This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up nights. Anyone who has owned a Lava Lite knows they are driven by the power of a really hot lightbulb–those lovely and wasteful incandescents, to be precise. What’s the fate of my beloved bottle of glowing goo when I burn through my last lightbulb and all that’s left on the Wal*Mart shelf are nice, efficient (and way too cold) fluorescents?
Do I need to be stockpiling? Why does Obama hate my Lava Lite?
Did Obama pass this bill? I thought it had been passed long before he was in office.
I dunno, man. I just get tired of blaming Bush for everything and sometimes pick people at random. 
I’m more interested in keeping my LavaLite fired up and need to know about the predicted (un)availability of the proper equipment.
Well sorry to disappoint, but the legislation you speak of requiring more efficient lighting was passed in 2007. So you must continue to blame Bush.
But here is a solution to your lava lamp problem: http://reviews.wikinut.com/Mathmos-Smart-Astro-LED-Lava-Lamp-Review/car3zsu1/
Appears to forgo the traditional light bulb heating method for an electric element.
I believe the weirdo bulbs used in lava lamps are exempt. However, the Easy Bake Oven has fallen victim to the insidious forces of energy conservation (and equally sinister anti-toddler-burning interests) and now use a heating element instead of a regular old 100w bulb.
Well, the trend away from incandescent bulbs has sprung up problems like this. For example, I heard on Fark about someone who kept a 60 watt bulb on a timer inside his pump house, it was just enough waste heat to prevent freezing. I’m guessing, for applications like that and lava lamps, reptile warmers, discount chicken incubators, etc, a small UL listed heater with the correct output could be devised.
Incandescent bulbs are not banned despite what the Republicans keep saying. The law merely requires them to be more efficient. Thanks to ingenuity in the private sector (yay free market) a couple of companies have come out with halogen bulbs that are drop-in replacements for regular incandescents but meet the efficiency requirements. These bulbs from Sylvania are an example. I believe that colored bulbs are exempt from regulations, so for your lava lamp or easy bake oven where the color may not be so important you could always use one of those if it needed to be exactly 60 W.
Bizarre to think that in some applications a light bulb is a heat generating device that produces a lot of waste light.
If it takes an appliance bulb 40W or under you may be OK, as those are allowed. This indicates that some of them do take bulbs of that sort:
That’s because in all applications an incandescent bulb is a heat generating device that produces a lot of waste light. 
Incandescent bulb types will continue where there isn’t a substitute.
OK, so replace it with a “150-watt-equivalent” CFL, which consumes an actual 65 watts of electrical power. Problem solved.
In the case of the lava lamp, you’d enjoy much brighter light output.
screw in heating elements, in a wide range of wattages, have existed as long as domestic electricity has been around.
infra-red bulbs are also available.
In many applications, the halogen bulbs can be used. I am thinking of replacing the incandescent bulb I put in my washer to keep it from freezing up with a halogen. Hummmm, do we need to use higher wattage bulbs because of all the energy lost as light?
While screw in heat or halogen bulbs may be available, with the volume will we have to search around and pay through the nose for them? Years ago I formulated Labdude’s law, that which you can’t buy at K-Mart will be much more expensive elsewhere.
I thought the watt-equivalent rating was estimating brightness, not heat – as in “this 65-watt CFL will shine as bright as a 150-watt incandescent”.
Does it generate the same amount of waste heat as a 65-watt incandescent, though?
My daughter received an easy-bake oven for Christmas that cooked things with ice. You mixed the cake mix with warm water and then pit it in the oven which was first stocked with ice cubes. The chilled air caused the “cake” mix to solidify into a cold, sweet, vaguely cake-like flavored piece of foam-like material. As good as it sounds.
All power consumed by any light bulb eventually ends up as heat. The only question is how much of it ends up as heat in the light bulb and immediate surroundings, and how much of it ends up as heat a substantial distance away when the useful light it emits is absorbed (mostly by not-completely-reflective illuminated objects, but a small percentage by human retinas).
Put a 65 watt light bulb in an opaque box, and you have a 65 watt heating element, independent of what type of bulb it is. Power in = power out.
Interesting.
So visible light might travel further – out of windows, etc. – before becoming heat, but still does eventually?
The watt-equivalent rating does indeed estimate brightness: a “150-watt-equivalent” CFL is claimed to be as bright as an incandescent bulb that consumes 150 watts of electrical power.
And if you look at the fine print, you’ll find that that “150-watt-equivalent” CFL consumes 65 watts of electrical power.
Since incandescent bulbs have an efficiency of about 30%, you’re right, for 65 watts of consumption, only about 46 watts will be dumped directly to the air as heat. But of the remaining 19 watts that is ejected as visible light, pretty much all of that is going to be absorbed by the interior walls of the pump room, where it will manifest as heat.
The same is true for a 60-watt incandescent bulb (with 10% efficiency), although 54 watts are delivered directly as heat, and 6 watts of visible light end up heating the walls.
In either case, all of the electrical power delivered to the bulb gets delivered to the room as heat.
“It’s not a bug, it’s an undocumented feature.”