You need to use a dimmer that pulses the power, not a dimmer with a resistor. Dimmers with resistors simply don't work with most CFLs. Even so, if the power pulse isn't on 100%, it will shorten the life of the CFL, but not by as much. The CFL also needs to have a dimmable ballast, not a regular ballast, so the cheapest CFLs won't support this. But just get LEDs—CFLs suck.
Er, even if it's amortized across a couple of years, the savings in energy pay for the higher price. So reducing the up-front sticker shock is exactly the right thing to do. The worst that happens is that I pay the _same_ price for a few years to keep that bulb lit, until the subsidy is done with.
Have you looked into wood furnaces? At least in principle, these ought to be able to meet clean air guidelines. They work by burning the wood outside, and then using a heat pump to move the heat inside. Apparently they are quite efficient and cheap to run if you have a cheap local source of wood. Granted, they cost a lot more than $50. But if you are paying thousands per month to heat your house, you might also want to look into an energy retrofit to make your envelope more efficient. It wouldn't take long for something like this to pay for itself at that burn rate (pardon the pun).
Scandinavian stoves rely on thermal mass. So they take a significant fraction of the total heat from the fire, and store it in mass (rocks), and then re-radiate it to the room. This heats the walls, which also have thermal mass, and also heats the air, which has very little thermal mass and is cheap to heat. Scandinavian stoves are nothing like those little radiant dish heaters. Yes, both radiate, but the experience they deliver is quite different.
This sounds great, but the air has very little thermal mass and is cheap to heat, unless you're constantly heating outside air because your envelope is poorly sealed. Your walls have a ton of thermal mass, so they are expensive to heat (but of course, they cool off slowly). So you want to keep them at the temperature you want the house to be, not let them be too cold or too warm. If you have a nice IR heater pointed right at where you are sitting, you will be warm on the side where the IR heater is, and cold on the other side. So yes, it's efficient—you won't freeze to death—but it's not very comfortable. It's a lot better to have an efficient envelope; the tragedy is that hardly anyone bothers to build them, because the people in the building profession (quite understandably!) pay more attention to rules of thumb and "how it's always been done" than to physics.
The total energy of a closed system cannot increase. But with a heat pump, the conditioned space is one part of the closed system; the exterior air (or ground, in the case of ground-source heat pumps) is also part of the system. It doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics to move heat from the exterior air into the conditioned space.
Room dynamics are the same whether you use resistive heat or a heat pump. Having said that, of course you can also tune the dynamics of the conditioned space. In our house we have a Zehnder Comfo-Air heat exchanger, R-60 walls, R-80 floor and an R-97 roof (numbers are approximate). This means that the rate at which heat leaves the house is quite low, but we get a constant supply of fresh air from outside; the heat of the conditioned air is moved into the outside air as it's drawn in through the heat exchanger, so that we don't lose much heat to the outside through air exchanges.
Because our envelope is so efficient, we actually can't afford to light our house with Edison bulbs—if we did, it would be uncomfortably hot.
Heat pumps work by moving heat from a source to a sink, not by generating heat (although of course they do generate heat because they aren't 100% efficient in what they do: pumping heat). So as long as your source has heat to move, you can deliver significantly more heat to the sink than you could get by putting the same energy into a resistive heat emitter. Our house in Vermont is heated by a single 12.5kbtu air-to-air heat pump. The source is outside air; in the winter, we cool the air passing over the exterior device, but a fan continually blows air across it so that we are never cooling the same air. You may think winter air is cold, but tell that to a space alien with liquid helium blood. To them it's fatally hot. So the air is maybe ten or twenty degrees cooler after it passes through the exterior heat exchanger, but there's a relatively endless supply of warm (say, 0F) air to replace it. Consequently, we get a nice multiplier over resistive heat: while the net heat delivered to the system as a whole is the same, the heat delivered to the conditioned space is three times greater. Physics is full of win.
Rough service bulbs aren't covered by the ban.. I would expect that rough service bulbs, which look just like regular incandescents, will do the job just as well. The point of these laws is not to penalize or even inconvenience farmers and other industrial users, but to reduce or eliminate the use of inefficient bulbs in applications where they aren't appropriate, like home lighting.
People are justifiably skeptical of these laws because of the problems with CFL bulbs and early LED bulbs, but there are a lot of _very_ nice LED bulbs, which actually produce nicer light than incandescent bulbs. Be a smart buyer—make sure the bulb you buy does what you want.
