Posted on 01/20/2011 6:53:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind
California's utilities are spending $548 million over seven years to subsidize consumer purchases of compact fluorescent lamps. But the benefits are turning out to be less than expected.
No state has done more to promote compact fluorescent lamps than California. On Jan. 1, the state began phasing out sales of incandescent bulbs, one year ahead of the rest of the nation. A federal law that takes effect in January 2012 requires a 28% improvement in lighting efficiency for conventional bulbs in standard wattages. Compact fluorescent lamps are the logical substitute for traditional incandescent light bulbs, which won't be available in stores after 2014.
California utilities have used ratepayer funds to subsidize sales of more than 100 million of the bulbs since 2006. Most of them are made in China. It is part of a comprehensive state effort to use energy-efficiency techniques as a substitute for power production. Subsidized bulbs cost an average of $1.30 in California versus $4 for bulbs not carrying utility subsidies.
Anxious to see what ratepayers got for their money, state utility regulators have devoted millions of dollars in the past three years for evaluation reports and field studies. What California has learned, in a nutshell, is that it is hard to accurately predict and tricky to measure energy savings. It is also difficult to design incentive plans that reward-but don't overly reward-utilities for their promotional efforts.There are additional problems since it seems the state may have over-rewarded utilities with taxpayer money to promote a program that has failed to live up to the green dreams of its proponents.
Despite governments' effort to market them, CFLs are not necessarily better. Tests conducted by the London Telegraph found that using a single lamp to illuminate a room, an 11-watt CFL produced only 58% of the illumination of an equivalent 60-watt incandescent -- even after a 10-minute warm-up that consumers have found necessary for CFLs to reach their full brightness.
Lack of light isn't the only drawback. CFLs apparently are so dangerous, the European Commission has to warn consumers of the environmental hazards they pose. If one breaks, consumers are advised to air out rooms and avoid using vacuum cleaners to prevent exposure to the mercury in the bulbs.
"Energy Management" has been a snake-oil scam for decades. "Green and sustainable" is the FedGov subsidized continuation of the scam.
Luminosity (in candelas or foot-candles), power consumption (wattage), and color (Kelvin number) are all separate concepts.
The color of traditional incandescent lighting is about 3300 Kelvin; halogen lamps at full power are more like 3800. The hottest halogen Osram and Sylvania Silverstar headlight bulbs are right at 4100K, just below the 4200K lower end of the high-intensity discharge (Sylvania's name: Xenarc) arc-type lamps, which go up beyond 10000K (violet and ultra-violet).
Those dining-room CFL's are supposedly "daylight" lamps and probably totally inappropriate for dining. A morgue would be more like it.
Then there's the problem of steadiness of the light source. Halogen bulbs on AC current and fluorescents tend to flicker invisibly at 50Hz or 60Hz, which causes eyestrain as the iris tries to follow the flickers and adjust. We're unaware of this losing battle, until we develop eyestrain, fatigue, and presbyopia.
I'm not sure how LED lamps perform on AC house power. I suspect they'd produce the same eyestrain as halogens.
The very best reading light is halogen bulbs on straight DC current. Incandescents are a good compromise, since their tungsten filaments heat and cool more slowly than halogen filaments, suppressing the flicker effect. My den uses recessed floodlights and spots (the spots look better); I'm stockpiling them. Ozero can sue me.
My experience with bulbs has been that the fluorescents last longer than incandescents. I replaced incandescent floodlights (50w) in my back yard with 15- or 20-w fluorescent floods (U-shaped fluorescents, old style, wrapped in a big plastic reflector) and got about 7 years from the latter.
My best bulb has been a thick-walled halogen Sylvania Capsylite which I installed on a post lamp with a photoelectric eye, on at dusk, off at dawn. The photocell switch reduced the output of the bulb from its normal light output for a 90w halogen to about what you'd expect from a 40w incandescent, stretch 50w or so. The bulb lasted 11 years.
I suspect even the "soft white" versions have a lot of UV and violet output, much moreso than incandescents, and that's the source of the "icky look". It's blue light.
They put CFL’s in our storage freezer at work as part of our “green initiative.” It never got brighter than a dim glow and you needed to bring a flashlight to find anything.
CFLs will work in enclosed fixtures. If you are concerned about the warning, get one designed without the warning. CFLs can be bought for use with dimmers. I put regular CFLs in recessed lighting fixtures and had no problems.
Aside from that, I agree that the light quality is much poorer.
Tests using live subjects showed that they prefered CFLs over incandescents.
Now were finding out that they dont last nearly as long as were promised.
By a good one and they last. Besides, I have had MANY incandescents that never came close to the rating on the box.
Obviously you have NO idea how flourescent bulbs operate. Go google and read the description of the operation of the ballast. You will see that they DO NOT have a 60hz component, it is more like 40Khz!
Typical halogen lamps are about 3000k. I don't understand why you say 4100k is hotter?
I'm referring to the color in Kelvins, not to temperature in degrees Kelvin. They're different.
If you have better knowledge, please post up. Link, please.
