Everyone is patting themselves on the back for their great idea.
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It was not too long ago that all the enviromentalists were up in arms about mercury. Every discharge lamp, which a CFL (Compact Florescent Lamp) is, has mercury in it. These all end up in the landfill unless recycled, and who is going to do that? Who recycles florescent lamps from your home now? In the US, we do not currently catagorize household wastes as hazardous.
Other little details; What about dimming? Want to fry your CFL lamp ballast? Run it on low voltage. What about the lamp that is only used ocasionally? Hard to justify the extra cost for energy savings on a lamp that is off 99.99% of the time. Oh and don't forget the temperature sensitivity of these. The lumen curves drop off if too cold or hot.
CFL Lamps have their place and is a good product when mated to the right application. But these broad brush generalizations are a real display of ignorance.
And why limit it to the compact flourescents? See:
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the future.
I've never had one of those compact "twisters" last more than a year or so, supposed to be good for 7 years with most sorts I've gotten. Maybe sitting in a closet... And how much more "greenhouse" gas is given off in the manufacture of same compared with incandescents? Not to mention the mercury in them. I don't see CFLs saving Western Civilization either.
There's enough mercury in a flourescent that we had special teams to clean up after a tube breakage at the shipyard. Seems that cuprous plumbing fittings in submarines and mercury didn't get along, something about being brittle when mixed. Not exactly what you want cruising along under the surface.
Fluorescent lighting is also very old technology, having emerged in the '40s or so. CF's are made possible by advances in cheap electronics so the ballast could be part of the "bulb" -- but they're still mercury vapor tubes with phosphors to convert UV to visible light.
LED technology has now surpassed both incandescant and fluorescent in terms of luminous efficacy -- lumens of light per watt of electricity.
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They're still considerably more expensive first-cost and 5 watts is about as high as they go at present (need 20 of 'em for 100 watts) but it's still very early in their technology life cycle. Costs will drop a lot as these become more mainstream for general illumination beyond being just little colored indicators for elex gadgets. Further, LED's last tens of thousands of hours so life-cycle cost of "bulb" in $ per lumen-year is already considerably better than it appears at first glance.
There are already a couple of concept cars with LED headlights.
California may ban them because some contain arsenides, might prefer genetically-engineered organically-fed lightning bugs....
Well, then they certainly should ban ALL LED-containing products! No computers, cell phones, CD players, etc. allowed in the state. And, of course, you can't allow anybody to MAKE semiconductors in CA either, as they probably vent/throw away 100 times as much As as goes on the chip itself.
I've had good luck with the twisters except where there is vibration. There Philips mercury light bulbs really excel. The only problem with them is that the start up time is slooooow.
It is amazing how many things we take for granted will kill you when operating at near the edges of the envelope
If you're a light bulb manufacturer and you sell two bulbs, one which costs the consumer $.28 and the other that costs $4, which bulb do you want the environmentalists behind?
If you make cars, with a standard model costing $16k, and the hybrid model costing $22K, which model do you want the environmentalists behind?
This list could go on and on, but the fact is, the environmentalists never consider what damage the extra costs of these "friendly" products do to the environment. The car mentioned above is the Honda Civic, and as a remodeling contractor, I have to process a lot more material and haul a lot of it to the dump to afford the Hybrid model. Impact to the environment? I wish someone would do an honest study.
Mercury will desolve other metals. You may recall that was how they reclaimed gold. The gold would disolve in the mercury. The same goes of silver fillings in your teeth. If the mercury gets into any systems it will disolve and possibly make the metal brittle. Any parts used on a sub must be tested and certified that they are mercury free.
I disapprove of banning incandescents, on general libertarian grounds, but I almost never buy any incandescent light sources anymore. (110v or flashlights).
Yeah, I don't really like the idea of banning incandescents - but something needs to be done to get more people to convert to CF. Most don't because they have no clue what is going on and simply continue to do what they have always done (buy the lowest cost light). I'd rather see a heavy tax on standard consumer incandescents with the money going to consumer education programs and/or to distribute free low energy lamp samples to the public.
Hell, if they did that, I could sell the two boxes of used incandescents I have left over from converting the house to CF on eBay.
I suspect that if the entire nation was forced to convert, all the local and city governments would put together an effective recycling program to deal with the mercury problems.
They make CFs that work in conventional dimmers. I have a few of them. But they don't work as well as an incandescent.
Giving up the ability to dim is a small price to pay to help get global warming under control. In the long run, there will be plenty of dimming options for low energy bulbs. Dimming an LED works fine.
It would be more cost and energy effective to put a variable darkness shade on a CF than to dim an incandescent.
