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!"
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends entirely on the relative costs of energy sources and how they are applied. However, as heating appliances go, incandescent bulbs are not exactly optimal for that use.
I can attest, though, that an incandescent desk lamp placed near my keyboard satisfies my lighting needs as well as keeps my fingers above freezing even when the main heat is turned way down. Generally having heat only where it is needed is more efficient than large-area heating, even if the energy source itself is more costly.
=Smidge=
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
I have a cabin in upstate NY. It is heated from a wood burning stove. I do the same thing. In the summer, I 'light' the cabin by opening up skylights and CFL bulbs. In the winter, with the much shorter days and VERY cold weather, the incandescent bulbs provide heat and are actually much more efficient than my wood stove.
The electricity comes from a hydroelectric source, which heats my home. Which beats my local natural gas furnace or wood stove in terms of efficiency, emissions, and saves me from cutting down any hardwoods on my property.
It's not enough to heat my entire house, but any time I meet the following conditions, it is the best solution:
1. If temperatures are below 60F and I'd light my wood stove or furnace.
2. If I require light.
Under those two conditions, Incandescent bulbs are more efficient.
Re:So? (Score:2, Interesting)
In other words, space heating. Me, I use a few servers running BOINC to warm my feet. That way, even though resistive heating is much less efficient than using electricity to run a heat engine, or burning fuel on-site, at least the electricity is being put to good use before it dries my socks. Now if only I could get the fans to run quieter... given the air temperature is pretty low to start they shouldn't need to be on full blast... overly conservative SMBIOS, feh, by the time these things wore out via hot electron effect they would be completely obselete.
I have a slew of old G4 mainboards from iLamps, but none of the distributed computing projects want to provide Linux/PPC clients, so no uber-silent convection-cooled heater for me, sadly.
Ok, once again... (Score:3, Interesting)
CFLs result in lower lifetime mercury emissions than incandescents. [wikipedia.org]
CFLs do not fit in fixtures (Score:3, Interesting)
I have lots of ceiling fixtures of the "dome" style, and CFLs are too long to fit inside them. I have wall fixtures (e.g. over bathroom mirrors) and CFLs extend below the glass shade, leading to a very annoying glare. I'd like to switch to LEDs,but there are no products on the market which both have 360 illumination and the lumen output of a 60 or 75W incandescent.
Personally, I vote for a massive increase in the cost of electricity, and let both consumers and businesses decide what type and how much light they want.
Cheap electricity usid for heating in Norway (Score:3, Interesting)
Power from hydro-electric plants have traditionally been quite inexpensive here in Norway, it is only over the last 10 years or so that we've gotten to the point where other forms of heating (particularly heat pumps) have started to become really attractive.
(BTW, since we have no domestic gas grid, we instead sell all our North Sea gas to Britain, Germany, Holland and other EU countries.)
We need some form of home heating maybe 8-9 months a year, so it made perfect sense to me to leave more or less all electric lights on all day, except in the middle of summer when it doesn't really get very dark at all.
Ten years ago I started to replace old bulbs with more energy-efficient alternatives like halogen, these days I put in LED instead.
For a new house we're having built we've decided on using very energy-efficient construction (25 cm/10") wall isolation, (35 cm/14") roof isolation, top grade glass and a balanced ventilation setup with a heat exchanger.
BTW, this is just a small step above the latest legislated minimum requirements for new homes in this country.
Terje
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends, entirely, on where you live. There are, at the very least, some isolated locations in the US where electric heat is, actually, cheaper than gas/oil/etc. Specifically, there is at least one area in Upstate New York where a co-op generates all of the electricity locally. Because it's a co-op, they're not trying to maximize profits and sell the power at cost.
Science fail. (Score:2, Interesting)
It is no more a perpetual motion machine than a heating oil delivery truck is. A heating oil delivery truck transports a magnitude more gasoline than it burns. In a typical day of deliveries it may move 10x as much energy as it burns in its engine. In other words the energy transfered is 10x the energy used in the transfer.
In a similar fashion a heat pump simply moves heat energy. In winter it moves heat from outside (even when it is "cold" there is heat energy present). In summer it moves heat from the home to the outside. A heat pump with a COP of 4 adds 4kwh of thermal energy to the home for every 1kwh of electrical energy supplied. In comparison a resistance electrical heating adds 1kwh of thermal energy per 1 kwh of electrical energy supplied.
Re:CFL's are dirt cheap these days (Score:1, Interesting)
Any value in the energy "savings" from using CFL over old-fashioned light bulbs is lost in a variety of other ways:
Banning old fashioned light-bulbs in favor of CFLs is a typical short-sighted move by power-tripping politicians attempting to be seen as doing "good" (but instead are just doing "stupid")
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
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),
3-4 minutes before you can see your book? Maybe it's time to replace that bulb after 20 years. Modern CFLs are quite a bit better than that.
premature heat-death from enclosed fixtures
I think you have that backwards. If heat death is an issue, that a good reason to move from incandescents to CFLs, because they're quite a bit cooler. I've had fittings that would quickly destroy any incandescent bulb, but would work fine with CFLs.
and high cost (about ten times more).
10 times? Do you think your 30-cent incandescents will last as long as a CFL?
I get it that you don't like CFLs much, and I'm not going to pretend they're perfect in every possible way, but you're wildly exaggerating, and mostly wrong.