How do you feel about regular light bulbs being banned?

I'm not an environmentalist, just not stupid.

And most of your favoured light is outside your visual range with a great big hole at the bottom end.
LED is far closer the range of our eyes.

Mad as a spoon or, at minimum, paranoid.

 

Actually, the "high efficiency" CFL and LED do not really save energy in cold climates. The old incandescent bulbs are actually 100% efficient - it is just that much of these energy comes out as infrared heat rather than light.

I usually only turn on the lights in the night, when it is colder. I take around an electric heater throughout the house to warm the individual rooms I am in (this is actually less expensive and uses less energy than turning on my central gas heating that heats the entire house). Why on earth would I use a "high efficiency" bulb? I thought the old bulbs were supposed to be mini electric heaters - and this is exactly what I need! It makes absolutely no sense for me to switch to LED bulbs while I am using an electric heater.

So in my case, and for many other people, "energy efficient" bulbs will actually waste more energy, cost more, and ultimately will be worse for the environment.

Now I mentioned that the old light bulbs give off heat, so what about people that live in warm climates? Well again, your lights will usually be turned on at night when it is cooler. Even in desert climates where it is very hot in the day time, it can still get cold at night. Second, 70 Watts is really not that much energy. A typical little electric space heater is 1500-3000 Watts, for example. And with a typical air conditioner, it only takes 1 Watt of energy to remove 5 Watts of heat.

http://www.richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp

 

Here's something else to consider. If the poll in this thread is any representation of the rest of households, more than half of people have already voluntarily switched to CFL or LED bulbs.
28% of members responded that they "already have mostly CFLs in their house", while 24% approve of the ban, and so presumably don't need the government to pass any phase out to get them to switch. Only 45% of people, it seems, do not have CFLs.

So it would seem that half of everyone already has CFLs, and the 24% minority is trying to force the other half to switch, whether they want to or not.
Since it is probably around 15% of people who just hate CFLs, what the environmentalists it seems are really trying to do is make 15% of the population suffer just to get the other 30% of the population to buy the "energy efficient" bulbs.

Does anyone not see how this is kind of senseless? Is it really worth forcing 1 person who really hates these new bulbs to use them, just to get 2 other people to switch?
And this when half of the population has already switched? Why do we need a law to force people to switch?

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110127/ARTICLES/110129569

Again, I emphasise that the process of phasing out incandescent bulbs has not come to completion yet, they still survive temporarily in the form of halogen bulbs. But within 8 years these halogen bulbs will be phased out under the current law. Whatever "exemptions" there are will just be much more expensive specialty bulbs that will not be practical for regular lighting, and if people start buying too many of these exempted bulbs, the current law directs these bulbs to be banned also.

Is there not some other form of promoting reduction in energy usage that still allows people who really hate the alternatives to continue to have incandescent bulbs ?
I am not as much concerned for the adults right now. Those who really want incandescent bulbs have already stockpiled. My concern is for the children, and those that have yet to be born, that will not tolerate the energy efficient bulbs well. This will no doubt lead to more learning disabilities in the future, as there is a well established connection between light quality and concentration in certain vulnerable populations of school children.
http://suite101.com/article/student-success-includes-natural-lighting-a138865
http://www.steadyhealth.com/Anxiety_and_Fluorescent_Lighting_t78620.html

 

Thanks for the laugh. I enjoy reading the ramblings of uneducated twits trying to sound clever.
These things are more like 10% efficient. A LIGHT bulb's job is to provide light, not heat.
The fact, most of that light isn't even in the visible spectrum makes you post just that little sillier.

 

I, myself, turn on lights at night, when it's darker.

I'm unsure as I'm also unsure you're on the same planet as the rest of us.
One provides light, the other, heat.
The tiny light bulb would do almost nothing to assist heating a room but waste a pile of power not to do it.
Add that heat rises, so your wasted energy never gets to you unless you nail yourself to the ceiling and watch your black and white 12 inch TV from there.

 

I'm really going to have to change my underwear as I'm peeing in the incumbent ones as I read your posts.

I live in a warm climate that drops to the massive low of 16 degrees C at night. Please explain why I need heat from my light bulbs.

70 watts is a lot when you compare it to 3 or 6 watts and expand that over a year's electricity bills.

That's it. Time to change my underwear.

 

Changed.
Now, please stop posting rubbish so I don't need to do so again.

 

I don't know where you live, but I am cold right now sitting at my computer with my nice pleasant incandescent bulb on. So cold... perhaps I should go get my little electric space heater...
Even in the warm summers it still often is cold at night. And I only turn on the lights in the night time (except in one of my bathrooms that does not have a window, which was not a very good architectural design if you ask me).

