Cite? I’d be very interested in a detailed break down of major carbon emissions by sector.
Require that any package of regular bulbs be sold with one (1) fluorescent bulb added to it, by law.
Also, change the name to “Twisties” because “fluorescent” is hard to spell, & takes up too much space.
One problem I’ve had is difficulty of finding lamps and light fixtures that work with CFLs. I’ve had lamps that don’t provide enough space for a CFL, and lamps whose control circuit (esp. touch-sensitive switches) don’t work with CFLs. It would be nice if there was a labeling requirement to indicate whether lamps and fixtures are compatible with CFLs.
California’s Universal Waste Rule could be modified to make an exception for compact fluorescents. As it is, when you buy an efficent lamp, you also buy a trip to the hazardous waste center:
Of course, changing the rule would result in more mercury in landfills, but is that less desirable than more CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere?
A study I found claims that.
http://www.nwcouncil.org/comments/documents/CFLUseLighting.doc
There are about 36,132,147 people in California this is about 9 million households. This corresponds to about 16,200 GWh for residential lightling.
Another cite has has total power for 2005 as 288,245 GWh for California.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/gross_system_power.html
So that is about 5.6% of electricity for residential lighting.
I thought photons were released when electrons changed energy levels in an LED. Are they using the LEDs to excite phospors in a lamp?
From the Wikipedia article on Light Emitting Diodes:Most “white” LEDs in production today are based on an InGaN-GaN structure, and emit blue light of wavelengths between 450 nm – 470 nm blue GaN. These GaN-based, InGaN-active-layer LEDs are covered by a yellowish phosphor coating usually made of cerium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Ce3+:YAG) crystals which have been powdered and bound in a type of viscous adhesive. The LED chip emits blue light, part of which is efficiently converted to a broad spectrum centered at about 580 nm (yellow) by the Ce3+:YAG. The single crystal form of Ce3+:YAG is actually considered a scintillator rather than a phosphor. Since yellow light stimulates the red and green receptors of the eye, the resulting mix of blue and yellow light gives the appearance of white, the resulting shade often called “lunar white”. This approach was developed by Nichia and was used by them from 1996 for manufacturing of white LEDs…White LEDs can also be made by coating near ultraviolet (NUV) emitting LEDs with a mixture of high efficiency europium based red and blue emitting phosphors plus green emitting copper and aluminum doped zinc sulfide (ZnS:Cu, Al). This is a method analogous to the way fluorescent lamps work…The newest method used to produce white light LEDs uses no phosphors at all and is based on homoepitaxially grown zinc selenide (ZnSe) on a ZnSe substrate which simultaneously emits blue light from its active region and yellow light from the substrate.
A new technique just developed by Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, involves coating a blue LED with quantum dots that glow white in response to the blue light from the LED. This technique produces a warm, yellowish-white light similar to that produced by incandescent bulbs.
Stranger
We’re using them where we can (they don’t fit in my livingroom lamps). But due to the hideous color, I don’t use one in my makeup light. I think the long-term savings will be the feature that brings people over. The initial cost should come down eventually, which will be an additional plus.
Count me among the people who would switch to CFLs completely if they only fit my lamps. I have them in the rooms where the lamps are usually on all day, but I can’t find any that will fit in the fixtures in the bathrooms or kitchen. Don’t even mention the chandelier.
Slap a modest tax on the old bulbs, and call it good.
Try to make people use CFL’s by law is idiotic. I’m a fan of CFL’s, and I have a bunch of them in my house. But they’re not usable everywhere. They don’t fit all fixtures. They still don’t throw the same kind of light, although they’ve gotten a lot better. They aren’t great with dimmers, and I have a lot of dimmers (I wired my house with pushbutton dimmers all over the place to save energy). They don’t work well outside in Canada, and I’ve got 12 exterior lights.
You simply can’t force people to use them by law.
If they are truly superior, they’ll win out in the market over time. Wal-Mart says they’re going to sell 200 million of them next year, because they’re going to make a huge PR pitch for them. 200 million in one year in one chain store is a huge number. That will put at least one CFL in the majority of homes in the US. Then we’ll see if people keep buying them to replace all their bulbs - if so, we’ll know that they are a truly superior alternative, and we don’t need any new laws to get people to use them.
Right, and I was also including all other sources of carbon including heating and transportation. I’ll see if I can find some figures on those later today, unless someone can beat me to it.
I’ve been replacing my incandescent bulbs with CFLs too, and I’ve noticed the delay in the cold and the fact that they don’t fit every socket in the house. That happens when you try to retrofit with a newer technology.
