Ross rails against the nanny state:
Writing in the overly-cheery, "just do as I say and all should be well" style of Dolores Umbridge explaining a new regulation from the Ministry of Magic, Brendan Koerner tries to persuade me to stop worrying and embrace "compact fluorescent light bulbs." (Not that I have any choice in the matter.) Why would you want to stick with "inefficient incandescent technology that has barely changed since the invention of the tungsten filament nearly a century ago," he wonders, when you can enjoy the hip and refreshing taste of New Coke - sorry, I mean, the chilly pulse of energy-efficient fluorescence? (It's the official light bulb of Tomorrowland, kids - and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project!)You might be a little concerned about what to do when a CFL bulb breaks, but not to worry: "Just follow the EPA's easy cleanup guidelines." (Who doesn't want a lightbulb that comes with government-issued "cleanup guidelines"?) True, those guidelines suggest that you flee the room at first, and then use rubber gloves and two sealed plastics bags to clean up the broken bulb, but the good news is that "even a broken CFL bulb won't leak too much toxic metal." And while you might have trouble throwing the broken bulb away, since putting it in the trash is probably, er, illegal, there's hope on the horizon: "Look for several major retailers to set up recycling drop-off boxes this year, in order to goose their CFL sales." (Jonah Goldberg, call your office ... )
Oh, and "use common sense and don't place CFLs where they can be damaged by young children." You know, like in your living room.
Flourescent lights are the reason everyone looks hideous and sickly in dressing rooms. I have no desire to carry that feeling home. I'll cast my vote for any politician that stops regulating the hell out of every aspect of our life, and instead imposes a sane, transparent carbon tax to deal with whatever negative externalities present themselves.
have you tried the 2700K bulbs? I think they give a good light.
I already commented on Ross's post, but I find CFLs perfectly tolerable with two measures: 1) use a warm-toned lampshade - not orangey, just off-white will do; 2) use a slightly higher wattage than the box says as the equivalent. That is, if the box says a 10W CFL equals a 60W incandescent, use a 15W CFL. It'll be fine. It's not like the ugly fluorescent tubes over your or my cubicle. Who knows, like Moliere's character who'd been speaking prose all his life, you may even have sat under a CFL bulb without knowing it.
A carbon tax would be a fine alternative though - although it might result in you or your friends using CFLs anyway (since that's the point of a tax, to change usage patterns). Do you have any ideas for actually getting it passed?
I think they give a good light.
Your eyes don't work. Avoid driving and art.
c'mon, you won't drink the coolaid, Megan? I use the CFL's as a choice...
But why is it that everydamnthing must be legislated? Sheesh! I don't want to make Megan buy bulbs she loathes and detests. Beside, being a smart cookie, she may go out and by a stock of the old kind. Leave it a market decision and somebody in R&D is going to try to make something pleasing and better. At that point She sees the light [could I resist?] and buys what she likes.
I think legislators just like to scold other people...
Megan, have you seen any of the most recent generation of compact fluorescents? I've got an old-fashioned fluorescent in my kitchen, and it's cold and stark, but I've got newly-bought compact fluorescents in my living room, and they're nice and warm-looking like the old incandescent bulbs.
The technology is improving fast. The CFLs I bought this past summer are much better than the ones I bought five years ago.
the new flourescent bulbs look a lot better on objects, but they still, for reasons I don't understand, make human skin look gangrenous. Try comparing how someone else looks under the new cfls vs. incandescents.
Thou dost protest too much. Has thou not seen human skin under candlelight?
"Flourescent lights are the reason everyone looks hideous and sickly in dressing rooms."--MM
CFLs do, indeed, need to go.
"CFL BACKGROUND
Color temperature: The lower the color temperature, the warmer the light. Warmness (red) or coolness (blue) can be measured in degrees Kelvin by a chroma meter. We observed a temperature of about 2700 K for soft white bulbs, whereas "daylight" bulbs measured around 3400 K — real noontime sunlight ranges from 5000 K to 6500 K.
Lumens vs. lux: Manufacturers use a complex process to measure lumens, the total quantity of light emitted by a bulb. We used a light and chroma meter to measure lux, the light intensity a bulb shines on a surface. Our observed results in lux generally tracked with manufacturers’ lumen ratings.
Watts and efficiency: Our ammeter’s CFL wattage results were all within 3 watts of manufacturer ratings — but all CFLs use about 70 percent less electricity than incandescent bulbs. The average U.S. household has 45 light bulbs — replacing that number of 75-watt incandescent bulbs with CFLs would save $180 per year.
Phosphor: This chemical compound lines the inside of CFL tubing. When excited, it converts ultraviolet radiation into visible light. The chemical composition of the phosphor determines the color temperature of the light emitted by the bulb.