While an incandescent bulb gives off 90 percent of its energy as heat, you do realise that a CFL still wastes 80 percent of its energy as heat? not to mention some UV and EMF radiation that can probably not be good for our health. LED replacement bulbs are really not all that better either, even the best ones being sold still wastes 65 percent of their energy on heat.

My incandescent bulbs not only put out pleasing warm light, they are also little radiant electric heaters. Not that they put out a lot of heat, by any means, but they are no less efficient than the electric space heaters I use to warm individual rooms. Gas heating is nice too, it does not use electricity, but I only turn that on if I need to heat the entire house. Not that my light bulbs make much of a difference: I would need to turn on about 40 light bulbs to match the heat (and energy consumption) from my little electric heater.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050961/Thousands-dying-afford-heating-bills.html
http://www.empireclaims.co.uk/blog/...will-be-freezing-in-fuel-poverty-this-winter/
http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/tag/pensioners-burn-books-for-warmth/

You cruel environmentalists! Don't you care about what your senseless phase out has done to the old?

 

My wife will go crazy at me and the maid will complain about the smell of pee.
The first link says strip lights aren't as good as daylight.
I agree so I use LED bulbs that are very similar to daylight as far as the visible spectrum is concerned.
Your old, mini heaters are far worse as their output is slanted to one end of the visible spectrum and most is outside it.
You've just shot yourself in the foot.
The second link talks of strips being a problem but does not mention your stone age bulbs as a cure.
Frankly, if you're down to using forum posts as evidence, you need to stop trying.

 

Let's take a look and compare the spectrums of natural sunlight to a "daylight color temperature" LED...



Not very similar, are they? These LEDs are only being called "daylight" because they put out so much blue light.
Despite "correlated color temperature" ratings, color temperature does not exactly apply to LED sources because their light cannot be matched to the curve of a heated black body.

True, but at least they put out all the different frequencies of light, and are particularly rich in deep red frequency light that white LEDs are deficient in.

So what about dull yellowish incandescent bulbs? How do they compare to sunlight? Well, at least their spectral graph is a smooth continuous curve like sunlight. While you might think that a 2700K incandescent light causes color distortions, it does so in a consistent way, which your eye can compensate for. Why do "whites" look about the same at different times of day, even though the actual colors vary quite a lot? The "von Kries hypothesis" explains this, suggesting that the three receptors in the eye can change their "gain" in different environments in order to compensate for different lighting conditions. CFL's and other sources distort colors in a way that your eye doesn't easily fix, for instance by creating "spikes" of extra green that distort particular colors.

In fact, the best light source for replicating the natural spectrum of sunlight is just a halogen incandescent with a unique coating formulationfrom, made by the SoLux company. These bulbs have a 98 CRI at 5000K CCT.
http://solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/infopages/index.html

In terms of trying to match sunlight, halogen is better than normal incandescent bulbs obviously because the curve is shifted a little more towards the blue end.

They are still trying to develop LEDs that more closely match the spectrum of sunlight, but right now they still have a long way to go.

 

Nice try, total crap but at least you tried.



The visible spectrum is the only bit that really matters and you totally fail to note it.
It's true, LEDs are weaker in the low green range and a tad over strong on the blue but still come far closer to sunlight than your favoured option will ever manage and at a far lower running cost.



Care to defend that terrible red line?

 

What would probably approximate sunlight even better is using a combination of LED together with halogen. The halogen has that good full spectrum light in the red-yellow-cyan part of the spectrum, and the LED would add that extra blue light. Unfortunately, hybrid incandescent-LED bulbs would probably not be too practical because the LED chip needs to be kept from overheating.

Yes. If you actually zoomed out on the full electromagnetic spectrum graph of an LED, you would also find a big hump of infrared. It just does not appear in a normal spectrum graph because this infrared is all lower frequency from just being hot, not all the near infrared that is close in frequency to red that appears in the graph of an incandescent. Again, that deep red light (which is close to infrared but still vissible) adds to the color rendering of inandescent bulbs. White LED bulbs just do not have this deep red frequency light, and so their color rendering suffers. Again, I am using a radiant electric space heater right now. This infrared coming out from my bulbs is exactly what I need (even though it is not anywhere near the level coming out from my heater).

Oh, and that LED spectrum shown in that bottom graph you posted is a "high CRI" LED chip, which is much more expensive and not being used in any of the energy saving LED bulbs currently being sold. The spectrum graph of the LED chips in your bulbs actually looks even worse. And the graph for halogen (not shown on your graph) is better (in terms of that red line) than normal incandescents. In fact, most of the incandescent bulbs being sold right now are all halogen, so that graph is not really a fair comparison.