If the manufacturers would just stop making incandescent bulbs, that would solve the debate. However, as long as a market exixts, someone will manufacture the product and you couldn’t stop it even with legislation. With the fiasco that is the US’s War on Drugs, I could never get behind outlawing a light bulb because it uses too much energy.
This discussion reminds me of the switch to unleaded gasoline in the 70s. How long was leaded gasoline available after the auto manufacturers switched to all unleaded? I recall filling a 64 Impala’s tank with regular leaded in the mid 90s, but could only find it at one station in town.
Other, foreign, manufacturers would quickly take up the slack, and we’d use a lot of fuel driving driving to Canada or Mexico in order to buy forbidden fruit. There’d be lightbulb shacks at the borders just like there used to be margarine shacks around the edges of Wisconsin.
Have they changed much from two years ago? About two years ago the utility company was running a program where they’d come out and help make your house more energy efficient. They’d do little things like caulking your windows, installing an insulated blanket over the water heater, give you the low flo shower heads (that got trashed soon, too), and replace your light bulbs with “equivalent” CFLs.
Most of the ceiling lights in my house are 60W, so I got CFLs which “produce the same light as a 60W but only use 15W.” “Great,” says I.
Well over the course of the last two years I’ve found myself getting increasingly irritated at how dark my house is all the time. I kept swearing to myself I was going to go out and buy a bunch more lamps and put them everywhere ‘cause I can’t frakin’ see anything. I’d notice the next morning the dishes I did the night before were still kinda dirty. “I’m turning into my mom,” I thought. She used to do that when she was getting older and her eyes were getting worse.
Fortunately, a CFL in both my bedroom and kitchen burned out and I replaced them with good ol’ fashioned 60W incandescent. I almost cried when I turned the lights on. I could see again!
I’d been stumbling around a house that was lit approximately like a dimly lit romantic dining room at a restaurant.
I figure if I decide to try CFLs again I’m going to have to get ones which are “60W but produce as much light as a 250W incandescent.” Of course, that would defeat the energy saving purpose but dammit, when I want light, I need light.
Easy. Drain the person’s blood and replace it with a mixture of mercury vapor and argon or xenon.
You sound like a cranky old man ;), but if this has been a problem, just try the 75w or 100w equivalent bulbs. The wattage is still much lower than 60W and the light provided is greater. I believe on average the 100w CF uses 23w. I have actually had the opposite problem. I find the 60w CF to be to bright compared to the 60w Incandescent.
luminous flux Incandescent Compact
(light output) fluorescent
200 lm 25 W 5-6 W
450 lm 40 W 8 W
650 lm 60 W 11–13 W
950 lm 75 W 18–20 W
1200 lm 100 W 20-25 W
1600 lm 125 W 26-30 W
1900 lm 150 W 35-42 W
Jim
They work in my ceiling fans, but my harps won’t accommodate them. Why is this? Who’s in charge over there?
If the concern is that incandescents use more power than CFLs, why not just increase the cost of electricity and let the market sort it out?
It’s been hinted at by several people, but I don’t think it’s been stated explicitly.
One way to shift people to fluorescent bulbs and away from incandescent is by making light FIXTURES designed for fluorescent bulbs.
Put some pressure on builders to make new construction more fluorescent light friendly. Have some swap days at the electric plant where you bring in your 3-way light fixture, and take home a fluorescent torchiere lamp. (Possibly with some money changing hands as well–the swap might just be a reduction in the price of the new lamp.) Design some fluorescent bulbs suitable for arranging around a vanity, and encourage the design of new vanity lights that work well with fluorescent bulbs. (Although, vanity mirror lights might be a hard one–persons putting on make-up may have issues with lights that aren’t reasonably full spectrum).
None of these will solve the problem overnight. But any solution that doesn’t attempt to reduce the number of light fixtures being made/installed that aren’t appropriate for modern fluorescents, ignores a large chunk of the market for incandescent bulbs.
Now, some of these fixtures may simply not be suitable for any fluorescent bulbs. But some of them aren’t suitable because the same basic inexpensive fixture is used in many places, over a large time frame. Efforts to change the fixtures used in new construction may not pay off this year, or this decade. But it might mean that it 30 years fewer people can honestly say “Well, I use fluorescents where the light fixture works with them, but there are just so many light fixtures where they just don’t work”.
There are a lot of reasons to decrease power usage. Simply increasing the cost of electricity would put an even greater burden on those that have less ability to make changes or shop for more efficient products. It will be quicker to get most lighting switch from incandescent to CFL & LED if the government steps in with incentives to reduce the cost of these bulbs.
We already do this in many sectors of the economy from agriculture, solar panels, hybrid cars to oil itself.
Jim