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Posted on 03/14/2007 5:08:22 PM PDT by fanfan
They have to be left on all the time, they're made from banned toxins and they won't work in half your household fittings. Yet Europe (and Gordon Brown) says 'green' lightbulbs must replace all our old ones.
Every day now we are being deluged with news of the latest proposals from our politicians about how to save the planet from global warming. We must have 'a new world order' to combat climate change, Gordon Brown proclaimed yesterday. We must have strict 'green' limits on air travel, proposes David Cameron, so that no one can afford to take more than one flight a year.
A fifth of all our energy must be 'green' by 2020, says the EU, even though there is no chance of such an absurd target being met. We must have 'green' homes, 'green' cars, 'green' fuel, even microchips in our rubbish bins to enforce 'green' waste disposal.
Have these politicians any longer got the faintest idea what they are talking about? Do they actually look at the hard, practical facts before they rush to compete with each other in this mad musical-chairs of gesture politics?
Take just one instance of this hysteria now sweeping our political class off its feet: that which was bannered across the Daily Mail's front page on Saturday in the headline 'EU switches off our old lightbulbs'.
This was the news that, as part of its latest package of planet-saving measures, the EU plans, within two years, to ban the sale of those traditional incandescent lightbulbs we all take for granted in our homes. Gordon Brown followed suit yesterday, saying he wanted them phased out in Britain by 2011.
No doubt the heads of government who took this decision (following the lead of Fidel Castro's dictatorship in Cuba) purred with selfcongratulation at striking such a daring blow against global warming.
After all, these 'compact fluorescent bulbs' (or CFLs), to which they want us all to switch, use supposedly only a fifth of the energy needed by the familiar tungsten-filament bulbs now to be made illegal.
Among the first to congratulate the EU's leaders was UK Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who claimed that 'banning old-fashioned lightbulbs across the EU would cut carbon emissions by around 20 million tonnes per year and save between e5 million and e8million per year in domestic fuel bills'.
Who could argue? Certainly one lot of people far from impressed by the EU's decision are all those electrical engineers who have been clutching their heads in disbelief. Did those politicians, they wondered, actually take any expert advice before indulging in this latest planet- saving gesture?
In fact, the virtues of these 'low-energy' bulbs are nothing like so wonderful as naive enthusiasts like Ms Lucas imagine them to be. Indeed in many ways, the experts warn, by banning incandescent bulbs altogether, the EU may have committed itself to an appallingly costly blunder.
It is a decision that will have a far greater impact on all our lives than most people are yet aware, presenting the UK alone with a bill which, on our Government's own figures, could be £3 billion or more.
The result will provide a quality of lighting which in many ways will be markedly less efficient. Even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who put forward the proposal, admitted that, because the energy-saving bulbs she uses in her flat take some time to warm up, she often has 'a bit of a problem' when she is looking for something she has 'dropped on the carpet'.
But even more significantly, because they must be kept on so much longer to run efficiently, the actual amount of energy saved by these bulbs has been vastly exaggerated.
So what are the disadvantages of CFLs over the traditional bulbs we will no longer be allowed to buy? Quite apart from the fact that the CFLs are larger, much heavier and mostly much uglier than familiar bulbs - and up to 20 times more expensive - the vast majority of them give off a harsher, less pleasant light.
Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim - and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem.
Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 60C degrees or lower than -20C they don't work),
More seriously, because CFLs need much more ventilation than a standard bulb, they cannot be used in any enclosed light fitting which is not open at both bottom and top - the implications of which for homeowners are horrendous.
Astonishingly, according to a report on 'energy scenarios in the domestic lighting sector', carried out last year for Defra by its Market Transformation Programme, 'less than 50 per cent of the fittings installed in UK homes can currently take CFLs'. In other words, on the Government's own figures, the owners of Britain's 24 million homes will have to replace hundreds of millions of light fittings, at a cost upwards of £3billion.
In addition to this, lowenergy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites - which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem.
Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox, as is explained by an Australian electrical expert Rod Elliott (whose Elliott Sound Products website provides as good a technical analysis of the disadvantages of CFLs as any on the internet).
