That could be a first-cost saving measure, similar to not installing switches. Bigger HVAC equipment is more expensive, but is downsizing the heating equipment worth the cost of upsizing the air conditioning equipment? Using the lights as supplementary heat seems to be a pre-energy-crisis strategy of the 1960s and early 1970s, because it does increase operating costs even if it may save on initial equipment installation. Of course the trap is that if you’re going to switch to high-efficiency lighting, it means the HVAC system needs to be re-engineered as well. There’s not enough heat in the winter, and now the a/c is oversized so unless it has modulating capability it will not be able to dehumidify sufficiently.
I thought the same heating and cooling loads were used to size the heating and the cooling.
2.9A? At 120V? You have a 350-watt fluorescent reading lamp? :eek: Does it come bundled with a welding mask?
Oh no, it’s rare that they’re ever the same. You need to go pretty far south before they even start to come close to converging. Think about it like this, even in the hottest desert (at least in the US) the biggest spread between inside and outside temperature is no more than 40-45 degrees. In most of the country though it’s pretty rare for temperatures to get above 100, and that’s only a 25 degree differential if you’re cooling to 75 degrees. If you’re heating to 70 degrees, a 25 degree differential is only 45, and even south Florida has hit freezing a few times.
So unless you’re in one of those “internally dominated” commercial buildings that have a lot of volume compared to their surface area, the heating load will almost always be higher than cooling, in many cases 2x-3x as much. However, that doesn’t mean heating equipment is necessarily more expensive to purchase or operate, but it’s hard to separate them out from one another.
I probably was looking at milli-Amperes, not Amps. Thanks. 
It surprises me when people say “conspiracy theory” as if conspiracies don’t happen, as if invoking the phrase makes the opponent wrong.
It’s certainly not unheard of. Apparently Singer (sewing machines) had a policy for a while of destroying any old machines they could get their hands on, because they lasted so long. The Secret Life of the Sewing Machine with Tim Hunkin - YouTube
“Conspiracy theory” as a casual descriptor identifies a category of organizations for which evidence is nonexistent, or which require such massive, unfailing secrecy or cooperation as to be extremely unlikely.
In the case of anti-competitive business conspiracies, there are two factors that make them extremely unlikely, or short-lived:
-if an anti-competitive conspiracy is legal, it is unstable. All it takes is one maverick upstart to disregard the conspiracy and set a price (or sell a product) that undercuts them all. The Phoebus cartel lasted only nine years before a competitor did exactly that. And these days, there are even more billionaire venture capitalists who would be happy to fund a startup that undercuts the entire extant long-life light bulb market.
-if an anti-competitive conspiracy is illegal, all it takes is one single person who fears the law and decides to spill the beans. This was the undoing of the Indiana concrete price-fixing conspiracy I linked to upthread.
Bottom line is that if someone posits an anti-competitive business conspiracy, they may be right - but they won’t be right for long.