Posted on 03/14/2007 5:08:22 PM PDT by fanfan
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)
"I'm glad they didn't listen to you or we'd still be waiting for action."
Glad it workd out for your city. But LED's by cost and design LED's aren't ready for everyday household situations yet.
The last time I was at Home Depot, they were selling the 100 W equivalent 5500K (CF) bulb for $12 -- but were selling an entire desk lamp fixture with Happy Eyes or Bright Eyes bulb of 6000K quality for $20.
With the the quality of light from these bulbs, I don't need reading glasses. I think most vision problems are due to poor lighting quality and these reading CFL seem to be the best quality lighting around -- producing virtual sunlight quality without the heat.
I like the LEDs for portable lighting -- and since they require so little power to run, those with the hand crank can provide lights for substantial time enough to perform most tasks.
Lighting really needs to move into the space age. The incandescents are little more advanced than open fires.
"Lighting really needs to move into the space age. The incandescents are little more advanced than open fires."
The next big thing - actually taking LED's into the space age - will be quantum dot LED lighting.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/051021_nano_light.html
http://www.evidenttech.com/applications/quantum-dot-led-electroluminescence.php
The problem with current LED's is the design of the LED's themselves. It's difficult to replicate a standard light bulb throw for everyday household and office applications. And the output has been lacking. If they can get quantum dot LED lighting to work and be practical, it will not only make LED lighting practical for every day use, it will open up different lighting possibilities most people haven't even thought of.
"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)"
So I assume by your expertise your entire house is filled with LED lighting and no standard lighting. How much did it cost you to equip it with LED lights, and how do you handle the output problems from the current generation of household LED replacement bulbs?
I don't think we have to look that far ahead for state-of-the-art lighting solutions. I see a lot of stuff that works very well but just hasn't gotten popular because Consumer Reports will write reports that say it doesn't make a difference -- like they do with the ion technology for air cleaning filters. So there's a lot of confusion and skeptism.
I think low-end fluorescents give high-end, high-tech fluorescents a bad name -- and agree they can actually cause health problems because one is tricked into believing he is operating in a lighted environment when the reality is the intensity of the light is like living in perennial darkness -- without realizing it, just as one would in a cave, ruining eyes and health.
But the proper quality and intensity of light will boost many peoples' health to a greater extent than they would suspect possible -- because the greatest stimulation of the brain, is just light itself.
... 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'.A few of the older lamps, and most of the "floods", are slow to come to full light. But just about all the rest are just about instant, with a few older with a half-second pause from being switched on to lighting up. The technology is changing.
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.It's in rare situations that I turn a light on then off again in very short order. Certain rooms tend to remain lit while someone's home (central kitchen, for example), or for the duration of some activity.
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.Oooh! They are heavier!!! My arms will fall off!
And uglier...
Well, yes, on both counts. The latter is why I don't use them in situations where decorative bare bulbs are displayed. If the UK's leaders ban the latter, that's their right I guess. The subjects can elect new leaders.
Harsher, less pleasant light? Agreed absolutely -- for older lamps. My house didn't start getting generally outfitted until we found lamps with apparent light spectrum very close to incandescents. And while those haven't been around very long, they are there.
The older, uglier-lighting lamps are being relegated to areas such as the workshop where it doesn't matter. Their last stop on the way out.
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.Can't say a thing about this, because I haven't delved enough into the electronics. 50 Hz? Odd -- if their flash rate is dependent upon the mains frequency, in the UK I'd expect to see a 100 Hz flash rate (it's more likely the zero-crossings that are relevant, if one uses a full-wave rectifier). My understanding was that they used a high-frequency switching-supply to supply the high voltage; add a sufficiently-large capacitor and you have little to no mains effects.
But I could be wrong.
I note there's no comment about the flicker effect of incandescents, not to mention fluorescents...
Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past.Bovine-Spit! Generally they don't work with dimmers (today), but I have two CFL security lights out front that come on instantly when the unit is triggered.
Maybe all one can get in the UK is old technology, in which case the author may have a point. For folks in the UK.
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),I've no doubt those problems could be solved... but who's calling for a blanket replacement? Not me. I'm happy to leave incandescents in my microwave, oven, freezer and vacuum cleaner. It's not like one of these are any significant portion of my electric bill. (Unless, of course, the light stays on when you close the fridge. Don't think mine does, but you never know -- maybe Joe Lucas is the Prince of Light when it comes to British refrigerators).
I'm also not putting in CFLs in any flashlights either (it looks like LED technology is advancing there) -- though for years I've had a fluorescent camping lantern to accompany my beloved old Coleman white-gas lanterns.
Is the UK banning incandescent flashlight lamps?
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.Don't understand this. I've been using some in enclosed fittings without any problem -- in fact, the ones in the enclosed fittings rank among the oldest CFLs in the house.
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.I have a number that won't too. Mostly (not all) "decorative" bulbs. Add them up and the figure is probably 25$% or more. In bulb count. And few of the decorative lamps remain on for any period of time. And I have a few that simply won't accomodate the physical proportions of the CFLs.
Not a problem unless your government bans incandescents outright.
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.Don't know about the "energy to manufacture" rate, but I agree 100%. But somehow, I don't see a "total energy usage" figure - some function of ("energy to manufacture", "energy in operation", "expected life"). I'd like to see that.
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).Actually, the killer for incandescents is the current surge at turn-on, and the lifetime reduction increases as a function of voltage (the UK's mains are much higher than the US) and an inverse function of wattage (low-wattage lamps die faster than high-wattage of the same technology). The shortest-life bulbs in this house are the low-wattage decorative lamps (there's a good reason for this, but I'm not explaining).
Others may not like CFLs, and that's their privilege. (Don't come visit our home because we have lots of CFLs, but then again our house thermostat is set to 64F day/occupied, 58F night, and we're really comfortable with that even if you aren't; we might turn the heat up a bit for the duration of your visit.)
I have to confess I don't like the "mercury" aspect noted here, though I wonder if that, um, element isn't a bit overblown. But the day LED lamps with decent spectra and pricing appear on the market, I'll be happy and start switching over.
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