Mercury: According to the EPA, CFLs contain an average of 5 milligrams of mercury, which increases the bulb’s efficiency. But that also means you can’t just trash them—CFLs must be properly recycled. Visit Energy Star or Earth 911 for disposal instructions.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/home_improvement/4215199.html
their science is marginally better here..
"Lightbulbs’ inefficiency, compared to fluorescents, has been well documented. Lighting consumes 22% of electricity produced in the United States, according to the Dept. of Energy, which also claims widespread use of LED lighting could cut consumption in half.
Compact fluorescents (CFLs) could help cut consumption, but consumers haven’t warmed to them.
LEDs can produce a yellowish or “warm” light similar to incandescents. At Lightfair, Dallas –based Lighting Science Group Corp. showed an LED “bulb” that screws into a standard, medium-sized socket and produces a warm light equivalent to that of a 25W incandescent bulb, but consumes 5.8W. However, it costs $50.
At Lightfair, Polybrite Intl. (Naperville, IL) announced that lighting giant Osram Sylvania will distribute its LED bulbs to commercial clients.
The article quotes Nadarajah Narendran, director of lighting research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as saying LEDs can be very energy efficient in the lab, but haven’t shown that efficiency when used in fixture because of their heat production. Narendran said the diodes produce less heat than incandescents, but they keep that heat in the fixture rather than radiating it; the hotter the diode, the less efficient it is."
http://www.signweb.com/index.php/channel/12/id/2087
Let me announce flatly that I'm not making special trips to anywhere to throw out dead lightbulbs. They're going in the garbage with everything else. If future generations don't like having toxic waste in their landfills, they can sue the manufacturers.
y81: make sure you don't live in NYC, where they actually pay people to go through garbage to make sure you're complying with recycling rules.
On the plus side, the unnatural (because of it's mandate-driven existance) push to enforce CFL use will drive the development much more interesting, flexible and efficient LED technology.
Regarding the carbon tax - shouldn't a punative tax be levied more heavily on those that actually use fossil fuels for power generation - say, like California? Personally, I live less than eighty miles from the buggest nuclear power plant in the western hemisphere - our state and local governments, and the heavily regulated power utility companies took the risk to build this nuke plant in the late seventies. If you listen to the anti-nuclear-power activists, we are still bearing an additional large risk.
Why should we who did the right thing, be punished like the pollution-exporting residents of California and the eastern states?
I already buy grow lights instead of incandescent lights because they provide more natural light, even if they cost more. There is no way I am going to switch to CFL's--they lack the natural color spectrum that my body deems essential to prevent headaches.
the new flourescent bulbs look a lot better on objects, but they still, for reasons I don't understand, make human skin look gangrenous. Try comparing how someone else looks under the new cfls vs. incandescents.
The path to getting light from electricity in an incandescent bulb is: Use electricity to heat a filament until it glows. This produces a wide range of light output in the lower temperature regions, predominantly in the infrared zone.
The same path in a CFL is: use electricity to excite an arc discharge through low-pressure mercury vapor, which then produces most of its light in the ultraviolet range; then use a phosphor coating to convert the UV to visible spectra. Different phosphors have different dominant spectral lines, and by combining them in various ways, different light temperatures will be simulated. However, the spectral lines are still there, and these can bring out unexpected colors in things that we are accustomed to seeing under warmer light -- most notoriously, human skin.
The recommended techniques above -- 2700K bulbs, brighter than the rated equivalent, and off-white lampshades -- are good ones. The lampshade in particular reduces the bulb's tendency to act as a point-source while filtering some of the higher-frequency (green, blue) spectral lines, making the light softer and warmer.
I should add that the concept of minerals emitting light in narrow, visible spectra when excited by ultraviolet is nothing new; you can witness it at the geology and minerals exhibit of any natural history museum. Note, in particular, that many minerals readily fluroesce in narrow ranges of green and blue.
Jason in Arizona,a carbon tax would not apply to nuclear power, so it would affect those in Cali and back east and not those of you who did the right thing.
also, there are Fiber Optics:
http://www.del-lighting.com/glassblock_wall.html
http://www.del-lighting.com/basics_of_fiber_optics.html
and the perennial half-day bane of Candlemakers:
http://www.sunpipe.com/index.htm
Has anyone actually calculated how much extra mercury is going into the landfills from all those people (50%? 90%?) who will just throw the old bulbs in the bin without reading the fine print?
Has anyone actually calculated how much extra mercury is going into the landfills from all those people (50%? 90%?) who will just throw the old bulbs in the bin without reading the fine print?
I switched to CFL bulbs four years ago. The light is fine. My home computer is the biggest consumer of electricity.