If people continue switching their lights on and off when needed, as Mr Elliott puts it, they will find that their 'green' bulbs have a much shorter life than promised, thus triggering a consumer backlash from those who think they have been fooled.
But if they keep their lights on all the time to maximise their life, CFLs can end up using almost as much electricity from power stations (creating CO2 emissions) as incandescent bulbs - thus cancelling out their one supposed advantage.
In other words, in every possible way this looks like a classic example of kneejerk politics, imposed on us not by our elected Parliament after full consultation and debate, but simply on the whim of 27 politicians sitting around that table in Brussels, not one of whom could have made an informed speech about the pluses and minuses of what they were proposing.
Even if it does have the effect of reducing CO2 emissions, those reductions will be utterly insignificant when compared with emissions from China, for example, which is growing so fast it is using half the world's cement, 30 per cent of the world's coal, one quarter of copper production and 35 per cent of steel.
There was not a hint of democracy in this crackpot decision, which will have a major impact on all our lives, costing many of us thousands of pounds and our economy billions - all to achieve little useful purpose, while making our homes considerably less pleasant to live in.
Such is the price we are now beginning to pay for the ' ecomadness' which is sweeping through our political class like a psychic epidemic. The great 'Euro-bulb blunder' is arguably the starkest symbol to date of the crazy new world into which this is leading us.
There is a 5 1/2" CFL which can be dimmed.
Ping
LED lightbulbs are the answer, but they're several years away from being practical.
This is Socialism folks. Learn to hate it, despise it, spit upon it if you don't already.
I agree. The light from LEDs is getting whiter and brighter.
CFLs are very much like the betamax of their time.
I already do. ;-)
Ping!
I have some of those CFL light bulbs. I never thought about global warming at all when I bought them. I do not care about global warming.
There are applications where fluorescents make sense. There are other applications where incandescents make more sense. For other applications, sodium lamps, arc lamps, or other technologies may be more appropriate.
I have some too.
They suck, IMHO.
I bought them because they were supposed to use less energy, which would save me money, and because it was better for the environment.
Now that I've read this article I realize the suns-a-bees fooled me!
I do care about global warming. I hope the globe stays warm.
:-)
"I have some of those CFL light bulbs. I never thought about global warming at all when I bought them."
Me either. I have a 12' high ceiling fan I got tired of changing light bulbs in.
"Now that I've read this article I realize the suns-a-bees fooled me!"
Yeah, lighting your home is generally not the expensive part of your electric bill anyway. With CFL some folks are tempted to buy larger wattage bulbs as well. Best I could tell the savings would be negligible.
" mad musical-chairs of gesture politics "
And guess who's gonna end up standing all the time?
Standing in that dump full of mercury.
I've changed over virtually every bulb in our home and cottage to these bulbs. I think they are great and we have had a substantial drop in our electric bills...which is why I put them in. They also last much much longer than the old bulbs. It is true that they take a few seconds to come up to full lumens, but you get used to that.
By the way, there are a number of varieties which will work with dimmers.
The EU regulations are the usual socialist crap one expects from Eurocrats, however. If someone told me I had to use these bulbs, I'd go buy all the old ones I could find, but that's just me (I suspect that will be the attitude in Greece. When the government says "yes", the Greeks tend to say "no" on general principle!).
Luckily we use 110VAC @60hz instead of the 220VAC @ 50hz they use. Less flicker noticable from the bulbs.
I use them around the house. The 5000K temp bulbs though since soft white looks so horrible. It saves a little energy and lets me stick more wattage in a fixture to make a room brighter.
"CFLs are very much like the betamax of their time."
Weren't beta players technically superior to vhs?
To me CFL's are like going from 8 tracks to cassette, instead of going all the way to CD's. They're an improvement but not the greatest thing out there. But the best thing needs time to develop and come down in price first.
About 12 years ago when I could first buy the CFL's that fit in my lamps and wall sockets. I replaced all the bulbs in my house. There was an immediate $10 a month reduction in my electric bill, and the bulbs lasted about 5 times as long as my incandescent bulbs. I figure I saved at least $1200 the first ten years. Now that Home Depot has the really inexpensive ones, I probably save even more.