 

Light bulbs in general are just a passing fad. I am surprised people still even use them but then again some people still like disco.

 

Just a passing fad? Edison began selling incandescent light bulbs in 1882.

By 1920, nearly half of all American homes in urban areas had electric power for their edison bulbs. By 1930, 85% of them did. It took a little longer for rural household to catch up. In 1940, 30% of rural households had electricity to power their edison bulbs. By 1950, about 80% of them did. Electric power and edison's incadescent light bulbs went hand in hand. The incandescent bulb was by far the main reason for sending electrical power to peoples homes, at least in the early days. By the year 1990, with all the other consumer appliances and electronics, only 15% of the average home's electricity went towards powering their incandescent bulbs. Even if everyone never used their lights, our electric bills would still only go down by 15%.

Incandescent bulbs have been an integral part of our lives for over a century. And now the government wants to get rid of them.

 

So why not go back to candles? We have become so reliant on artificial lighting now that many of our buildings and schools would not be functional without them, because of poor design that takes artficial lighting for granted. Many rooms have inadequate windows, or no windows at all. Houses are now only rarely oriented in relation to the direction of sunrise to take advantage of natural light.

 

There is no justification on any grounds for any government to restrict the usage of regular light bulbs.

Our societies are principly powered by hydrocarbon, and CO2 is not a pollutant. Coal, oil, natural gas, et al are plentiful - and as discoveries and technologies are developed, they are becoming ever more plentiful and accessible. Governments should not be artificially making the use of these life giving energy sources more expensive and more difficult to use.

The environmental agenda has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment; it has everything to do with empowering government and controlling society, i.e. controlling resources, land, and people. Next? They'll be telling you how far you can drive, what you can drive, what temperature you can keep heat or cool your house to, what you can eat, how much you can eat, how many children you can have, on and on... it will never stop.

 

That's what it eventually will come down to.
If there are so many people in the world that I cannot be allowed to enjoy such a simple thing as an incandescent bulb, then I say there are just too many people!
We wouldn't have to worry about our country using "too much energy" if we just stopped taking in so many immigrants.

 

Oh wow, it's your lucky day! Dimmable AND warm light! It's a good thing I have google so I can find these things for you!

http://www.amazon.com/PureSpectrum-...1331&sr=8-1&keywords=cfl+dimmable+light+bulbs

 

My guess is those bulbs are being heavily subsidised by a utility company and that store is illegally selling them on the internet, outside the region. And what about the cost of shipping?

Even if people were handing those things out for free, many people still wouldn't take them.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110127/ARTICLES/110129569

 

http://kayranft.blogspot.com/2011/01/day-seventeen-2011.html

 

Yes, they are very out of date.

 

I really don't care about your crazy guesses.

 

If they were so "out of date", everyone would be ceasing to use them of their own free will. Even many consumers who have switched to CFLs admit that the light is inferior, and only made the switch for the believed energy savings and supposed environmental impact.

The government never had to ban vinyl records for people to switch to casette tapes, and never had to "phase out" casette tapes for people to switch to CDs. So why is it that lately the government feels they have to intervene? In fact, there still are a few nostalgics that appreciate vinyl records. Could you imagine the outrage from these music lovers if the government banned the sale of vinyl records? Did the government have to ban cathode ray tube TVs to get people to switch to LCD screens? What about the small minority of consumers that still prefer the look of cathode ray tubes?

No, there is a reason incandescent bulbs have remained popular for well over a hundred years. There is a reason why people kept using incandescent bulbs in their homes and fine restaurants when fluorescent tubes became widely available in the 1960's. The light from incandescent bulbs, despite being yellowish, is still a continuous spectrum that is soft, pleasing, and easy on the eyes. Halogen incandescent bulbs are not as yellowish as the old ones, but the environmentalists don't want to allow those to be sold either after 2020.

LED technology has just not caught up. When LED lights become available that can actually replicate the spectrum of natural sunlight, perhaps then consumers will start switching of their own free will. If LEDs actually had more pleasing light, the government would not have to force them on everyone. The government never had to force color televissions on people.

 

I'm in Indonesia where the old bulbs are freely available and very cheap.
Only the very poor use them.
Should you ever stroll through a remote Javanese village at night, you'll see a few ancient lamps but the vast majority are newer types.
There is no street lighting on many small roads so it's normal to have an outside light covering roads or paths around your house. It's a sort of community street lighting.
The old bulbs are very unpopular as the light is so poor, so the vast majority have changed.

 

CFLs last longer and are cheaper in the long run.