Strange problem with low energy light bulb

If the switch that is series with the light bulb has a night light in it, the current pass of the night light will cause the CFL to flicker.

If the CFL is connected to a switch that is electronic, the small leakage of the electronics will cause the CFL to flicker or in some cases to not turn off.

Regular CFL's cannot be used on standard light dimmers and many of the electronic timers. This is a big inconvenience for many people.

When regular lamps become unavailable, I can see a lot of problems with these new types of lamps. The biggest one will be the pollution from their disposal. They use mercury, phosphors, and many types of materials that are very harmful for the environment. There is also the electronics circuit board, which contain components that have the same recycling problem as used in most electronics. Even though they last longer, when they are eventually put out in to the garbage, they will eventually end up in the land fills. They are going to be a very big problem compared to the simple light bulb that was made of simple glass and metals.

Regular light bulb materials are about 85% recyclable. There are almost no materials in these that are bad for the environment. Most CFL's materials are not recyclable, and their materials are very polluting.

It looks very strong that the government is pushing the CFL's to save some electricity to sell to large industry. This is the only answer that is logical. There are NO green house gasses from using regular light bulbs. When more electricity is sold to industry, the pollution problems from its generation will actually increase, unless the generation is from water power, or nuclear power.

These are my (well known) views also, but I fear we are squeaking like little lost mice in the dark ...

The general public are not told - and would not understand anyway - the wider implications of these knee-jerk government interventions in our lives. All too often, they are poorly thought through, and are dreamed up as a response to the latest bit of pseudo science to hit the news stands. At the moment, anything with the words 'green' or 'eco' or 'environment' or 'global warming' are fair game for this sort of nonsense, and to add to its 'validity' in the public's eyes, they've already started inventing new bits of techno-babble like 'carbon footprint' and 'carbon offsetting' to justify what amounts to little more than opinions by a vociferous band of scientists getting paid large amounts of money and credibility ratings, to promote the government line. As you say, these CFLs are just trading one form of alleged pollution, for another definite one ...

Arfa

Arfa

Quite apart from the problems of disposing of old CFLs, I question the whole principle of Low Energy lighting. If you have a conventional bulb, much of the energy output is in the form of heat, which will help heat the room, and consequently will reduce the need for other heating, central or otherwise. Putting in a low-energy lamp mean that there is less heat being put into the room, and consequently, more heat has to be supplied externally. The only way that Low Energy lighting makes a positive difference is if people change their lamps when they stop using external heating. As in Northern Europe we usually have to have our heating on for at least 7 months of the year, typically 8 months, low energy lighting doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, how much energy does it take to make a low-energy lamp compared with a conventional one? When this is factored in, together with the extra energy required to dispose of it safely, I doubt very much whether low-energy lighting helps at all.

S.

That's sort of fine if you want extra heat. Often as not you don't.

The other downside of your idea is that electricity is more costly than other heat sources (often by a large amount).

No, that's no excuse for low efficiency lighting.

Graham

Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

It wasn't an excuse, it was a reason, and a good one, there was more to his point than you quoted. Most times light is used, heat is also wanted. Where it isn't, you use a light source that doesn't add heat, and there are several choices. LED's in outdoor and tunnel and other places where people don't need to spend time keeping warm, or any of the other types already in use, but that's not where people spend most of their time.

The current availability of CFL's is no excuse to risk vast pollution and ebergy use in manufacture for all the general domestic uses that also need heat, and this is true before you begin to consider all the dimmers that must be replaced and thrown away.

If you're looking for excuses, at least look in the right place. Trying to force an end to the incandescent lamp to satify a political expedient is not engineering, but an excuse. No matter how people heat their homes, the important thing is not to let it all out of the roofs, doors and windows, it's less important where it comes from.

I suppose that depends where you live. In many parts of the populated world, heating and cooling seasons are roughly even in length.

Also, even in heating seasons, the heat generated by light bulbs is not necessarily efficiently generated or distributed. Resistive heating is hardly the most efficient way to heat your home or office.

LEDs will become a good option. From what I've read so far, their efficiency will be very similar to that of fluorescents, both requiring a little more than 1/5 as much energy as incandescent bulbs, for a given lumens level.

I agree with this. The disposal of these things will create a pollution problem. One mitigating factor is that one of these will last many years as opposed to months, in normal use. But the disposal problem is definitely an issue, and it also applies to hybrid cars or all-electric cars.

You try to fix one problem and risk creating an even bigger one.

Bert

I disagree totally. Furthermore an incandescent lamp adds heat at ceiling level usually where it is useless for warming a room.

LED lamps are currently hugely expensive and the light they create is even wierder than CFLs. No, CFLs do fine at this.

I happen to disagree with simply 'banning incandescent bulbs' but that's more from a libertarian perspective than anything else.

Banning incandescents totally would also have the effect of banning modern high efficiency halogens too, some of which currently can be twice as efficient as standard tungsten incandescents and both Philips and GE have plans to improve this figure further still.