A few years ago I became interested in a different way to save energy which was very doable and survivalist friendly. That is using straw bale construction for house building. Although vehicle energy uses about 25% of our energy. House and building demolition, construction and heating and cooling use something like 50% of our energy. The British estimate that house heating and cooling uses about 28% of their energy. Thus saving energy with the right housing is more efficient than saving vehicle energy.
We have got to stop making the Arabs rich at our expense. There is lots of interesing info on Straw Bale Construction on line. If you are interested you can also click my article on the subject at
http://ecobusinesslinks.com/straw_bale/straw_bale_solar_sustainable_development.htm
From what I read of the article, the author is an uneducated idiot. JMHO.
Where the warm cuddles are
The light travels slower
As it shifts down to yellow
yep! lol!
yer stalking me ;)
Libertarian ping! To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.
Plagerist, did you give me credit for writing that? Nooooo.....
You also forgot the rest of the poem.
Quoted for TRUTH.
Click pn POGW graphic for full GW rundown
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
yeesh!
ok, note to my previous post...
written by patton
better now? :)
No, post the rest of the damn thing.
Then I will feel better. Pbbbblllllt.
All true. In large parts of the country, building codes requiring simple passive solar-heating (window placement, eaves) and insulation in new homes would make an enormous difference over a 30-50 year time frame. Also, requiring a geothermal tap in the back yard for heating and cooling would make a huge difference.
If we were really serious about bankrupting the muslims and hugo, we would take a small portion of money we will waste every year on medicaid and retrofit all existing homes with a geothermal tap. Home heating and cooling costs down about 50%.
But we aren't serious. Instead, we are going to spend an incredible amount of money producing ethanol, which will have almost no net energy effect, except to make our cars run less efficiently. But it will buy a lot of votes for D's and R's alike as farmers lap up the subsidies.
Kneejerk contrarians always overstate their case. It can't be only that CFLs ought not be mandated, oh no, instead they must be the devil's spawn, utterly evil and irretrievably bad and inferior in every way.
sigh, if you insist :)
Where the warm cuddles are
The light travels slower
As it shifts down to yellow
the roaring fire and embers glow,
the yellow burns to a golden red.
comfort of being home, together.
Dog on a rooftop
Snake in the glass
Wanting Relief
Rat in a cage
this is sounding more like a zoo,
than home. oh yeah, we live at the zoo.
kids in the choir
statuary hall
doors begin to open
the quiet girl on the stairs
watches the menagerie
passing by like a parade
dark brown eyes
a soul glowing through
it was always you, babe
Me too! It's been friggin cold up here the last several weeks. Makes me want to shove Leonardo diCaprio's head into the nearest snow bank.
"Dimwits: Why 'green' lightbulbs aren't the answer to global warming"
I love our allies in the UK.
But maybe they can't access this from their Internet connections:
http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/index.aspx
Or maybe they just didn't know how to scroll down to the factoid at
the bottom of that webpage.
I bought a Fluorescent drop light to work on my car with. I ended up cutting the wire off it and putting a plug on it. Biggest Piece of crap I ever bought. Couldnt see a damned thing with it.
I read something the other day about a two or fourfold increase in incandescent efficiency being in the research pipeline. With any luck it will become production capable right when they are banned.
"Building codes."
They have been a barrier to more straw bale construction, however several southwestern states now have established codes which are being accepted in other parts of the country.
My brother from Colorado who is a strawbale enthusiast, interested my other brother an architect in building a fully permitted home in Montgomery Co., MD about 8 years ago. It was 2,600 sq. ft, cost about 20% less to build, and is probably 3 or 4 times as energy effecient. It looks like an Italian villa.
