equivalent to 150(1/5th), and that LEDs are expected to live roughly twice as long as a CFL*, $25 vs $7 doesn't really work out.
*That's one thing that always gets me - everyone compares LEDs to Incandescents. The equations become a lot tougher when you put them up against CFLs, much less FLs when you're replaceing the fixture.
Use heat tape next time - a drop of water won't shatter the bulb and leave you without a generator.
I also wonder about the whole heat thing - We run snowblowers, generators, and more just fine even in the dead of winter here in Alaska. I doubt the midwest gets that cold.
But yeah, a bit of heat tape would do the same thing. Or just get the carb fixed.
IF you do it through a heat pump
Irrelevant in this case when we're talking about the 'positive' of inefficient bulbs generating heat when it might be wanted because incandescent bulbs aren't heat pumps.
Matter of fact, if you have a home that obtains it's heating and cooling from a heat pump you want energy efficient bulbs precisely to gain that 3X advantage when heating IS necessary and avoiding the extra cooling. A light bulb can make sense in a limited spot to prevent freezing, but the proper answer there is probably more insulation, or failing that some heat tape which will only turn on when necessary and last years vs months.
Also, oil boilers can be over 80%. Down south I'd think more would be on natural gas/propane. As mentioned above, while electricity might 'technically' be 100% efficient inside the house, that's disregarding the 60% efficiency of the generation plant, or the ~10% losses in the transmission lines getting to you. If you're using a (geothermal) heat pump it's more efficient than burning in the house, but only if you're doing that. If you're using resistive heating, then it flips back because resistive heating is ~3 times more expensive than heat pump, with oil/gas heating somewhere in the middle of there.
In the mean time, I need to go out and get a new bulb.
Which is part of the reason why I think LEDs should be parts of fixtures, not stuffed into individual bulbs. Go with the long tube flourescent model - have a seperate power supply. While you're at it make it modular so you don't have to mess with wirenuts and such.
This also gives you an advantage because the ideal lighting patterns between incandescents and LEDs are quite different. I'd rather see a fixture designed with them in mind, especially given that with regular usage most LED bulbs would be the life of the owner/longer than most renovations. Still, make the bulbs replaceable with nothing more than a screwdriver
Typical "dim"wits like yourself assume a light that generates heat is wasting energy.(Hint: stop believing the MSM) Wrong. At least 2/3rds wrong
I'm living in Alaska; my electricity prices are such that heating my house with electricity is approximately 3 times as expensive as heating it with oil. Plus, no AC but it still gets hot in the summer. As such, electricity efficient bulbs are very handy.
So no, while I'd have to discount the 'waste' heat by about a third, it's still costing me money if I use incandescent bulbs.
There's a bit of difference between the dozen or so tubes in the old TVs, and I remember using the Rayovac machine to test tubes myself as a kid with my dad. I'm sure he could have done it faster himself, but I loved doing it.
As for the tubes in the computers, I think they were about the same reliability - smaller and more complex, but also built to a higher standard. It's just that going from ~12 tubes to 60k ones means that you're going to have them fail more often. In addition, many of them could still operate even if tubes were blown, and you could hot-swap many of them.
First, vacuum tubes lasted much longer than 6 months, Second, that's what PM is for. Preventative Maintenance would have you replacing the tubes before they're reaching EOL, increasing system reliability.
You just have to accept a few hours of downtime every few months while they swap out thousands of tubes.
According to the notoriously unreliable source you quoted, official fire investigators are trained in no less than 13 different aspects of fire investigation, not to mention the requirement to be accredited by several different organizations.
You miss the part about them messing up which quadrant test fires start in over what they'd get with random guessing? Heck, they only reached parity with their choices with the last testing 5 years ago(and I don't expect all investigators to even be that competent).
The Wikipedia link you provided actually says:
And on the right sidebar under 'powertrain' it calls it a transmission.
So I looked up Transmission and got:
In British English, the term transmission refers to the whole drive train, including clutch, gearbox, prop shaft (for rear-wheel drive), differential, and final drive shafts. In American English, however, a gearbox is any device that converts speed and torque, whereas a transmission is a type of gearbox that can be "shifted" to dynamically change the speed-torque ratio such as in a vehicle.
So I suppose it's better to call it a Gearbox in American terminology because it can't be 'shifted'.
Yea, well, Elon Musk isn't a trained fire investigator, so please excuse me for not taking him at his word.
That's why I originally mentioned his failure analysis team. As for the fire investigators, read this. They're not actually very reliable.