Graham

Why would 'disposal' of electric or hybrid cars be a problem ?

The batteries would obviously be recycled, they're far too valuable to throw away, as would electric motors too I expect for their copper content. I'd have thought by the time they're commonplace, there ought to be very good car recycling facilities in place.

Graham

Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

Mostly radiant, so with reflectors, or high efficiency white reflective surfaces, a lot of it can be reflected down. What little goes upwards might help (minimally) to reduce heating requirements for people in rooms above.

That's true, about LED light, but that's exactly what will make it attractive to many. What's also vital is that good colour rendering can be had with RGB that is much easier to filter out, which should please the astronomers, as well as those who need more efficient whitelight sources. CFL's on the other hand, have a light quality that is far harder to control than LED's and LED's in the end will be more appealing, easy to dim, therfore easy to get different colours immediately on demand in a way that no previous tech has allowed. They will become enormously popular.

Agreed, I think that it is a technology that will always find uses, and banning it before it's reached the best possible development would be daft. Anyway, as most lamps have special characteristics that are suited to certain tasks, industrial process use won't be banned, I think. It's the general long-term human environmental lighting that really needs to be thought through because the bulk consumption is there.

The main thing is that govt reactions with no engineering thought behind them need to be stopped, and I hope that some of the smarter politicos read Usenet threads like this one. They could save SO much time, as they're up to date, filled with various opinions and facts, and if govt wants to find people who discuss this stuff they should go where they can find it naturally occuring, instead of listening to pundits with private agendas whispering in their ears, or just going for a big media news-story to steer their course by.

"Serge Auckland" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@bt.com

Fallicy #1 - all CFL's are the same. Right now, they are a moving target as the designs of their electronics packages becomes more sophisticated and purpose-driven.

Dimmable CFL's are available in enough different wattages to be useful in a wide variety of applications.

True that disposal is more critical especially because of the the mercury. However, I've seen situations where CFL's outlast incadescents by 20:1.

They are both primarily made up of glass, which is recylcliable.

This is a very flawed argument. Industry is going to get the power they need. They don't buy power for the fun of it.

Mixed bag.

In the summer, less heat means less need for air conditioning. In the winter, less heat from electricity for lighting may have to be offset to keep the rooms at the same temperature, but space heating often comes from more efficient sources. Electricity generation has about 70% waste back at the generating plant, plus significant losses due to transmission and distribution. Natural gas doesn't have the 70% conversion cost, but it does have some losses in transmission and distribution.

Only surely true in the winter. Even in the winter, space heating generally comes by a more efficient path that was detailed above.

Clearly not true at all if you are cooling the room, which is true in maybe

Hi, The CFL movement is not just USA. Almost every country ( no opec countries to my knowledge) that is energy conscious is changing to CFL's. Even Cuba. The difference is the military inters your home and removes all of the incandescent bulbs and replaces them with CFL's made at a factory located near the Havana airport. Ray

As a fraction of the actual voting public? Or do you mean how many did it look like on TV (vs. the actual numbers.) We have demonstrations all the time over here in the Washington DC "Mall" where you can get a couple hundred people together and if you are on the right side of the issue (that is the "left side"), the "news" purveyors will shoot and edit it to look like thousands (or even hundreds of thousands if it is a slow news day.)

The conservative estimate (by the police) was 750,000 - see

Now that's a big protest march in a country this size, by anyone's definition. Over a million people signed the anti road pricing petition that I mentioned. Again, that is a very substantial piece of the motoring public. The day after that petition closed, the minister for transport, or whatever he was, publicly declared that the petition was basically nonsense, because the motoring public did not know what was good for them, and what was the 'right' thing to do, so they were going to go ahead with the pilot schemes, regardless. Despite France and The Netherlands ( Holland ) returning a resounding "No" vote to the establishing of a Europe-wide 'constitution', which would seriously erode yet further, a country's right to govern itself, and set its own laws and taxes, and which vote should have spelt an end to further pressure on the member states, it is now being reintroduced by the back door, in such a way that it will be very hard to knock on the head again.

And to Mr T, the answer to whether we had more democracy under Mrs Thatcher, from those of us who can remember her conservative government, the answer has to be yes. At least I didn't feel like they were trying to run my entire life for me, as this lot do ...

Arfa

Which means most of it ends up where it won't warm YOU.

Graham

Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

Don't be daft, I don't exist in a vaccuum! I already posted, at LENGTH, that it's healthier to avoid excessive thermal gradients focussed on our own bodies. I'm sure you disagree, but by now that's because it's me saying it, isn't it? Nothing to do with actual science.

I don't understand your objection to direct radiant heat.

In any event if you were intentionally adding heating you wouldn't locate it on the ceiling !

Graham

Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

I take it that big post of mine never got through... I described a house where that is exactly what had been done. I don't think it's a great idea, but it's more effective than you'd think. The sun doesn't add heat to the earth from below, either.

It's a very odd idea indeed.

Neither does it do so in these latitudes from above. Graham

Eeyore wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

Hell, right now it barely shines at all. >:)