The end of Incandescent Lamps. Heater is worried.
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
It seems that it's the end of the road for incandescent lamps, aka light bulbs, in the USA soon.
They disappeared from shops in Europe a while ago.
Needless to say Heater is very distressed about this
On the face of it the new legislation outlawing the light bulb makes no sense at all:
1) In most I places have lived if the lights are on it's also cold, winter in northern Europe for example. Whatever energy is saved by not having heat generated by lighting must be made up for my cranking up the heating system.
2) I find it hard to believe, taking into account the total life time of lamps, manufacturing to disposal, that a complex LED or CFL lamp is consuming less energy overall than a simple filament light bulb.
3) Environmentally I cannot imagine that manufacturing LEDs or CFLs is not a total disaster compared to a simple filament bulb what with all the complex materials and processes required.
4) I don't want to get into politics but if LEDs and CFLs were such a good idea people would switch to them anyway. No regulation required.
Does anybody have any hard information on these issues? Nothing I can find googling around convinces me it makes any sense.
They disappeared from shops in Europe a while ago.
Needless to say Heater is very distressed about this
On the face of it the new legislation outlawing the light bulb makes no sense at all:
1) In most I places have lived if the lights are on it's also cold, winter in northern Europe for example. Whatever energy is saved by not having heat generated by lighting must be made up for my cranking up the heating system.
2) I find it hard to believe, taking into account the total life time of lamps, manufacturing to disposal, that a complex LED or CFL lamp is consuming less energy overall than a simple filament light bulb.
3) Environmentally I cannot imagine that manufacturing LEDs or CFLs is not a total disaster compared to a simple filament bulb what with all the complex materials and processes required.
4) I don't want to get into politics but if LEDs and CFLs were such a good idea people would switch to them anyway. No regulation required.
Does anybody have any hard information on these issues? Nothing I can find googling around convinces me it makes any sense.
Comments
CFLs are a disater, IMO. Their touted longer life may hold up when mounted upright in open air. But they will overheat when mounted in any other orientation or when enclosed, shortening their lives considerably. Plus, their mercury content makes them hazardous waste.
I've been rather well impressed with the LED-based lighting that's coming out lately. The quality of the light is pleasant enough, and the prices do seem to be coming down. I'm sure that they will spell the death knell for CFLs in the not-too-distant future.
Once incandescents are gone, I wonder how much longer we will have to endure the Edison socket and what standard will emerge to replace it. "Screwing in a light bulb" will become as anachronistic as "dialing a telephone," which people still say, despite punching buttons instead.
-Phil
I have bough over 2 pallets of light bulbs. I will not use either CFLs (disgusting) or LED (harsh an nasty).
I do not need big brother telling me what sort of lights to use.
Joe
Oh, you had to go for the political point. I do agree that sometimes a nudge or "jump start" is required for the long term good of society. My problem with this as that I'm not totally convinced that the goal of the legislation, saving energy, is actually achieved taking into account the total life cycle of a light bulb vs a LED lamp. Hence my question about the technical realities of this.
Despite my user name I have been a LED fanatic since I got my first 4mm red LED in the early 1970's. WTF, it's a diode and it lights up? You're kidding me!
However I don't even want to get into the aesthetics of filaments vs CFL, vs LED here.
I agree CFLs are a disaster.
Train Nut
If that is the case then these lights are also bad news for illuminating paintings, photographs, fabrics, antiques, and lot's of other things you would rather not have fade or be colour damaged. This is BIG.
Sounds like time for some experiments here...
I've been running experiments with fittings that have 3 sockets - I put one standard bulb, one CF and one LED bulb in the socket. Here is what I have found:
1) CF bulbs take several minutes to turn on. If you have a standard bulb in the socket, at least you get some of the light straight away
2) CF bulbs lose brightness as they age. You think your eyes are aging as you can't read a book but it is the bulb. If you also have a standard bulb in the fitting you can use that as a brightness reference.
3) LED lights are brighter and come on straight away. But they flicker at 50Hz. You can see the strobe effect if you move your hand quickly. Not sure how that goes with people who get migraines. I think the manufacturers are supposed to use a constant current regulator, but they cheat and save costs by just using the AC.
4) LED lights are supposed to last forever. I just noticed on one that is a year old that a whole bank of leds is not working.
5) In high use areas like the kitchen, it is the standard lightbulbs that need replacing all the time. As the official lightbulb replacer in the house, I like not having to do this job any more than necessary!
I'll keep doing experiments and buying bulbs from different manufacturers. I think the ideal light will be a LED light with a constant current driver and also where it has been designed well within the heat/current recommended range rather than (as I suspect) being pushed right to the limit.