The irony is that there's now a huge market for modernized versions of the original edison bulbs, which radiate far more in the infrared and red, and far less in the colder portions of the spectrum. I was at a metting in the Andaz Hotel in downtown Manhattan last week, and they had chandeliers with maybe 20-30 of these bulbs each, producing very little light and a lot of heat, and then they had a separate cove lighting system so that we could actually _see_.
So basically, a massive waste of energy solely for the purpose of fashion, which wasn't even at all attractive, and made several people quite uncomfortable because of the heat output. Oh, plus they probably had to crank up the AC to keep the room from overheating.
It's a damned shame that Edison couldn't have invented the remote-phosphor LED lighting system, and instead forced Philips to do his dirty work a century later. But that's the way things go. Both he and Tesla were way too enamored of basic electricity.:)
What astonishes me is that people aren't installing more of these Philips lights—they are amazing. You can't tell the difference between them and incandescents, but they last forever, use minimal power, and look _really_ cool (but don't look at them when they're on—they're _bright_!).
Blu-ray disks are really efficient. You only spin them up when you need what's on them. Media that's consumed by everyone is likewise not so unreasonably expensive to keep spinning, and might actually be cheaper if it's heavily-enough used. But there is almost certainly a substantial percentage of stuff sitting on racks in data centers, on spinning media, that is very rarely accessed. Encouraging CIOs to try to optimize that stuff into non-spinning, non-powered storage, or simply to reduce the energy footprint of the servers it sits on, is worthwhile and valid.
Yes, thanks for another argument by unsubstantiated assertion. We get a lot of these, and they are always charming. I'm sure you are convinced of the righteousness of your beliefs. However, conservation is quite possible—I live in a house that uses an eighth the energy of a regular house to heat it. So reduction in the base load isn't out of the question. More importantly, though, we are in fact increasing the amount of energy we get from renewables year by year. The only thing slowing us down is that right now, because fracking is so heavily subsidized, the price of a kilowatt-hour generated with natural gas is still lower than the cost of a kilowatt-hour generated with solar. The same is true of nuclear—because it's so heavily subsidized, it's "cheap." Oil actually is pretty cheap, but it's not much cheaper than solar at this point. Take away the massive subsidies on natural gas and nuclear, and the switch to solar, wind, etc will happen fairly quickly.
Generally speaking you will find that the same people who oppose nuclear also oppose coal, for precisely the reason you state, as well as a few others—e.g., mountaintop removal, watershed destruction, deforestation. In fact, in general at this point I think you will find that people who oppose both oppose coal more than nuclear. But it's not an either-or proposition—despite widespread naysaying, it turns out that renewables really can work. What we lack is not the technology, but the ability to wean people who depend on extractive industries for a living from the dark teat.
Not strictly true. Suppose you have a source with a half-life of 200 years, and you have a ton of it. In 200 years, half of that ton will still be radioactive. In 200 more years, a quarter. And so on. So its not like 200 years later, it's all gone. The trouble with the long half-life stuff is that although it isn't radioactive enough to kill you outright, it's more than radioactive enough to cause cancer, and it'll keep doing it for a lot longer.
The sad thing about all this is that of course there's a lot of potential energy in a radioactive isotope, at least potentially. So if we succeed in releasing that energy quickly and in a way that doesn't capture it, future generations may look back on and curse us for doing so. Just because we can't get our act together to keep our nuclear plants safe doesn't mean they won't figure out a way to do it.
Not true. There's a commune down the road from where I live that's been around since before I was born, and a lot of the people who were there when I was a kid are still there. The herd has definitely thinned, but many of the people who left still live nearby, and still pursue a sustainable lifestyle. E.g. I have a neighbor who's a farmer who gave up vegetarianism because he feels it is not sustainable in Vermont, due to the lack of produce in winter.
This is a bit off-topic, but the point I'm getting at is that your cynicism isn't really justified. Sure, there are people who are green as an identity rather than as a practice, but that's true of any ideology. I happen to fall squarely in your camp on this—my wife and I built a Passivhaus because we want all the modcons, but don't want to use energy stupidly. I think this practice is the only one that will ever hit the mainstream, because most people who want to live green can't manage it. But there really are people who do, at least according to the definition you have proposed.
That's right. It's very difficult to concentrate on the messages our internet overlords are trying to get us to read if we waste time sleeping and screwing. Back to your browser, citizen!
Policy debate? There's never any debate about the shit that the TSA does—it's always presented as a fait accomplis. We have to accept it, because we can't fly if we don't, and we don't get to debate it. When courts have demanded that the TSA hold hearings on their stupid policies, the TSA ignores them. So no, we are not at all obliged to start off the discussion by respecting the TSA's position. In fact, were we to do so, we would effectively be conceding before we started.
