Selling Incandescent Light Bulbs As Heating Devices 557
Csiko writes "The European Union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology (most of the energy is transformed into heat). A company is now trying to bypass this restriction by offering their incandescent light bulb products as a heating device (article in German) instead of a light device. Still, their 'heat balls' give light as well as heating. So — every law can be bypassed if you have some creativity!"
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with that, it's not as if they're being misleading. That "wasted" energy has to go somewhere and if it's being used to heat up your home in the winter, then it's hardly "wasted."
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
True on the technicalities, but seriously? Electric radiant heat is terribly inefficient, and more often than not you'll be putting the heat source literally at the ceiling.
Or hell, I dunno. Maybe you guys have fond memories of clustering underneath the bare bulb in your bedroom for warmth when you ran out of heating oil or something.
Is it just me? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
haha. Yeah, that's what i thought. I actually switch out my CFLs to incandescent lightbulbs in the winter in my study because it is warmer. The study is a pretty small room and the lamp is close to me so it works out alright. I don't know about using heat balls in a large space though :p
You'd save money by turning up the heat (or insulating your house.) Electric resistance heat is ridiculously expensive.
Re:I hate the new bulbs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop buying the cheapest shitty bulbs you can find.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Electric radiant heat is terribly inefficient
Er, where does the wasted energy go?
Market Forces are better than silly laws anyway... (Score:4, Insightful)
The European union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology reasons (most of the energy is transformed into heat).
If these items are generally better, in terms of energy consumption, and are likewise sold at a reasonable price, they OUGHT to make sense to buy. (Or make cents, as it were.) If they don't then people should be free to wait until they do.
On the inverse, if there's a law requiring they be the only kind of bulb, then they can be built without concern for energy savings, and sold at any price. After all, the law says you have to have them, so why not profit from the artificial demand.
Oh, and by the way, all that artificial demand is damaging the economy, which will likely lead to war, which is about the least 'green' thing imaginable. Why is it that we love to talk long term about climate change and human behavior, but can't seem to do so about economics? I'm astounded mostly because while the former is a natural phenomenon that could be influenced by humanity, the latter is entirely human and will cease to exist when we do.
Just astounding.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
No no no... in the case of this product the wasted energy is turned to a yellowish light.
We use heatballs here... (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in a rural area. We aren't on city water, we have a well. About 3 or 4 times a year it gets cold enough that we turn on a light in the pump house to help raise the temperature to protect our already well insulated pipes. This is a very effective solution for us and safer than using a space heater. The space heater costs a lot more than a lightbulb and isn't considered 'safe to leave unattended.' We also have chickens. We have a heatlamp in there, and they can move in/out of it's light to control their own temp (don't want them cooked... yet...)
Do we NEED more fucking regulations? Give me a break.
Re:I hate the new bulbs. (Score:3, Insightful)
"I care about the planet as much as the next guy"
In oher words, you don't give a shit?
Re:I'm buying what are considered decent CFLs (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad light colour, low light output and short lifetimes are all exact symptoms of buying bad lights.
The same is being done with sweetleaf/stevia (Score:4, Insightful)
Although it is not approved by the FDA as an ingredient in foods [to replace HFCS and/or Aspartame] Stevia is being sold as a dietary supplement and more recently as a sweetener that may be added to foods by the end user. Sweetleaf, a sweetener as natural as sugar simply can't get the approval that high fructose corn syrup and aspartame have been able to acquire. So, instead, it is sold as "something else."
5 C? Seriously? You have a tent with stairs? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know where you buy your CFLs from, but the ones I have come on like any normal incandescent light build does.
I guess you either live somewhere that's warm all the year round or you heat your rooms 24 hours a day. In winter mornings my room temperature is about 5 degrees C and it takes a minute for the CFLs to reach normal brightness. My wife insists that we keep the stairway light on all night so that the stairs are well lit, so I am not exactly sure we save any energy.
Wait, you really let your house interior get down to 5C (that's 41F to most of us in the USA)!?!?!
Oh, I get it, you live in a tent. How did you find one with stairs?
Seriously, put some insulation in the walls and roof before you complain that modern lamps don't work in your house, or move from the freezer to a modern house.
CFL's are dirt cheap these days (Score:5, Insightful)
at Costco and Home Depot they run just over $1 per bulb. with the energy savings you have to be crazy to keep on looking for incandescent bulbs
...and? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is true of anything. If it uses electricity, the plant efficiency is the same.
However that doesn't imply wastefulness, it would well be a hydro, solar or nuclear plant. Also in some areas, natural gas isn't available. Where my parents live you heat your house using electricity. There just isn't natural gas hookups to be had.
Electrical radiant is not at all an inefficient way to heat your house. The original poster didn't know what he was talking about.
Ok, a couple things (Score:3, Insightful)
It would help if you understood the current situation regarding bulb regulations better, before prescribing changes.