Oh, and here's my put-up on this business of flickering fluorescents:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/1988-76.pdf
[From the Introduction]
Introduction
An intermittent light no longer appears to flicker when the frequency exceeds some limit commonly referred to as a flicker 'fusion' threshold. When the light is bright and diffuse and stimulates a large retinal area this threshold can be as high as 90 Hz but is rarely higher(l). The 'fusion' threshold cannot, however, be taken as a limit above which intermittent light has the same effect as continuous light. First, Greenhouse and colleagues(2) have recorded human electroretinogram responses to intermittent light at frequencies higher than 100 Hz. Second, Brindley(3) demonstrated psychophysically that the nervous system resolves intermittent light at frequencies at least as high as 125 Hz. He stimulated the retina electrically so as to produce the appearance of flashes of light (phosphenes). When he increased the frequency of electrical stimulation sufficiently the phosphenes appeared continuous. Brindley combined electrical stimulation and stimulation from flickering light simultaneously, at frequencies at which both forms of stimulation appeared continuous when presented on their own. When the frequencies of the combined electrical and visual stimulation were slightly different observers reported seeing the beat between the two. The beat was perceptible when the visual stimulation had a frequency as high as 125 Hz indicating that, at some level, the visual system was resolving the stimulation at this frequency.
Fluorescent lamps operating on an AC supply emit light that pulsates in brightness(4). Twice with each cycle of the electricity supply (e.g. at 100 Hz) the light output varies between a maximum and about 60% of that maximum, depending on the decay rates (persistence) of the phosphors and the range of wavelengths measured. The light output also varies slightly at half this frequency (i.e. at the frequency of the AC supply) partly because the dark spaces in front of the cathode alternate between the ends of the tube, and partly because the electrodes may burn unevenly, and as the tube ages an asymmetrical discharge can result.
--Paper by Wilkins, Nimmo-Smith, Slater, and Bedocs, rev. version 1989. (full cite at link)
There you are. As I was saying. Without a special ballast, US fluorescents would (did) flicker at 120 Hz, the house-power cycle rate X 2 (not 60Hz, my bad, good ding), but then at 60Hz later on, as they age (oops). If they were on 410Hz AC service, like some military applications, there'd be less of an eyestrain problem, as I've pointed out -- but they'd still flicker. More links available.
But the ALL have 'special ballasts. You dissed CFLs because they have 60 hz flicker. I posted that they operate at 40Khz. There is NO perceivable flicker since they all have electronic ballasts.
I'm referring to the color in Kelvins, not to temperature in degrees Kelvin. They're different.
They are the same.
bfl
Ho Ho Ho .... Your source is from 1989!!!!!
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Read my post again for comprehension. I wasn't talking specifically about CFL's, I was talking about fluorescents, of which CFL's are a subset.
You say they don't flicker; but you haven't proved they don't. You talk about ballasts with a higher cycle rate -- but do they not flicker at all, or do they flicker "imperceptibly", the way fluorescents on 410-cycle AC would?
Other people are posting info, you're playing games with posters.
[You, being a PITA] They are the same.
Not.
See below, found online. (Which you could have done.)
Color Temperature (Kelvins) and Color Rendition Index (CRI)Blogsource:
The color of light is determined by its wavelength. The two ratings that are commonly used to describe the color properties of lamps are color temperature and color rendition (CRI). Color temperature is the color appearance of the light produced by a bulb and the color appearance of the bulb itself. It is measured on a Kelvin scale (K). A bulb with a low color temperature will have a "warm" appearance (red, orange, or yellow). Conversely, a bulb with a high color temperature will have a "cool" appearance (blue or blue-white). Color rendition is a measure of how the lamp influences the color appearance of the objects that are being illuminated. It represents the ability of a lamp to render color accurately and to show color shade variations more clearly. High color rendition allows us to see objects, as we would expect them to appear under natural sunlight. Color rendition is measured via a complex process on the Color Rendition Index scale ranging in value from 0 to 100.
To put it in slightly different terms, the color temperature of light refers to the temperature to which one would have to heat a "black body" source to produce light of similar spectral characteristics. Low color temperature implies warmer (more yellow/red) light while high color temperature implies a colder (more blue) light. The standard unit for color temperature is Kelvin (k). (The Kelvin unit is the basis of all temperature measurement, starting with 0 k at the absolute zero temperature. The "size" of one Kelvin is the same as that of one degree Celsius, and is defined as the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water, which positions 0° Celsius at 273.16 k.)
It shouldn't be forgotten that a color temperature value, though expressed as a single number, doesn't describe a simple property. In reality, it only summarizes the spectral properties of a light source. Two light sources with the same light color can differ widely in quality, e.g. when one of them has a continuous spectrum, while the other just emits light in a few narrow bands of the spectrum. Some of the qualitative aspects of such a spectrum can be summarized by means of its color rendering index (CRI). Therefore the higher the CRI, the higher the “quality” of the light produced. CRI is measured on a scale from 0 to 100. A 100 CRI light bulb does not exist. Our HID bulbs range from 60 to 90 CRI depending on the bulb's manufactor and the salt mixture inside the bulb.
Black-body radiation is not what we are discussing in these illumination sources. See the discussion at link about color rendition indices, and the fact that common light sources do not usually have full spectra.
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