Last spring I traveled around the country looking at straw bale structures. A simple one bedroom near Pensacola, FL would cost about $25,000 to $30,000 to build today. It survived Hurricane Hugo with no damage although large trees blew down very nearby. Some people complain that these houses look too primitive. I next went to the Burritt Mansion/Museum in Huntsville, AL. It is a large impressively elegant structure built in 1938. There is no way it looks as though it was built using 2,200 straw bales. If anyone is interested I can email some of the photos I took. Just private message me and leave an email address.
After all, these 'compact fluorescent bulbs' (or CFLs), to which they want us all to switch, use supposedly only a fifth of the energy needed by the familiar tungsten-filament bulbs now to be made illegal.
This is generally true - the 20 watt CFL produces a light equivalent to the typical 75 or 100 watt incandescent.
The result will provide a quality of lighting which in many ways will be markedly less efficient. Even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who put forward the proposal, admitted that, because the energy-saving bulbs she uses in her flat take some time to warm up, she often has 'a bit of a problem' when she is looking for something she has 'dropped on the carpet'.
This is somewhat true - they come on quickly enough, but don't reach full output for a couple of minutes. Depending on use, this can be a problem.
But even more significantly, because they must be kept on so much longer to run efficiently, the actual amount of energy saved by these bulbs has been vastly exaggerated.
I don't have any data on this, but certainly, they'd be more useful in lights that are going to be used somewhat continuously rather than intermittently.
So what are the disadvantages of CFLs over the traditional bulbs we will no longer be allowed to buy? Quite apart from the fact that the CFLs are larger, much heavier and mostly much uglier than familiar bulbs - and up to 20 times more expensive - the vast majority of them give off a harsher, less pleasant light.
This has changed - more recent CF bulbs come closer to mimicing the light output of incandescent lighting, although they still have a different overall color temperature. The use of different flourescent coatings gives better light color than in the past.
Pricewise, even the good ones (GE, Phillips, etc.) can be had in 3-packs for under $8.00 at WalMart. Still not cheap, but less than 20X a decent soft-white incandescent.
Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim - and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem.
This issue has also been dealt with - the newer CF bulbs have electronic ballasts that operate at a much higher frequency than ordinary line voltage, so you don't see the flicker.
Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 60C degrees or lower than -20C they don't work),
There is some modest dimming capability with CF lights, and there may be some that are made for dimming, but ordinarily, they aren't capable of being dimmed down the way incandescents are. As for low temperatures, it depends on the type of bulb. I used a Philips CF bulb in my outside lamp in northeast Ohio with no problems. Yes, when it was very cold, the light took a few minutes to warm up, but it was fully functional after that.
More seriously, because CFLs need much more ventilation than a standard bulb, they cannot be used in any enclosed light fitting which is not open at both bottom and top - the implications of which for homeowners are horrendous.
I've never had a problem with a CF bulb in an enclosed fixture, provided that the bulb fit. They don't always fit, but they run so much cooler than incandescent that I can't see a tight enclosure being a problem.
In addition to this, lowenergy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites - which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem.
They are more complex to manufacture, and probably require more energy for production. But I doubt that any compact flourescent uses mercury vapor - that is reserved for outdoor streetlighting and such.
Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox, as is explained by an Australian electrical expert Rod Elliott (whose Elliott Sound Products website provides as good a technical analysis of the disadvantages of CFLs as any on the internet).
No, they don't need to be kept on continuously. Yes, they are best used in locations where their on-time is longer, but they aren't so fragile that turning them on and off occasionally is a significant problem.
I have several CF lights in certain locations. Of course, those hard-to-get bulbs in high fixtures get them, along with the 8 bare light fixtures in the basement. And a few lamps that get long-time duty. But I also have places where I use incandescent lighting. Lights that get frequent on/off duty, decorative fixtures where the bulb is exposed, and lights where CF bulbs don't fit are among those places.
I love you, wife. ;)
Is this true? I have a couple of ceiling dome lamps -- metallic base with a heavy glass bowl enclosing the bulbs. Changing the bulbs is a nuisance so I thought I might switch to CFLs the next time around. I thought they were a lot cooler than incandescents so heat buildup shouldn't be a problem.
I amot 100% certain, but I think all flourescent lights require minute amounts of mercury to operate.