My current thinking is different bulbs for different places - eg for the closet, hardly every used and the incandescent will last forever. But for the kitchen and living areas, I quite like the hybrid approach.
We've been using CFL's since they came out. CFL's have been amazing in my kitchen, garage, basement, and exterior lighting. I think I've changed a light bulb outside once or twice in fourteen years. In the kitchen perhaps annually. But in desk lamps the lamp tends to get knocked over before the lifetime of the bulb elapses. The bulb is usually intact, but often nonfunctional afterwards.
One thing popular here are those (deleted) LED Christmas lights. They are harsh in color, they flicker and give me headaches. They are not at all natural looking. I am not an anti-LED person, I have plastic storage drawers full of the for electronic projects. I just do not use them for lighting.
One suggestion for the train layouts... use Neon (old fashioned) only lights. NO MERCURY in the tube. Only oldschool neon craftsmen can make those now. No Mercury, no damaging UV light to tear up the plastic.
Joe
You have me thinking, I have been very annoyed by LED flicker in the past. Just now we have a string of multi-colour LED Christmas lights around the window that I cannot detect any flicker from them at all. Usually a pain when you cast your gaze around. I don't see anything special about them, I'm now wondering if they are dual LEDs that would give a 100Hz flicker instead of 50Hz. Is there even such a thing? Looks like I have to pull them apart and find out.
Maybe they were not cheap so they put a full-wave rectifier(4 diodes) on the incoming ac.
What? I never buy anything that is not cheap
Perhaps there is a full-wave rectifier. Seems like an odd thing to have to do given that LEDs are diodes. You only need two LEDs back to back in the package, I have to rip on them after Christmas.
Edit: Wait. I did not buy these. "Her in doors" did. Perhaps they were not so cheap...
Even if you are using incandescent bulbs as *cough* heaters, I assume that in such cold climates most actual heating systems are gas or oil based. Burning the fuel to heat your house on site is still a lot more efficient than burning it in a power plant, converting to electricity, sending it down wires, and making a filament hot.
Good point. For sure heating with electricity is usually a lot more expensive that gas, oil, etc.
It's even worse than that here because most domestic heating, in cities at least, comes from waste heat from power stations delivered to apartments via high temperature steam pipes underground. It's basically free! Scandinavia can be very efficient.
So my "heating" argument falls down. I'm still not clear on the total life cycle energy efficiency and environmental impact though.
Edit: When I say "basically free" the point is that the cost of heating is included in the rents of apartments so there is not much consumer choice about that.
Edit, edit: Oddly, just at the moment I wrote that I was asked to close the door to our balcony, it's been open all day because it's was too hot in here!
I have some cough * Real* LED systems and they have No flicker...I use them for video ........ the issues here is the quality of the lamp.
Best ones use a few HP dice . not tons of the dinky indicator LEDs . and the good lamps use a Real CC CV switch mode power supply to regulate the power at 10s of KHz .
Xmas lights are just a diode and a resistor in some cases .
My PAR spot bulbs where 10 USD a pop but are normally in the 40 dollar range ...
but they will out last ME so I see them as a investment!
CFLs are a JOKE . horrible power factor and are toxic and have warm up issues ........ they were a gateway drug to the world of LEDs
I skipped the CFL craze .... I am all LED here and its pardon the pun . cool .. * I have ONE incanseset in my oven that I doubt a LED would fare well in it *
And if you're worried about the mercury in CF's you really don't want to know what chemicals are involved in the making of semiconductors.
Well, in the olden days I would have pulled one to bits. But these days, jump on youtube and see someone else pulling one to bits. I have about 10 of these 'corn led' lights through the house - some are a lot bigger than the one in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKUEgnLpeQo and they do seem equivalent to a 100W incandescent in terms of light output. The one he is dismantling I think is equivalent to a 40W incandescent. I haven't got audio on the computer at the moment, so I'm not sure about the vibe of the commentary.
At 6:18 in the video is the schematic. The smoothing cap is 47uF. I wonder if increasing this would decrease the flicker?
Also that schematic looks like there are led strings in parallel but only one dropping resistor. Not sure how that should work. Probably why one bank of leds has stopped working on one of the bulbs. Constant current would be better.
I couldn't find any corn led constant current bulbs on ebay. But they do exist eg http://geteok.en.alibaba.com/product/959412776-218902425/SMD5050_constant_current_85_265v_30w_LED_Corn_Lamp.html
BTW, in order to prolong the bulb's life, I wired a rectifier diode into the lamp's base to reduce the effective voltage that it sees. Still, though, a single-wire 25W filament is a very fragile thing, and I still have to replace the bulb about twice a year.
