Posted on 12/02/2011 11:37:19 PM PST by george76
Include me among those crazed Americans who can’t walk into Home Depot, Target or my local grocery store right now without wanting to grab a king-sized shopping cart and stuff it to the gunwales with 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.
Maybe it’s the sheer thrill of buying bulbs that in just a month, as of Jan. 1, 2012, will be banned for sale in America. What fun, in this incandescent twilight, to acquire legally what the federal government will soon treat as contraband. Or maybe it’s that gut sense that with the dollar teetering, those beloved old 100-watt bulbs will at least provide a decent store of value, even if all I do is use them to read by for the rest of my life.
First the 100-watt incandescents will vanish from the shelves. Then the 75-watt, the 60-watt and 40-watt...
Presumably, federal authorities will now be spending US tax dollars (excuse me — “creating jobs”) to deploy light-bulb cops.
For decades, America has been the world’s beacon of freedom. Yet here we are, wards of the nanny state, with politicians dictating that even that prime symbol of American ingenuity, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb, shall be regulated into oblivion. All this has been ably exposed as an act of crony capitalism, designed to enrich manufacturers who prefer to sell pricier light bulbs that a lot of Americans, if free to choose, prefer not to buy.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
LEDs DO give off heat. One of the reasons they have not quickly come to the market is that to make them brighter, they need a larger current, which produces more heat. If it is high enough, the LED lifetime is cut drastically. Additionally, the electronics needed to drive some LEDs also gives off heat. Do a web search for "LED heatsink" or see this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_management_of_high-power_LEDs
The solution to this is metal heat sinks to absorb the heat and fins to radiate it. The fins aren't there for style.
Of course, LEDs ARE much more efficient than incandescent and CFLs and as production costs decline, they will be all over the place.
When you look at the life span they are a great value and think of the space you'll save, because they last over ten times as long a "double life" bulb. We are using them in my home and give off the same light that our old General Electrics give. After shipping they are about $1.25 a piece but with a 25,000 hour life span, you'll be throwing away the lamp before the bulb goes bad.
I like saving money and I like seeing, so we use a mix of bulbs in our house. For general lighting we use CFLs. For reading and detail work (shaving), we use incandescent bulbs
I don’t know about the science of LEDs...but as for touching them, I have hands on experience and the LED did not burn my fingers.
Repackage them as 100 Watt heating elements with this warning:
WARNING: It is a violation of Federal law to use this 100 Watt heating element, formerly known as a 100 watt light bulb, as a light bulb!
This low efficiency device puts out 5 lumens per watt. There are LED bulbs (equivalent to 100 W incandescents) available that put out 50 to 100 lumens per watt, much more than incandescents and similar to CFLs. Of course, they cost a lot right now but they are rated at 40,000 hours lifetime. That's about 15 years of 8-hour days.
Congress is the problem and Congress needs cleaning.
The 10-year 100-W bulbs last that long because they run cooler, which means they put out only 1060 lumens (about the same as a 75-W bulb). Regular 100-W bulbs put out about 1600 lumens. They are double-life, but 2/3 light.
But they do same money if you are OK with dimmer bulbs.
Thank you.
I bought some warm-white LEDs for my ceiling light. They work fine. As stated...they are expensive, but I hope I don’t have to climb a ladder for 10 years to replace them.
Will Obamacare cover mercury poisoning?.
What’s the metric equivalent of 100 watts? Perhaps they can just relabel the incandescents to confuse the green police.
I have been studying the CFLs now for 15 years. For several years they have had warm and cool light, and daylight type illumination. I changed to all CFLs 15 years ago and my electric bill immediately dropped from $28 per month to $17 per month. CFLs use about 1/4th the electricity of incandescents. When I look at LED lights they never seem to say what the electric saving is, unlike the CFLs which clearly state, for example that a 60 watt bulb luminosity burns about 13 watts. I figure I have saved at least $2,000 in the past 15 years on bills alone, not to mention what I have also saved on light bulbs.
However, if people want to throw their money away on incandescents, I think they should have that right. It must be nice to have enough money to throw it away, at lease they will give me a small increase in Social Security this year for a change.
If you like 150 watt bulbs, you should try a white heat lamp bulb in the cool/cold weather. I have clipped a 125 watt heat lamp bulb to my headboard and use if for reading and keeping warm when I set my bedroom thermostat to 60 degrees.
Isn’t it ironic that we live in a country where one can choose to kill their unborn child, yet we do not have a choice in toilets and light bulbs we can buy? It’s like the old picture puzzle in “Highlights” magazine when I was a kid, “what’s wrong with this picture?” As Yakoff Smirnoff says, “what a country!”
In a couple more years, the average street during Christmas, will look like the Freemont Street Experience in Vegas.
I’m waiting for the price of LED’s to go down. I bought some for my ceiling lights. They cost like $40/per bulb. But if they last a few years, it’ll be worth it.
>>> They are expensive right now, but will cut your electric bill in half because they do not produce any heat at all. <<<
Fine.
I have a root cellar up here in Alaska, where the temperature can get down to -50 degrees in the winter. It needs a little extra heat to keep the cold at bay. I use one light bulb. It produces just enough excess heat to maintain a constant temperature throughout the winter of 34 degrees, give or take a degree. It is simple, elegant, requires nothing more special than a lamp or a bulb, and uses next to no electricity - which is important when you’re paying 59 cents a kilowatt hour.
Your LED lights put out almost no heat. BUT I WANT THE HEAT. In fact, if I could find a little tiny heater putting just the meager amount of heat that a light bulb puts out, maybe I’d buy it, but a light bulb and a lamp is still cheapest and best.
My point... who the hell is the Congress of the United States to tell me what bulbs I can buy? They cannot possibly legislate finely enough to predict that some guy in rural Alaska will preferentially want a bulb that produces excess heat. However, the market would be able to determine who wants what bulb for what use and allocate resources better than some attorney 4,000 miles away, and I could simply buy my bulb. Or I can go to the Walmart in Alberta next time I drive down the Alaska Highway and buy a case or two... assuming it’s not confiscated by customs.
I wish a conservative presidential candidate would ride this issue to the White House.
Otherwise, I’m with Levin. It’s a posts-Constitutional republic. God help us.
WhatHeSaidBump!!
Redpoll - “”My point... who the hell is the Congress of the United States to tell me what bulbs I can buy?””
May God guide our course.
Tatt
SadTruthBump.
Nowhere Man - “”Isn’t it ironic that we live in a country where one can choose to kill their unborn child, yet we do not have a choice in toilets and light bulbs we can buy?””
God help us.
Tatt
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