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Al Gore's Light Bulbs Are Fail
New York, 1:39 PM
Tue Dec 1
55 posts in the last 24 hours
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Al Gore's Light Bulbs Are Fail |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
03/29/09
Anyway, this is one of those things where yeah, there are some problems, but there are even more misconceptions about those problems. It's like saying oh look, there's lead paint in these Chinese toys, therefore
03/29/09
Continuing... it's kind of like saying there's lead paint in Chinese toys, therefore ALL CHINESE PRODUCTS ARE DEFECTIVE AND MUST BE BURNED!
I've had a bunch of CFL's. The biggest problem with them - and this is alluded to in the article - is that they're very, very poorly labeled. Would you buy a regular light bulb without knowing if it was "soft white" or some other color? Probably not, this is a pretty standard thing. But until recently, almost no CFL's were labeled like this and most of them were way bluer than people were used to. Nowadays there are soft white CFL's and they're labeled as such, but you need to know to look for them.
Also, some CFL's have almost no warmup time, some have a long warmup time. Again, there's no labeling to tell you which is which. I've got a few of each. Two of the worst offenders in this area are in my kitchen and while they actually give off a really nice light when fully warm, it takes them literally a minute to get there. Really annoying when I just want to pop in at night and grab something quick out of the fridge.
But good CFL's do exist and they are nowhere near $30. They're more like $2 now. It's just almost impossible to differentiate between them without better labeling.
Kinda seems like there should be a law, or something.
03/29/09
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03/28/09
[www.cbc.ca]
"Questions are being raised about whether so-called energy saving light bulbs might cause cold-weather Canadians to burn more energy to heat their homes than if they were to use regular light bulbs.
CBC News has found that in some cases compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) can have the adverse effect of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how consumers heat their homes.
Physics professor Peter Blunden at the University of Manitoba said CFL bulbs are certainly more energy efficient than older incandescent bulbs.
But in cold-weather climates such as Canada's, Blunden said older incandescent bulbs do more than just light our homes. During the long winter months, they also generate heat. The new CFL bulbs on the other hand produce minimal heat so the loss has to be made up by fossil-fuel burning gas, oil or wood to heat your home.
"To some extent, the case [in favour of CFL bulbs] has been oversold" because of the offset in higher heating costs, he said.
In fact, a recent report by BC Hydro estimates new lighting regulations will increase annual greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia by 45,000 tonnes annually as consumers use more energy to heat their homes after switching to more energy efficient - but cooler - lighting.
"The replacement of inefficient lights with efficient lights that produce less waste heat will lead to increased fossil fuel use for non-electric space heating," says the report, part of a submission BC Hydro made to the B.C. Utilities Commission last month.
Another study, by the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology, also concluded that actual dollar savings by using CFLs depend on the climate in which a home is located. In Canada, in winter, "the reduction in the lighting energy use was almost offset by the increase in the space-heating energy use," the study said.
But Canadians, depending on where they live and the severity of the winter, may still benefit from using CFL lighting, despite the higher cost of the new bulbs and the additional heat energy consumed, said the CCHT study, conducted in 2008.
Some proponents of the CFL bulbs claim the new bulbs use only about 25 per cent of the energy of old incandescent bulbs.
"In Winnipeg you are going to lose a significant amount of those savings," said Blunden.
Indeed, when everything is factored in, Blunden says the real energy saving for Winnipeggers using CFL bulbs is probably closer to 17 per cent. Blunden said energy saving results will vary across the country, depending on how consumers heat their homes.
If you live in Newfoundland, for example, where many people use expensive heating oil "it might even cost you money" to use the new, cooler, efficient, CFL bulbs for lighting, Blunden suggested.
"If your advertising campaign says you're going to save money, then you've kind of shot yourself in the foot," he said, noting CFL bulbs were originally designed for use in warmer climates."
03/29/09
Look at it this way. Light bulbs are made to produce light. They produce heat as a byproduct, hence they are very, very inefficient at it.
Your furnace is designed to produce heat. That's why it exists. And it produces heat in the most efficient way possible.
If light bulbs were really a more efficient way of heating your home than your furnace was, then we'd all just have a big giant 50,000 watt light bulb in our basement heating our homes during winter. You could turn it upside down and aim it at the floor if you were afraid it'd be too bright - heat still rises.
Of course that's a ridiculous idea because incandescent light bulbs are inefficient at both lighting *and* heating.
03/29/09
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03/28/09
The big problem barely mentioned in the NYT article is how to dispose of them properly. You're not supposed to just toss them in the garbage, because of the mercury they contain. But there's no guidance offered on where you're supposed to go to safely dispose of a mercury-containing product like this.
03/28/09
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03/29/09
I doubt IKEA sells CFL's for less than that.
03/28/09
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03/29/09
ARE YOU READING THIS, GABE? BRING IT BACK!
03/28/09
I have been using compact fluorescents for the last 15 years. I love them. They use one-quarter the electricity of an incandescent bulb. The savings to me has been well into the hundreds of dollars.
To demolish some myths: first of all, they don't cost $30. It's not unusual to see 60-watt equivalent bulbs in packages of 2 for $5. Secondly, almost all CFLs sold today are both instant-on and daylight-spectrum (no sickly blue light).
The only problem I've ever had with CFLs is that they are not the same shape as an incandescent bulb, and sometimes I've had to modify (or replace) a light fixture to get them to fit. But it's worth it (if for no other reason) because you usually don't have to change them for at least five years, and sometimes ten.
03/29/09
The reason daylight doesn't look sickly blue to us in, well, daylight, is because it's BRIGHT. Like, really really bright, even without direct sunlight. You wouldn't get that level of brightness from CFL's unless you had about 20 of them in a space the size of a closet. Then the light might *start* to look like real daylight to you.
The problem, though, is that real daylight also has a large yellow component to it - if you're in sunlight. (That's why things look so blue all of a sudden if a cloud moves between you and the sun.) "Daylight" CFL's don't even try to mimic that - they're basically simulating the equivalent of a cloudy day, but with direct light, which is not something you ever see in real life. And I don't know anyone who's really looking for that.
The other problem with daylight CFL's is just that humans are used to "warm" lighting at night. This isn't just because of incandescent lights; this is probably pretty much instinct by now because it goes back to when we first discovered fire, which is a very warm light. We expect light that comes from a source other than the sky to be warm light.
They do make "soft white" CFL's now that are very good, and are right around 3000 degrees kelvin. I have several, some old, some newer... the newer ones are better. They've improved over the years. The ones I just bought a few weeks ago actually look better to me than the incandescents I replaced with them (once they get warmed up). And they don't seem to have any of the color rendering problems of my older CFL's, which often had big gaps in their color spectrums where they'd literally show certain colors as near-black. Very weird.
03/28/09
Servicey tip o' the day.
03/29/09
03/28/09
And its not just an aesthetic thing, its downright unhealthy. The psychological effects that these things have on people is devastating.
03/28/09
03/28/09
Most people's associations with florescent light have to do with old magnetic ballasts (which buzz, creating unhealthy white noise) or being at an office with poor lighting design late at night. If that's the unhealthy you're referring to. The actual light isn't unhealthy.
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