Let the TSA explain to us why they need to spend tax dollars on this boondoggle.
The scenario your propose is absurd. Sure, five highly trained soldiers with ceramic knives could subdue 200 people if those 200 people had reason to think they'd survive. But try the same thing in an airplane, and everybody is going to assume you're going to kill everybody on board. So they will fight you to the death. And you will lose, because you are massively outnumbered, and losing probably just means some bruises, not death.
BTW, there has been a substantial amount of outrage from the right. But the reason it's not unanimous is that of course when you fly on a private jet, you don't have to go through TSA security anyway. And if, God forbid, you have to fly commercial first class, they are introducing special lines for you that allow you to bypass all the stupid hoi polloi security stuff and go back to the way things were before 9/11, except that now the hoi polloi are in a different line, so you don't have to associate with them as much.
All it's really done is eliminated the stories people tell about arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flight and still getting on the plane. I haven't changed my arrival time _at all_ since 9/11. Because I always arrived with plenty of time to spare, because there have always been delays at the airport, or getting to the airport.
My main beef with the pornoscanners is that they are political patronage—somebody's friend is getting $245 million of our tax dollars to build machines that won't work and will be harmful to the health of the people who are forced to pass through them. So effectively we are getting screwed twice. Remember, the Matrix has you.
Oh come on. Seriously. You have a ceramic knife, and five buddies, and there are 200 people on the plane. How are you going to "start killing people?" You are going to get your ass handed to you. Every asshole that's tried something on a plane since 9/11 has been wrestled to the floor by angry and enthusiastic travelers. This isn't a real threat model.
Just start working with it. You will find that cut and paste works in the cases where you really have to put in an IPv6 address—it's what I do. If you really have to type in an IPv6 address, it _is_ a pain in the neck, but it's also a rarity. I think the major modern operating systems support DHCPv6 at this point, so DNS updates will work if you require DHCPv6. If you just set everything up to use ND, of course that won't update the DNS unless you also have a pretty fancy Windows/Active Directory setup.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because energy prices are expected to remain flat for the foreseeable future... :)
Also, 5000 hours? What kind of crappy-ass LED light has a rated life of only 5000 hours? That's a _very_ low number for an LED light.
You need to use a dimmer that pulses the power, not a dimmer with a resistor. Dimmers with resistors simply don't work with most CFLs. Even so, if the power pulse isn't on 100%, it will shorten the life of the CFL, but not by as much. The CFL also needs to have a dimmable ballast, not a regular ballast, so the cheapest CFLs won't support this. But just get LEDs—CFLs suck.
Er, even if it's amortized across a couple of years, the savings in energy pay for the higher price. So reducing the up-front sticker shock is exactly the right thing to do. The worst that happens is that I pay the _same_ price for a few years to keep that bulb lit, until the subsidy is done with.
Have you looked into wood furnaces? At least in principle, these ought to be able to meet clean air guidelines. They work by burning the wood outside, and then using a heat pump to move the heat inside. Apparently they are quite efficient and cheap to run if you have a cheap local source of wood. Granted, they cost a lot more than $50. But if you are paying thousands per month to heat your house, you might also want to look into an energy retrofit to make your envelope more efficient. It wouldn't take long for something like this to pay for itself at that burn rate (pardon the pun).
Scandinavian stoves rely on thermal mass. So they take a significant fraction of the total heat from the fire, and store it in mass (rocks), and then re-radiate it to the room. This heats the walls, which also have thermal mass, and also heats the air, which has very little thermal mass and is cheap to heat. Scandinavian stoves are nothing like those little radiant dish heaters. Yes, both radiate, but the experience they deliver is quite different.
This sounds great, but the air has very little thermal mass and is cheap to heat, unless you're constantly heating outside air because your envelope is poorly sealed. Your walls have a ton of thermal mass, so they are expensive to heat (but of course, they cool off slowly). So you want to keep them at the temperature you want the house to be, not let them be too cold or too warm. If you have a nice IR heater pointed right at where you are sitting, you will be warm on the side where the IR heater is, and cold on the other side. So yes, it's efficient—you won't freeze to death—but it's not very comfortable. It's a lot better to have an efficient envelope; the tragedy is that hardly anyone bothers to build them, because the people in the building profession (quite understandably!) pay more attention to rules of thumb and "how it's always been done" than to physics.
The total energy of a closed system cannot increase. But with a heat pump, the conditioned space is one part of the closed system; the exterior air (or ground, in the case of ground-source heat pumps) is also part of the system. It doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics to move heat from the exterior air into the conditioned space.