The answer, of course, is no (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, the price of incandescent light bulbs does not include the negative externalities their use implies. And also, people typically don't look at the life-cycle cost of the things they buy, just the up-front price. So the market, as is so frequently the case, is broken, and requires government help to get fixed.
Re:Hmmm Incandescent vs CFL (Score:3, Insightful)
First, the lifespans of CFL are based on on/off cycles, not time on. I haven't seen anyone who's in any way informed claim that CFL are good for places like bathrooms. In fact, other than a refrigerator, I can't think of many places where it would be worse to use a CFL. If you're putting a CLF into a bathroom, (or a refrigerator) you're using it in the worst way possible. Yes, it will suck for that. Those are places where we should be using incandescents. Use CFLs properly, and they last a damn long time.
Secondly, the quality of CFL varies a ton. I have one that does what you noted - a long period of dim, sickly light, then a brilliant dazzle. I have another that's nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent. The only difference is that it turns on at like (an equivalent) 90 watts instead of 100, and a quarter of the time I think to myself, "isn't that usually a little brighter...?" The rest of the time, I don't notice. After a couple minutes, it hits the full 100+ watt equivalent. It's bright and warm too. It's also been the primary bulb in my living room for 3+ years now. It gets turned on when it's getting dark, and stays on until I go to bed. That's how you use a CFL. And in that case, it doesn't matter that it's a tiny bit dim when it first comes on. If you need instant, 100% intensity light, you should be using an incandescent in that application.
Lastly, would you all stop panicking about mercury? It's fucking obnoxious. The WHO sets a limit for mercury exposure at 5x10^-4 grams per day. A CFL has about 4-5 grams of mercury in it. Yes, if you punch a hole in a CFL and inhale all the mercury out of it, it will be bad. But when you break one, the mercury vaporizes. What's the volume of the room you break it in, compared to the volume of the CFL? If you're in a room that's substantially larger than the inside of the CFL, (hint: you are!) the mercury quickly disperses in it. Ventilate, and you'll be fine. In fact, even if you don't, you should be fine, unless you break a bulb every couple of weeks inside. And each bulb has on the same order of magnitude of mercury that each adult has in their mouth in the way of fillings.
Use a quality CFL properly, and you're saving money, saving energy, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from an incandescent. Like anything, go cheap and use it improperly, and it doesn't do a good job. I agree with you about LED lighting - a few more years, and I think it will start to be competitive. Just leave off the mercury poisoning crap please. Unless you're huffing CFLs, they're perfectly safe.
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:1, Insightful)
If a standard lightbulb is only 5% efficient, then that implies that it is 95% inefficient. The inefficiency is given off as heat.
Therefore, ignoring the energy lost in distribution (depends on distance from power plant), it sounds like a lightbulb is a very efficient little heater that has the benefit of letting you read at night.
Re:Not a Company --- It's a Propaganda Site (Score:2, Insightful)
"CO2 is not a poison, plants need it"
Actually, the concern over CO2 does seem quite ignorant considering all the much nastier stuff we release into the atmosphere.
CO2 is a convenient target since it can be used as a justification for regulating practically everything, rather than choosing something that would only affect all those industrial lobbyists.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed.
Heat pumps are more efficient specifically because they don't "make" heat They extract the heat from outside and bring it inside. So instead of just 100% efficiency, you have ~300% efficiency.... for every 1 watthour of electricity used, you gain the heat equivalent of 3 watthours.
DISAGREE on CFLs being better.
Edison bulbs are older but still superior tech to CFLs, since they eliminate mercury poisoning, dim turnons (waiting 3-4 minutes until I can see my book), premature heat-death from enclosed fixtures or upside-down fixtures, and high cost (about ten times more). The old Edison bulbs also eliminate the diesel or gasoline emissions from special trucks having to collect the CFLs, in order to recycle them at a central plant that burns even MORE energy.
Edison bulbs also are locally built, whereas CFLs have to be shipped ~10,000 miles from Chinese or Indian factories. It all adds up a lot of reasons to consider CFLs an inferior and *dirtier* technology.
.
(dons flame-repellent armor)
yeh but at least it's a dry heat.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where are you finding all these crap CFLs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just checked; I have two Phillips bulbs and three GE ones, they're all too dim to read by, for long enough that it's irritating. I timed the GE ones and they were approaching comfortable brightness after a minute.
GE model FL12GLS/T2/827
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>regarding carbon-impact of burning hardwoods.
I answered that too. Trees DON'T sequester carbon. They eventually die, the bacteria/fungi eat them, and the carbon is released back to the atmosphere.
I also pointed-out it makes more sense to burn a renewable source like trees, which are carbon neutral like ethanol plants, rather than burn oil or coal.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Insightful? Utter bullshit. No way are incandescents superior to CFLs.
How you've managed to consider CFLs an inferior technology given the above is beyond me.
If you can't get locally made CFLs, that is not a problem with the technology, it's a problem with your location.