More on lead-free junk solder

You keep stopping at the hairy edge of the actuality. It will take 15 incandescent lamps to equal one (1) CFL/PL lamp. So, 15 x the ships to transport them if imported. 15 x the trucks if domestic. Even if you calculate strictly on weight, you are calculating on 60 oz. of material transported vs. 8, so only ~7 x. Both ways.

Think it _ALL THE WAY_ through life-cycle costs.

BTW, the very best oil burner is ~80% efficient. But we are neglecting peripheral efficiencies here. Were you to calculate all of those, the numbers would be even more obvious. Gas burners run to 94% or so. Electricity is 100%, delivery losses neglected as with all of the figures above.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

OK, I need to think some more on this one. Maybe we're all looking at this wrongly. Perhaps we should be looking to LEDs to replace incandescents. The advances in this technology over the last 2 years has been astounding. I would surmise that LED lighting modules are not a lot more complicated to make than incandescents. Properly treated, the LEDs themselves now have lives in excess of 100,000 hours, and can be made in virtually any colour you like, so it should be possible to get a 100% match to an incandescent. Even the drive requirements are becoming simpler, with cheap integrated solutions becoming available. One of my magazines even detailed a LED module for direct connection to 230v AC in last month's edition. At least these devices produce instant light of a constant colour temperature, and are virtually independent of ambient temperature. I would even venture that watt for lumen, they are even more efficient than CFLs ?? Certainly more robust physically, I would have thought, with any potentially harmful substances very tightly locked away in the chemical composition of the chip, as well as physically in the package.

Arfa

Yep... and the wave of the future. Sadly LEDs to-date are severely restricted in spectra, such that the ones suitable for most reading purposes are nearly all in the blue-to-LFUV range and would give the typical user a headache in short order as well as being nearly red/ green blind. They also have very limited 'cool-down' (much as fluorescents in the past) such that they blink at whatever the AC frequency or chopped DC Frequency. This is easily solved via a DC supply, but the spectrum needs considerable work. I see multiple LEDs in a diffuser to compensate for the above, but then voltages become tricky. Nothing that time and care cannot solve. And once the technology is solved, they will be quite cheap to manufacture.

Give it 3-4 years. About the expected life of the present generation of CFL/PL lamps.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

Yep... and the wave of the future. Sadly LEDs to-date are severely restricted in spectra, such that the ones suitable for most reading purposes are nearly all in the blue-to-LFUV range and would give the typical user a headache in short order as well as being nearly red/ green blind. They also have very limited 'cool-down' (much as fluorescents in the past) such that they blink at whatever the AC frequency or chopped DC Frequency. This is easily solved via a DC supply, but the spectrum needs considerable work. I see multiple LEDs in a diffuser to compensate for the above, but then voltages become tricky. Nothing that time and care cannot solve. And once the technology is solved, they will be quite cheap to manufacture.

Give it 3-4 years. About the expected life of the present generation of CFL/PL lamps.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

Yep... and the wave of the future. Sadly LEDs to-date are severely restricted in spectra, such that the ones suitable for most reading purposes are nearly all in the blue-to-LFUV range and would give the typical user a headache in short order as well as being nearly red/ green blind. They also have very limited 'cool-down' (much as fluorescents in the past) such that they blink at whatever the AC frequency or chopped DC Frequency. This is easily solved via a DC supply, but the spectrum needs considerable work. I see multiple LEDs in a diffuser to compensate for the above, but then voltages become tricky. Nothing that time and care cannot solve. And once the technology is solved, they will be quite cheap to manufacture.

Give it 3-4 years. About the expected life of the present generation of CFL/PL lamps.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

Yep... and the wave of the future. Sadly LEDs to-date are severely restricted in spectra, such that the ones suitable for most reading purposes are nearly all in the blue-to-LFUV range and would give the typical user a headache in short order as well as being nearly red/ green blind. They also have very limited 'cool-down' (much as fluorescents in the past) such that they blink at whatever the AC frequency or chopped DC Frequency. This is easily solved via a DC supply, but the spectrum needs considerable work. I see multiple LEDs in a diffuser to compensate for the above, but then voltages become tricky. Nothing that time and care cannot solve. And once the technology is solved, they will be quite cheap to manufacture.

Give it 3-4 years. About the expected life of the present generation of CFL/PL lamps.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

Yep... and the wave of the future. Sadly LEDs to-date are severely restricted in spectra, such that the ones suitable for most reading purposes are nearly all in the blue-to-LFUV range and would give the typical user a headache in short order as well as being nearly red/ green blind. They also have very limited 'cool-down' (much as fluorescents in the past) such that they blink at whatever the AC frequency or chopped DC Frequency. This is easily solved via a DC supply, but the spectrum needs considerable work. I see multiple LEDs in a diffuser to compensate for the above, but then voltages become tricky. Nothing that time and care cannot solve. And once the technology is solved, they will be quite cheap to manufacture.

Give it 3-4 years. About the expected life of the present generation of CFL/PL lamps.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

Severe hiccup in the system? Peter's last posting (above) was received here 13 times! Ian.

I would say that this is a fair comment here too. There are stores currently selling these things for 49 pence each - around a dollar give or take. Now I don't care what the economies of scale are, either these things are being quietly subsidised to get them on the market in bulk, or they are, as you say, being made out of recycled toilet paper ...

Arfa

And here. Interestingly, my OE didn't put the "watched thread" coloured marker on the header, as though it was a new thread, which of course it couldn't have been as it has the same name. It had also placed the thirteen entries at the bottom of the thread, and then yours at the bottom of that, with the header correctly highlighted ... There's some odd things going on on here at the moment.

Arfa

I think that the situation may be a little better than that. There are now LED lamps on sale that do a pretty fair job of matching the colour temperature of an incandescent, and even in similar outline packages. From the reading I have done on them, you can make them in pretty much any colour now. Setting aside the different forward voltages, which I'm sure can be overcome by suitable combinations of series-ing of the individual elements, and higher drive voltages to run the strings, I am sure that suitable 'good' replacements for incandescents, made from different coloured LEDs will be along sooner than 3-4 years. Given the recent rate of advancement in this field, and the commercial drive to better the CFL marketing effort with a product that will be even more efficient and *genuinely* eco friendly, 3-4 years, seems like a lifetime. Perhaps I'm crediting this technology with being more advanced than it really is, but I would have thought that it was up there with CFLs already ?

Arfa

Apologies for the stutter... And no clue as to why.

On "cheap" CFL/PLs, I purchase ours from a local industrial supply (Graingers or Johnstone as both are convenient) and they are of European origin. So far, they have lasted without incident excepting one globe-type where the globe separated from the main body. It was replaced without question.

At our summer house, we have a number of Home-Depot Chinese-origin CFL lamps, they get limited use but so far, so good. The only significant issue I have with them is that *some* interefere with my vintage radios when on the same circuit.

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

The coming ice age will negate the effects of global warming.

Surely it will.... but the operative term is "eventually".

Peter Wieck Wyncote, PA

The world's best scientists told us it would be here before the year 2000. So it's got to get here plenty soon enough to make a difference.

These wouldn't happen to be the same scientists who are now caterwauling about "global warming" would they?

Jerry

I can't be absolutely sure, but I'd bet a dozen donuts.

Krispy Kremes ? ;-)

Arfa

on

In my experience the bigger the joint the sooner they fail. A common example is scart sockets on TV's that start to move around over time. Perhaps this is why the big electrolytic has gone first.