Room dynamics are the same whether you use resistive heat or a heat pump. Having said that, of course you can also tune the dynamics of the conditioned space. In our house we have a Zehnder Comfo-Air heat exchanger, R-60 walls, R-80 floor and an R-97 roof (numbers are approximate). This means that the rate at which heat leaves the house is quite low, but we get a constant supply of fresh air from outside; the heat of the conditioned air is moved into the outside air as it's drawn in through the heat exchanger, so that we don't lose much heat to the outside through air exchanges.
Because our envelope is so efficient, we actually can't afford to light our house with Edison bulbs—if we did, it would be uncomfortably hot.
Heat pumps work by moving heat from a source to a sink, not by generating heat (although of course they do generate heat because they aren't 100% efficient in what they do: pumping heat). So as long as your source has heat to move, you can deliver significantly more heat to the sink than you could get by putting the same energy into a resistive heat emitter. Our house in Vermont is heated by a single 12.5kbtu air-to-air heat pump. The source is outside air; in the winter, we cool the air passing over the exterior device, but a fan continually blows air across it so that we are never cooling the same air. You may think winter air is cold, but tell that to a space alien with liquid helium blood. To them it's fatally hot. So the air is maybe ten or twenty degrees cooler after it passes through the exterior heat exchanger, but there's a relatively endless supply of warm (say, 0F) air to replace it. Consequently, we get a nice multiplier over resistive heat: while the net heat delivered to the system as a whole is the same, the heat delivered to the conditioned space is three times greater. Physics is full of win.
So a rough service 60 watt bulb will do exactly what you want, and is not covered by the ban.
Rough service bulbs aren't covered by the ban.. I would expect that rough service bulbs, which look just like regular incandescents, will do the job just as well. The point of these laws is not to penalize or even inconvenience farmers and other industrial users, but to reduce or eliminate the use of inefficient bulbs in applications where they aren't appropriate, like home lighting.
People are justifiably skeptical of these laws because of the problems with CFL bulbs and early LED bulbs, but there are a lot of _very_ nice LED bulbs, which actually produce nicer light than incandescent bulbs. Be a smart buyer—make sure the bulb you buy does what you want.
The irony is that there's now a huge market for modernized versions of the original edison bulbs, which radiate far more in the infrared and red, and far less in the colder portions of the spectrum. I was at a metting in the Andaz Hotel in downtown Manhattan last week, and they had chandeliers with maybe 20-30 of these bulbs each, producing very little light and a lot of heat, and then they had a separate cove lighting system so that we could actually _see_.
So basically, a massive waste of energy solely for the purpose of fashion, which wasn't even at all attractive, and made several people quite uncomfortable because of the heat output. Oh, plus they probably had to crank up the AC to keep the room from overheating.
It's a damned shame that Edison couldn't have invented the remote-phosphor LED lighting system, and instead forced Philips to do his dirty work a century later. But that's the way things go. Both he and Tesla were way too enamored of basic electricity. :)
What astonishes me is that people aren't installing more of these Philips lights—they are amazing. You can't tell the difference between them and incandescents, but they last forever, use minimal power, and look _really_ cool (but don't look at them when they're on—they're _bright_!).
Blu-ray disks are really efficient. You only spin them up when you need what's on them. Media that's consumed by everyone is likewise not so unreasonably expensive to keep spinning, and might actually be cheaper if it's heavily-enough used. But there is almost certainly a substantial percentage of stuff sitting on racks in data centers, on spinning media, that is very rarely accessed. Encouraging CIOs to try to optimize that stuff into non-spinning, non-powered storage, or simply to reduce the energy footprint of the servers it sits on, is worthwhile and valid.
Yes, thanks for another argument by unsubstantiated assertion. We get a lot of these, and they are always charming. I'm sure you are convinced of the righteousness of your beliefs. However, conservation is quite possible—I live in a house that uses an eighth the energy of a regular house to heat it. So reduction in the base load isn't out of the question. More importantly, though, we are in fact increasing the amount of energy we get from renewables year by year. The only thing slowing us down is that right now, because fracking is so heavily subsidized, the price of a kilowatt-hour generated with natural gas is still lower than the cost of a kilowatt-hour generated with solar. The same is true of nuclear—because it's so heavily subsidized, it's "cheap." Oil actually is pretty cheap, but it's not much cheaper than solar at this point. Take away the massive subsidies on natural gas and nuclear, and the switch to solar, wind, etc will happen fairly quickly.
