Incandescent Bulbs Return To the Cutting Edge 569
lee1 writes "A law in the US that is due to take effect in 2012 mandates such tough efficiency
standards for lightbulbs that it has been assumed, until recently, that
it would kill off the incandescent bulb. Instead, the law has become a
case study of the way government regulation can inspire technical
innovation. For example, new incandescent technology from Philips that
seals the traditional filament inside a small capsule (which itself is
contained within the familiar bulb). The capsule has a coating that
reflects heat back to the filament, where it is partially converted to
light. The sophisticated ($5.00) bulbs are about 30% more efficient than the
old-fashioned ($0.25) kind, and should last about three times as long.
So they are less economical than compact fluorescents, but should emit a
more pleasing spectrum, not contain mercury, and, one supposes, present
the utility company with a more desirable power factor."
only 30% more efficient? (Score:2, Insightful)
just because of a more pleasing spectrum? The "mercury" issue should be easily solved by disposing the bulbs in the correct way (i.e. recycle).
Dimmer Savior! (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.
Canada eh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "mercury" issue should be easily solved by disposing the bulbs in the correct way
easily...with a majority of dumb people disposing trash in the very street whenever they can ?
haha....you are so naive it is not even funny.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
You would find less overall electricity usage by switching to CFL and using the difference in power to run a heat pump. Worst case scenario, the ground doesn't have any heat to give you and your pump defaults to standard resistance heating, which is where you are now. All other scenarios are improvements on that.
Unless, of course, you're not currently using electric resistance heating as your main heat supply. In which case, by answering the question, "why not," you will also know why you're not saving anything by relying on your lamps as auxiliary heat.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government Regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor is there a need to reduce electricity consumption. If demand drives up the price of electricity (which it does in relatively deregulated markets), the solution is merely a matter of building more power plants. If it turns out that some forms of power production have unpleasant externalities (ie, impose costs or harm on nonconsenting parties), then a pollution emission market would account for those side effects, effectively billing the problem at the source of the problem rather than trying to change consumer behavior in order to indirectly meet dubious moral goals.
Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lasers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government Regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Replacing a $0.25 bulb with a $5 bulb is not a good use of government power. People can do that on their own, if it suits them.
no they can't - no-one in their right mind would buy a roughly equivalent 25c bulb for $5, and as a result, the manufacturers would not even bother trying to make and sell them. Net result: 25c bulbs are the only option.
Sometimes you need some external stimulus to provoke a change in a stable environment, like sticking your finger in still water.
Similarly, saying "the market will provide more power stations", well yes it will - eventually, in the meantime while the market is getting to the point where more power is required, you're suffering brownouts. Besides, it is often in the market's interest to let you suffer like that as they you will pay more.
Sometimes you need more forward planning and organisation than market forces allow.
These 2 factors are why we need and have governments, if only life was as simple as you think, we'd be living in a utopia.
Re:lasers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm wondering what the hell the federal government is doing mandating what kinds of light bulbs we can buy and use?!?!
In order for me to answer that question in a way that you would most easily understand, I'd like you to answer the following question first: who pays to clean up the pollution caused by the power plants that generate electric power for the bulbs?
Re:lasers? (Score:5, Insightful)
who pays to clean up the pollution caused by the power plants that generate electric power for the bulbs?
It should be charged back to the power plants in question, and therefore be built into the cost of the electricity.
We're a lot further along that than we used to be 40 years ago, the plants capture a lot of the pollution rather than emitting it*. We're still not all the way.
As for the efficiency, I think that a 30% improvement is just enough to keep them available under the proposed bans, like what California proposed.
Can't find a link, but I remember the law requiring bulbs to be something like 30% more efficient, they weren't banning incandescents by name.
Of course, I also saw on a couple of the sites I checked that there was a proposal against CRT TVs. My old 32" CRT TV(Energy Star rated for it's time) takes less energy, as measured by a meter, both as a unit and per square inch of visible screen, than my new 42" LCD TV(also Energy Star).
*And make a bit of change selling the valuable commodities that would be pollution if just released
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Government Regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes you need some external stimulus to provoke a change in a stable environment, like sticking your finger in still water.
So? If you don't have a reason to change this stable environment, then you don't need an external stimulus.
Similarly, saying "the market will provide more power stations", well yes it will - eventually, in the meantime while the market is getting to the point where more power is required, you're suffering brownouts. Besides, it is often in the market's interest to let you suffer like that as they you will pay more.
You're not suffering brownouts, if people are paying the proper price for electricity and its supporting infrastructure. The market doesn't have "interests". You mean electricity generators who are a subset of the market participants. And you don't pay more for electricity, if they're not delivering it to you.
Sometimes you need more forward planning and organisation than market forces allow.
Sure there is such a need. But there isn't a superior mechanism to the market for providing the necessary coordination and communication (as well as the usual economic transactions) between the parties involved. Banning certain types of bulbs even if there was a demonstrable need to change the usage of such light bulbs simply is not a good way to regulate or use the market because it doesn't take advantage of the market's strengths.
Oh rubbish (Score:3, Insightful)
Government regulation causes more problems than it solves. California's "deregulated" energy market was regulqated so that there was no incentive to provide reliable excess capacity.
Similarly... (Score:3, Insightful)
The last major gas mileage increase in North American cars came as a result of legislation.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:4, Insightful)
The craptons of mercury spewed by the power plant can, in principle, be scrubbed and recaptured.