-Phil
Your diode is shortening the life of your bulb. Filaments vibrate much more at 30Hz than 60Hz, so although it is operating a lower power and temperature, it is vibrating much more which induces fatigue. Try removing the diode and the vibrations should go down considerably. Maybe even run a test with your next bulb, one with and one without a diode. I suspect the one without will last longer. Or just use a resistive load, i.e. two bulbs in series.
Anyway, for something decorative like this, why not run it on DC and then your bulb will last a very long time? Rectify and regulate it so you get the brightness you want. But no triacs or SCRs as they will induce vibrations: ever notice when dimming incandescent bulbs that at certain light levels you can hear the bulb sing? That the filament vibrating wildly.
P.S. I'm a CFL believer. Every light in the house is CFL (except for the oven) and most are dimmable.
BTW, I've tried the lamp with and without the diode. Bulbs last longer with the diode. So I think the reduced voltage appears to trump the effects of 60Hz vs. 120Hz vis-a-vis vibration. But thanks for the heads-up just the same!
-Phil
My comment about filaments is from experience with similar long bulbs. I noticed that with 1/2 wave rectified AC they vibrate a lot more than regular AC. We switched to DC and haven't had any failures yet (these are for signs).
-Phil
Joe - I like the way you think! :thumb:
I'm gonna give that a try.
I don't believe that government intervention to eliminate existing technology is a very good idea.
Look what happened when Cash For Clunkers program was going on.
Auto industry benifited, but maybe should not have had that advantage.
Prices of used cars went up.
The common person that needed an inexpensive mode of transportation has a hard time now, purchasing a car to get them
to work which I guess is really not a problem because common people without college education can't get jobs anyway.
You pay for the CFL's and LED's up front, Hoping that they will last for 10 or 20 years.
I consistently replace my CFLs after a couple of years because they are in enclosed not recommended installations, which are
almost any light fixture I can imagine.
I truly believe that LED is the lighting of the future.
LED Costs will come down, maybe.
I have recently installed equivalent 60W LEDs in my outdoor fixtures.
Incandecents do not work because of slamming doors and vibrations from garage door closings.
CFLs don't work because when temperature gets down to about 20 degrees F, they take forever to warm up.
So far, after two months of operation, the LEDs are working well in my outdoor applications.
Garage doors opening-closing and front door slamming and cold weather down to -10 degrees F have not stopped
the LEDs from working.
When the 8track and cassette tape started to influence the 33 rpm record disks, no one really thought that the 33rpm records
were going to be obsolete.
When CD's came along, it spelled the death of vinyl records.
I still have my stack of 33LPs
I don't think any government intervention was needed to see that the CD technology was better than the vinyl record technology.
I think what happened is known as Creative Distruction.
That process actually works.
I believe that if people want the lowest initial cost lighting, they should be able to purchase whatever technology they want.
You pay now for something that may not be cost efficient in the long run
or
You pay over and over for something that may or may not work in the long term.
Thats my two cents worth.
Thanks for listening.
Garyg
But it's ok if producers do so by ceasing to produce them when demand drops?
I guess my -- completely apolitical, mind you -- point is that, in any ecosystem or free-market econosystem, perturbations will occur, whether they're initially seen as constructive, benign, or destructive. But it's the nature of such systems, when left alone again, to self-stabilize. What may be a detriment to one species will be an opportunity for another. I mean, where would we be if the asteroid had not wiped out the dinosaurs? We are the lumendiodia, the beneficiaries of that terrible event. And I can't say the world is worse off as a result.
-Phil
The technology change is going to be an opportunity for improving on newer technologies. People resist change and sometimes nudging that along is a very good thing. Sometimes it isn't.
If, in this case, it turns out it isn't, then we may well see the old bulbs return due do to how broad the impact is. I also think there will be niche purposes that will continue to be best fit with the old bulbs and enterprising people will make them available.
Cost will be an issue. I can respond to that in a variety of ways and mostly have. The CFL bulbs have improved and I'm spending less on bulbs now. If LED engineering and product development gets more aggressive, I suspect I can spend even less.
I'll miss a good, high wattage bulb. Of course, I really like the halogen ones I can buy now too. There is just going to be change. For some of us, it's an opportunity, and for a lot of us, it's a PITA. Get the adjusting done and get back to doing things that make sense.
Power-saving lights only makes sense for outdoor lighting, and that is also the only place they don't fail all the time - it's cool enough outside.
LEDs were slow to market because the vendors needed to figure out a way to make them fail regularly. One brand is labelled with 20,000 hours lifetime - turns out that it's if you use them 2.7 hours a day, the twenty thousand hours include the 21.3 hours per day when they are switched off.
So the real lifetime is about 3 months, and that's true enough - they last 3 months. Which is better than the rest of the rubbish produced today, but a sad story compared to what you could buy in the past.
