and all that mercury going in to the landfills is OK now???
Posted on 01/22/2011 8:06:33 AM PST by tobyhill
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.
One reason is that bulbs have gotten so cheap that Californians buy more than they need and sock them away for future use. Another reason is that the bulbs are burning out faster than expected.
California's experience is notable because energy experts have placed high hopes on compact fluorescent lamps. Often spiral-shaped, they screw into existing light sockets and offer energy savings of about 75% over traditional incandescent light bulbs.
Many nations are relying on them to help cut emissions from power plants and stretch electricity supplies further. The United Nations says 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions are linked to lighting, and that adoption of compact fluorescent lights could cut pollution.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Here is a place to stockpile incandescents (or "heat lamps").
H/T to another Freeper who originally put up the link. Sorry, I don't remember who it was.
But cost 750% more.
Government subsidies don't reduce the cost, they only transfer some of that cost to other taxpayers via the government who borrows money from China to finance the subsidy.
In 10 to 15 years there will be a panic about rising mercury levels in groundwater that will be traced to the disposal of compact fluorescent lamps. The government will mount a multi-billion dollar environmental clean-up plan. There will be a movement to eliminate compact fluorescent lamps and go back to incandescents. But incandescents will be rare and costly because there will be almost no manufacturing plants making them.
“For those of you who don’t want to save money and energy, stock up on all the incandescent light bulbs you want to.”
That I shall. Thanks for the OK.
Regards,
GtG
For long lasting light bulbs, I like halogen floods, I have one in the light over my computer which is aimed at the cream colored ceiling. It hasn’t been changed in over three years.
We buy them in bulk at Lowes, Home Depot and sometimes ACE Hardware.
They will probably be good barter items after Obama and the democrats finish destroying the economy.
Hang on to your lamps also.
I won't be surprised to see the Feds dictate a change in recepticle and bulb base type (from screw in) to foil reactionary citizens (like us) who resist the change to flourescents.
Boy that's the truth!
Actually clear glass flourescents would be useless except in sterilization chambers-it is the coating on the inside of the glass that produces human-visible light as a result of being excited by the ultraviolet emitted by the electric arc inside the tube.
Value of incandescents aside, the gubmit should not be poking their noses into this.
I remember trying to buy noiseless light switches and finding they’d been taken off the market because they contained mercury.
Duh.
Any savings in power consumption (assuming there really is any) will be lost to clean up costs of using a light bulb that contains toxic mercury. Very very bad idea.
Most of the CFLs don’t work well with dimmers. And I saw on one manufacturer’s site that their bulbs should not be installed in sockects pointing downward, like recessed lighting in ceilings. You can get CFLs designed for these services, but how many people read enough to know about these issues?
That might explain some of the short life spans and poor performance that people complain about.
We have a CFL in a recessed ceiling fixture. The thing we don’t like about it is it takes a few minutes for the bulb to get to full brightness. When you first turn it on, the light is very dim.
This statement doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means. Here is why.
Take a kitchen with 9 lights. Install one CFL into one socket and 8 incandescents into other eight. Use all lights at the same time. Which is more likely to happen - one CFL burning up, or any one out of 8 incandescents? This is a trick question based on statistics. The answer is the more incandescents you claim (8 or 8,000) the shorter their life time is - opposite to what most people feel.
The reason is simple. If we read the claim again we will notice that they claim exactly "8 incandescents" - and they don't say that they are used one at a time, and they don't say that if one burns out then it's still OK.
This means that if any one of this large number of incandescents burns out then the test is over, and CFL wins. If you install a million incandescents then, according to the bathtub curve, the probability of early failure grows fast, whereas it is a constant for the CFL. So if you do enough of those tests you will find that a single randomly chosen CFL on average outperforms a million of incandescents. I'm sure you won't need to test for long because there ought to be at least one bad (DOA) incandescent bulb out of a million.
Mathematically, I think, it can be written down this way. Let Cw be the probability of the CFL not failing, and Iw be the probability of an incandescent not failing, and N is the number of incandescents. What is the CFL reliability that matches a bank of N incandescents?
Cw = Iw ^ N
So if the Iw is 0.999 (the chance of failure is 0.1% over the test period) then Cw would be 0.992, and the chance of failure of a CFL would then be 0.8% - about 8 times as high as the incandescent.
Exactly! I have been stocking up on light bulbs for over a year now, every time I go to the store and remember to pick them up.
I am not putting mercury in this house for any reason. I trust Thomas Edison much more than I trust Chinese lightbulbs.
and all that mercury going in to the landfills is OK now???
Do not just throw them in the trash! They contain poison! Take them someplace there the poison can the properly handled. I'm sticking with Edison light bulb as long as I can.
A lot of us are. Which reminds me that I need to step up the process. Thanks.
Well, during the winter some people get effected by the lack of sunlight. I keep all natural light bulbs in my house and it helps.
I switched to CFLs many years ago. I first used them in fixtures that were hard to reach and/or used for many hours a night without on/off cycles (outdoor lighting). I switched most of the indoor lighting too now, except the bathroom, where there are alot of on/off cycles daily. I have no problem with them, they are more convenient, and save me money in two ways, less $$ for lighting, and less $$ for cooling.
Very interesting- thanks Greysard.
Yeah, there was some small print on the back of the box briefly explaining how the claim was calculated, but it’s nice to have more details. In an age in which the Gov. is using various accounting tricks all over the place to say that we’re still solvent and “saving” money on different programs, I guess things like this shouldn’t be that surprising...
I’m just flustered that the CFL bulb already has to be replaced.
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