It really makes no difference how much it's on. If you use it, you are burning 60% more energy then you need to be burning for the light. CFs I believe lose some of their effectiveness when used for short periods because they consume more energy starting - and I think you get less total hours of use out of them before they burn out if you don't keep them on. But I don't know the facts on this - mostly just rumors. But for low usage lights, you can always switch to things like LED lights. If people were forced to give up their addiction to their old ways, then new technologies would emerge to meet the needs that CFs don't fill.
It's been in the 20's here lately and my outdoor lights which are mostly CFs all work fine. They simply take an additional second to start up, and a bit longer to get bright. Cf's work fine for most the world.
Well, there's a real problem here that no one has solved. Most the country still refuses to covert to CF where they should be used. The US is wasting a ton of energy it doesn't need to be wasting because people that should have converted to CFs have not. I don't know what the figures are, but I would guess less than 5% of the homes have converted to use them in all the locations it makes sense to use them.
What's the best way to get them to convert? What do you think we should do? Ignore it and continue to slide head long into these global warming problems and do nothing?
I agree that the idea of making incandescents illegal is just wrong. But the government needs to find ways to make people convert to lower energy lights instead of continuing to burn money and CO2 that doesn't need to be burned.
I was just in the local grocery store picking up a new watch battery. Next to the batteries were the lights. They have a display of light bulbs that takes up maybe 12 ft of shelf space which is about 6 ft high. In all that space, about 4 hooks were used for CFs. Everything else was incadescents. This just shows you what people are buying. That's just wrong.
If people by this point haven't figured out they need to stop buying incandescents to both save money, and help save the earth, the governments need to step in and do something. I don't know the details of what Australia is going to do, but maybe just banning incadescents over time is one of the cheapest and best ways to get people to wake up and do the right thing.
I'm all for letting people whatever the f*ck they want to do as long as their actions don't hurt the rest of us. But not converting to low energy light bulbs is hurting the entire world when there's just not justification for it. Something needs to be done.
Things are already being done. The cost of CF has steadily decreased and since so many power plants (in US) are using natural gas, simple market pressures like saving a buck has caused a lot of people to switch. When white led's are perfected (better have voltage spike protection) then that technology is going to supplant CF.
Be careful of the slippery slope where the 'enviroment' is used to take away all choices in life on the basis of what that isn't approved is denied.
I'm sure some environmental wacko would love to ban the burning of coal and coke in forges, home made casting furnaces, ect, ect, ect.
As Tom mentioned there is an 'Agenda'. It is control, full and absolute, over the populance.
On 20 Feb 2007 10:51:51 -0800, with neither quill nor qualm, snipped-for-privacy@consolidated.net quickly quoth:
You'd like the book _Hard Green_ by Peter Huber. He points out tons of inconsistencies (which were the reason I gave up on the Green Party, the new environmentalism, etc.) Soft-Greeners suck.
-- If it weren't for jumping to conclusions, some of us wouldn't get any exercise.
But to be fair you need to take into account the life of the bulb. The incandescent 100 watt bulbs have a 750 hour rated life. The compact flouescent has a 6000 or 8000 hour rated life. So if you multiply the $.28 by 8 then the CFL is about twice as expensive per hour of bulb life. But based on the same 6000 hours, a 23 watt CFL uses 138 kilowatts and the incandescent uses 600 kilowatts. At .08 cents per kilowatt, the incandescent bulbs cost about $37 more for electricity.
That's a good start. Another advantage is that they run cooler. A lot of our house lighting is from "cans" in the ceiling. They are limited to 60 watt lightbulbs. I can put "100w equivalent" CF lights in them, save money on electricity and make my room considerably brighter.
I first tried one of the CFs about 10 years ago. It lasted for about 4 months. Even though I suspect it was a dud, or that the location I used it had some negative effect on it, I was still turned off by the technology from the experience. But last year, after some friends encouraged me to look into it again, I realized how much electricity I was wasting that just didn't need to waste. So I converted all our high usage lights to CF. I think it was about $250 dollars worth of lights. It's been less than a year so far, but nothing has burned out yet. I'll just have to wait and see how long they last. Most were from Home Depot. Some were from the local grocery story.
The slow turn on effect for the larger lights can be a real pain at time. The family likes to joke about it. The recessed lights in the kitchen are the most noticeable. You turn them on to try and read something but then you have to wait a couple of minutes for it to get bright enough to do any good.
What a pile of horse pucky. Do you really think changing a few light bulbs is going to have any affect on global warming? We don't even know if it exists, yet WE MUST FIX IT! Even if it does exist, most scientists agree we have very little affect on it.
Hey, I got an idea. How about if we get the government to step in and outlaw internal combustion engines! It will save the world don't ya know!
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