But hey, the craptons of mercury tossed into landfills by Joe Six-Pack can, in principle, be reclaimed when you end up drinking it. So it all works out in the end, I guess.
Light Bulbs...The LEAST of our worries (Score:5, Insightful)
Cripes, the infamous light bulb efficiency gimmick again. What's next, we gonna tie light bulb usage to Global Warming?
Seriously, any of you ever actually take a measurement of your electric usage in your house? Instead of screwing with 60W of light you use really only part of the day, take a look at your A/C unit. Older A/C units under 10 SEER drawing 20A or more will suck $80 - $120/month out of your wallet while new ones will draw less than 1/2 of that (7 - 10A). A dryer that runs 2 hours a day (not hard for a family of four) will run over $30/month pulling 20A. Own a pool? Average 1HP pump will suck another $25 - $35/month from your wallet if you run it according to what you've heard is "the norm". Geek running a server farm out of your home powered 24/7? Had a measly el-cheapo Dell headless tower that ran me $10/month by itself.
Point here is there's a HELL of a lot MORE we can fine tune and adjust lifestyles around to save a hell of a lot more than that 60W light bulb that you don't even turn off when you leave a room anyway.
Technology for Al Gores sake is not always necessary.
Too Little, Too Late (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, these new incandescents are 30% more efficient, but my CFLs are 400% more efficient than the latest "normal" bulbs they compete with. They're therefore 3x as efficient as these new incandescents. And these new ones, at $5 apiece, cost 8.75x what my CFLs cost in a box of 12. The CFLs will last something like 10 years, instead of about 2 for incandescents (maybe 5 for these new, less hot ones). But at such high efficiency, the CFLs add very little heat to the room to be cooled with my air conditioning - even more overall system efficiency. As for the spectrum, my CFLs side by side a new GE incandescent at the same luminosity show the CFL with a slightly yellower light, which is the "warm" light we like to associate with homey incandescent.
If we didn't have good CFLs, these new incandescents would be welcome. They might have some applications, given their small size, and cheap dimmability (dimmable CFLs cost 2-3x as much, last half as long, at least during their own early days). But within a couple years LEDs with 1300-1900 lumens will cost less than CFLs now, and can run directly on DC power - thereby increasing solar PV efficiency driving them by eliminating the 30-50% now lost on DC/AC/DC conversion. The LEDs will have a more tunable spectrum, last longer, and fit smaller fixtures, with even less heat inefficiency to cool (or disperse in enclosures).
CFLs today, LEDs tomorrow. Incandescents in movies about the 20th Century.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare that to the method for incandescent bulbs:
1) sweep broken bulb pieces into adust pan and dump in the garbage
Plus I don't have to turn off my central air each time I clean the floor after that.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:2, Insightful)
I had a professor once who broke a large mercury thermometer in a university lab -- one that got well over 200 people going through it daily. He called the EPA and asked them what to do about it. They told him to just be quiet and soak it up with paper towels as best he could. So of course he told us all about it.
Mercury is out there already. People with all these paranoid procedures are just being political, it's a fad. The only time I ever worry about mercury is when I go fishing in the local cesspool.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Planting a lawn in the middle of a fscking desert is not using water in an efficient manner, no matter how many days per week you're allowed to water it.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
18. Obtain $3,000,000 grant from US Government to clean up toxic spill site and covert to carbon neutral "green space". Use a portion of the proceeds to build an onsite 24x7 monitoring station.
Re:lasers? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the government does then it's us as taxpayers.
Which is why the government is trying to shift the burden from taxpayers to people who use power by introducing "cap and trade" to include the cost of emitting pollution across state lines in the cost of generating power.
Re:lasers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe Congress should mandate warp drive, since it's so good at inspiring technical innovation?
Re:lasers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shift the burden from taxpayers to electricity users who are... us taxpayers.
How much electricity you use (and thus how much of the cap&trade cost you bear) is up to you.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only on paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Cap and Trade will make my electric bill go up, not decrease the profits or pay of executives at the power company. Now, I'd be willing to eat that cost if everyone else were going to have to as well, but that won't be the case. Manufacturers that can, will move their power intensive operations over seas to countries that don't participate in the cap and trade system. It'll save them money, lose the US jobs, and drive down the business of companies that cannot/willnot relocate somewhere else.
This is the fundamental aspect of business that many in washington do not understand. Any move you make to increase operating costs in the US will simply result in the gradual movement of those industries affect to other countries that are less expensive to operate in.
Unless you can get the UN to jam this system down the throats of every industrialized manufacturing country, it's just going to make the US economy worse while helping the economy somewhere else. Not a big problem while the US was booming, but definitely counter productive under the current situation.
Re:only 30% more efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because you break your light bulbs so often that this is a major inconvenience that makes it worth trading off the substantial efficiency gains? Something tells me you're doing something wrong...
Re:Light Bulbs...The LEAST of our worries (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for foot-dragging when it comes to implementing repressive regimes.
Re:Too Little, Too Late (Score:3, Insightful)
If we didn't have good CFLs, these new incandescents would be welcome.
We don't have good CFLs, ergo incandescents are welcome.
Re:Only on paper (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the fundamental aspect of business that many in washington do not understand.
Just because they act to the contrary doesn't mean they don't understand.