Generally speaking you will find that the same people who oppose nuclear also oppose coal, for precisely the reason you state, as well as a few others—e.g., mountaintop removal, watershed destruction, deforestation. In fact, in general at this point I think you will find that people who oppose both oppose coal more than nuclear. But it's not an either-or proposition—despite widespread naysaying, it turns out that renewables really can work. What we lack is not the technology, but the ability to wean people who depend on extractive industries for a living from the dark teat.
Not strictly true. Suppose you have a source with a half-life of 200 years, and you have a ton of it. In 200 years, half of that ton will still be radioactive. In 200 more years, a quarter. And so on. So its not like 200 years later, it's all gone. The trouble with the long half-life stuff is that although it isn't radioactive enough to kill you outright, it's more than radioactive enough to cause cancer, and it'll keep doing it for a lot longer.
The sad thing about all this is that of course there's a lot of potential energy in a radioactive isotope, at least potentially. So if we succeed in releasing that energy quickly and in a way that doesn't capture it, future generations may look back on and curse us for doing so. Just because we can't get our act together to keep our nuclear plants safe doesn't mean they won't figure out a way to do it.
Not true. There's a commune down the road from where I live that's been around since before I was born, and a lot of the people who were there when I was a kid are still there. The herd has definitely thinned, but many of the people who left still live nearby, and still pursue a sustainable lifestyle. E.g. I have a neighbor who's a farmer who gave up vegetarianism because he feels it is not sustainable in Vermont, due to the lack of produce in winter.
This is a bit off-topic, but the point I'm getting at is that your cynicism isn't really justified. Sure, there are people who are green as an identity rather than as a practice, but that's true of any ideology. I happen to fall squarely in your camp on this—my wife and I built a Passivhaus because we want all the modcons, but don't want to use energy stupidly. I think this practice is the only one that will ever hit the mainstream, because most people who want to live green can't manage it. But there really are people who do, at least according to the definition you have proposed.
That's right. It's very difficult to concentrate on the messages our internet overlords are trying to get us to read if we waste time sleeping and screwing. Back to your browser, citizen!
Policy debate? There's never any debate about the shit that the TSA does—it's always presented as a fait accomplis. We have to accept it, because we can't fly if we don't, and we don't get to debate it. When courts have demanded that the TSA hold hearings on their stupid policies, the TSA ignores them. So no, we are not at all obliged to start off the discussion by respecting the TSA's position. In fact, were we to do so, we would effectively be conceding before we started.
Let the TSA explain to us why they need to spend tax dollars on this boondoggle.
The scenario your propose is absurd. Sure, five highly trained soldiers with ceramic knives could subdue 200 people if those 200 people had reason to think they'd survive. But try the same thing in an airplane, and everybody is going to assume you're going to kill everybody on board. So they will fight you to the death. And you will lose, because you are massively outnumbered, and losing probably just means some bruises, not death.
BTW, there has been a substantial amount of outrage from the right. But the reason it's not unanimous is that of course when you fly on a private jet, you don't have to go through TSA security anyway. And if, God forbid, you have to fly commercial first class, they are introducing special lines for you that allow you to bypass all the stupid hoi polloi security stuff and go back to the way things were before 9/11, except that now the hoi polloi are in a different line, so you don't have to associate with them as much.
You don't think $245 million on another TSA boondoggle is newsworthy?
All it's really done is eliminated the stories people tell about arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flight and still getting on the plane. I haven't changed my arrival time _at all_ since 9/11. Because I always arrived with plenty of time to spare, because there have always been delays at the airport, or getting to the airport.
My main beef with the pornoscanners is that they are political patronage—somebody's friend is getting $245 million of our tax dollars to build machines that won't work and will be harmful to the health of the people who are forced to pass through them. So effectively we are getting screwed twice. Remember, the Matrix has you.
Oh come on. Seriously. You have a ceramic knife, and five buddies, and there are 200 people on the plane. How are you going to "start killing people?" You are going to get your ass handed to you. Every asshole that's tried something on a plane since 9/11 has been wrestled to the floor by angry and enthusiastic travelers. This isn't a real threat model.
Just start working with it. You will find that cut and paste works in the cases where you really have to put in an IPv6 address—it's what I do. If you really have to type in an IPv6 address, it _is_ a pain in the neck, but it's also a rarity. I think the major modern operating systems support DHCPv6 at this point, so DNS updates will work if you require DHCPv6. If you just set everything up to use ND, of course that won't update the DNS unless you also have a pretty fancy Windows/Active Directory setup.