I do not disagree. I am simply saying that the efficiency of an incandescent bulb is somewhat dependent on how often you run your furnace, and the type of fuel you’re using.
I burn propane six months out of the year. If I turn on a 100 W incandescent bulb for 24 hours during the winter, I will burn less propane.
Let’s assume that, due to localized heating effects, the energy from an incandescent bulb needs to be twice the energy of propane to get the same heating effect for my home. Therefore, a 100 W incandescent bulb will add 1.2 kWh of “heating” energy to my home over a 24 hour period. If one gallon of propane can provide 27 kWh of heat, burning the bulb for 24 hours will reduce the amount of propane I burn by 0.044 gallons. If I pay 12 cents per kWh for electricity, and propane is $2.42/gallon, then it costs me $0.29 to power the bulb for 24 hours, but I burn $0.11 less in propane.
Obviously, incandescent bulbs have the opposite effect when I turn my A/C on in the summer. In which case I could simply switch to LED bulbs in the summer.
Just because halogens nominally contain a tungsten and a blackbody emiter does not make them incandescents in the normal sense of the word. They have substantial, categorical differences between themselves and what people refer to when they use the word incandescent.
I’m a bit puzzled. For the past couple years every time I roll into the light bulb aisle, I’ve been expecting to find nothing but LEDs and CFs. But every time it’s mostly incandescents for sale. This includes even last week at Target. Are these incandescent bulbs technically halogen? They look indistinguishable from traditional incandescents. If I hadn’t occasionally heard these rants and heard of people stockpiling traditional bulbs, I wouldn’t have even known something was up with light bulbs.
Okay, so we’re not disagreeing much. I’m gonna nitpick a bit anyways.
In your example, you’re still better off with LEDs in winter. Replace the 100W incandescent with 20w of LED, burn the extra $0.11 in propane (probably $0.09 actually since the LED bulbs still generate waste heat) and pay $0.06 for the electricity to run the light for a net savings of $0.13. Over 10,000 hrs that comes to $54, far more than the cost of the LED bulbs.
Even in a best case scenario where the heating system is electric you won’t get a 1:1 energy cost replacement from incandescent lights as they’re generally going to be adding heat up near the ceiling where it isn’t very useful.
So while the waste heat from incandescent bulbs will have some impact on heating, in virtually all real world cases it will still be more energy efficient to go with LED lighting and use the dedicated heating system to make up the difference. Hence I maintain that bringing up the “waste heat isn’t necessarily wasted” argument might be an interesting aside and possibly even relevant in extreme niche cases but on the whole is actually misleading.
You mean, the special sense in which you are defining the word, which is unlike the sense that manufacturers, retailers, governments, and normal consumers use the word.
Not true.
Not true.
Not true.
I am writing this while sitting under a three globe ceiling fixture. Two of the globes have new-style incandescent bulbs, the third has the older style. You cannot tell any difference at all in their light.
That piece appears to have been written in 2009. It is simply outdated and flat out wrong with today’s bulbs.
Basically for the same reason that you can’t throw your garbage out the window into the street, or dump your used motor oil into the city reservoir, or do any number of other things that you might find convenient. Your “hard-earned money” doesn’t even begin to cover the environmental costs of the wasted electricity, and we all have to live on the same planet and breathe the same air. As Princhester said in post #23, failing to understand this is the classic tragedy of the commons.
Other than that, I’ve nothing to add to the excellent responses already posted. Anyone who thinks that CFLs and LEDs don’t provide the “right” kind of light has apparently been spending too much time ranting about evil governments and not enough time looking at what the much-vaunted free market is actually producing these days.
Yeah, I’m considering going and buying one today (even though it will wear out much faster than a CFL). They’re not actually gone around here. Sometimes you want something without the turning-on lag of a CFL, and a little heat output, if at the cost of higher power usage.
We are not talking about a theoretical market when it comes to the electricity grid. We are talking about a system with a huge amount of government intervention. The government intervened and continues to intervene in all sorts of ways to make sure that you get a more-or-less steady supply of electricity delivered to your door.
If you were one of the relatively few people in the US who isn’t connected to the grid, then I might have some (but not much) sympathy for this argument. But if you are one of the many, many people who are connected to the grid, then these market arguments are merely self-serving.
So, people have a right to indulge on a system that all of us paid for building? They have a right to indulge using a system that all of us continue to pay for?
Light bulbs aren’t in some “special category.” There is a whole array of efficiency regulations for consumer products. See here:
Not only is this untrue, it’s the opposite of true. Halogen bulbs give a warmer glow than conventional incandescents. That’s why they’re more efficient: The higher temperature means proportionately more of their output in the visible range instead of the infrared.
The bulbs explicitly meant for heating are perfectly legal. You’d have to do a bit of rewiring and install a high amperage socket meant for one of the infrared heat bulbs somewhere in the bathroom.