Has anyone here priced the automotive LED bulbs?
They are definately seen better from a longer distance, but they cost waaaaayyy tooooo much!!
Price has to come down for me before I can change to them-just in my car. Will not change in my house.
I am trying to figure how many I will need for the rest of my lifetme, then going tp stock up. I already knew the new bulbs would not work in the refrigerator nor in the oven. Garage will be a problem, also, as most garages are NOT heated.
I need my security lights, here in rural America. They are motion triggered, not on all the time dusk to dawn. Without these lights, rural America is a sitting duck for criminals. Then the environazis will want all our guns and ammo and we will all be sitting ducks, not just rural USA.
I have had personal experience with the bulbs they are trying to foist on us. They cost way too much for the life of the bulb. They do NOT last 8000 hours. I have had them last barely 4 months in an office setting only. Not even on more than 9 hours a day. At the cost of replacement- $8/ea, this is no savings. Next will be a surcharge for disposing of them, like the batteries in the Prius.
We can reduce USA energy usage immediately by rounding up and shipping back south of the border all of the illegal intruders. They drive cars and turn on lights, also.
Quick, easy, and could be permanent if anyone got their stones in a row.
Do it. I'm not a CFL zealot, but a CFL pragmatist. Do it where it makes sense. It has cut my electric bill. The bulbs don't seem "slow" to light to me unless it's in an unheated room. You can find them on sale all the time and spend about twice what a normal bulb costs, but the life seems to be forever.
I started using CFLs about 3 years ago. I've replaced a total of 1 so far. In my kitchen, we leave the lights on pretty much all night(wife and I are up sorta opposing hours, just works out that way). I was changing standard bulbs constantly. After going to CFLs, I've had to swap out one!
I can't argue with that as I don't have solid evidence. But it would be ironic if the EU basically outlawed electric lighting. They've already got some serious restrictions on lead and mercury.
My red-herring meter pegged too soon to get to finish the article.
I live in a one-bedroomed, 40 sq.m. flat, 2 years ago I replaced all my lightbulbs with energy saving ones. In this time, my electricity bill has fallen and I've saved roughly £477 in this period. I work from home and I often have a light on all day because my desk is in a slightly dark corner.
-snip-
- Tina, Dusseldorf, Germany
Is that 477 pounds or marks?
I can't see a one bedroom flat saving that much on lightbulb electrical consumption if she used no light bulbs at all.
"They cost way too much for the life of the bulb. They do NOT last 8000 hours. I have had them last barely 4 months in an office setting only. Not even on more than 9 hours a day. At the cost of replacement- $8/ea, this is no savings."
You got some bad bulbs and paid 5X too much At the WalMart here with the power company rebate they run a bit over $5.00 for three 75 watt equivalents.
Yup. amd thats just what we use in our military aircraft
BTW, I own one of the ORIGINAL fluorescent light brackets ~ my grandfather who was always into gadgets bought one as soon as they hit the market. They still make bulbs that fit them.
The new CFLs are built pretty much the same way except they're crooked.
Since the bulbs have a 5 1/2 year life the traffic engineer has saved on manpower 'cause he hasn't had to "change a light bulb in the last 5 years. Dumb old Town council didn't know what to do with the $250 per month times 26 traffic intersections converted. So like any good politician they decided to spend the savings on Playground equipment and School Books.
I'm glad they didn't listen to you or we'd still be waiting for action.
Fact there are 11,000 power plants in the US. 25% of all electricity generated is used for lighting. Convert to LED or new flourescent bulbs that you can buy at Sams, Lowes or Home Depot and we can produce the same lumens for 50% less electricity. So we could turn off half of the 2700 plants that produce electricity for lighting. Thats approximately 1300 plants. Since 1125 of those are 11,000 plants are coal fired plants which do you think we should turn off first. Howsa 'bout ALL the coal fired plants.
The conversion could happen in about a year which is quicker than you can file and receive permits to build one nuc plant, (not that we shouldn't). To bad energy efficent LEDs are not available till 2002!!!(Sarcasm Off)
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