Sadly I did not stock up on bulbs when the good ones were made. Before they were phased out there was a period where they were silently replaced with very low quality Chinese-made bulbs, half of them don't work out of the shop, some don't fit in the socket (seen that when you buy them in pairs. One may fit, the other doesn't). Bulb is smaller so they overheat quickly and fail often.
-Tor
It all boils down to an old fashioned word... Liberty. I will not be told what I will illuminate my house with. If I want to light my house with kerosene, I will. I have stainless oil lamps just incase the power goes out and I run out of diesel for the generator. I do not want white gas inside the house because it is so volatile.
Right now, as my family sleeps, with the furnace in night time mode, I am writing this on a Dell laptop under an incandescent lamp. I have a 1500 Watt space heater under my desk, two 40 Watt grow lamps (fluorescent) in an 80 watt fixture over my begonias (along with four incandescent grow lamps for the IR), I have 4 250 Watt red heat lamps in my chicken coup keeping the fowl comfy in this freezing weather. The ducks really do not care, they will play in the snow at midnight, so they may or may not stay under them. The chickens however, must be kept warm. No warmth, no eggs. Wet feet, no eggs. Chickens will not eat right if they are cold. And to keep with the theme, chickens that do not eat right lay no eggs. Do not laugh, I get five dollars a dozen for farm eggs, and cannot keep up with demand with over 40 laying hens.
What most do not realize with the light bulb laws is that while one political party at the behest of the corporate CFL manufacturers wrote the laws, the other party jumps up and down with glee over the environmental correctness of the law. I am apolitical... George Bush who came up with and signed the law and Barney Frank who championed the law can both go screw a CFL in their nether regions for all I care. The only ones who are out (as usual) are those of use who have lost a legal choice. As for myself, I have a large stash of light bulbs in the barn. I have friends in China who will send me more if I am want for them. BTW, did you know that the machinery used to make light bulbs has been sent to China where they are now being made? And that machinery was around over a hundred years ago... literally the same machinery was used to make Christmas ornaments.
Just remember folks, if they can do this to light bulbs, they can do this to anything. What next? Are they going to outlaw computers that use CRTs rather than flat screen? Yeah, I have both. I still have my Daewoo Leading Edge model 2 with two 5.5 inch floppy disks, 30 Meg hard card, 8087, math accelerator card and amber screen that I use to code on. I to this day run Turbo C and Turbo Pascal 5.0 on it. How about my model 28 Teletype collection? Yes, I restore and use great big (and heavy) electromechanical Teletype machines to communicate with. Right now, I have five loops, a rack of jack fields, a fox box, tube modulators and demodulators, etc and etc. All highly energy inefficient. I communicate with HF radio (I am KB0TXC) and landline to other TTY enthusiasts... Horrors, I run a 1500 to 1600 watt linear for a good clean signal. And yes, heretic that I am, I sill have the good old fashioned three gallon per flush heads in the bathroom. No courtesy flush needed here. And OMG, have you seen the prices on the new water heaters that you have to buy now? Yep, regulation at work for our benefit.
If you actually like CFLs, then by all means use them. I might gently suggest that you read the EPA's own regulations on what must be done if you break one in your house. I do hope that never happens, but if it does, I hope that you were in the market for new carpeting anyway. If you like LEDs, then again, be my guest. I will never be the one to tell anyone 'thou shalt not'. All I ask for is the same courtesy.
Best and Merry Christmas!
Joe
As I look back over the last 4 or so decades, I have seen us shift the format of all sorts of consumer products from early rugged reliability to more dubious complexity.
My biggest gripe is the modern safety razor. I finally went retro this year and got a double edge safety razor (made in India on old machines imported from elsewhere) and am using German razor blades.
Industry can claim that they are improving the energy consuption or making a more recyclable product, but I am pretty sure that in the back of the minds of the managers of the company is a windfall by forcing over a changeover.
Not sure that getting rid of incadescent lamps is going to be a winner. It may mean we will just get lesser quality at more expense and a succession of format changes just to force the consumer to accept what is available now -- not what is really the best product.
~~~~~~~~~~~
I just see more and more industries shifting to modern technology with the true benefits going to primarily to the corporation, not the end user. I do realize that glass bulbs are rather energy intensive to fabricate, and tungsten may be put to better uses. But odds are that whatever replaces thes bulbs will just never be quite as solid or good. I have a friend that does microscope work and he depends on incadescent lamps to get the right lighting bandwidth for his work.
The strikes me as being similar to the huge debate on whether paper or plastic bags are the better choice when you go shoppying. The obvious answer is to ask for none and find another means to carry your stuff home.
C.W.