Now that conventional incandescents have been banned, The CFL and LED haters in the US will need to use halogen bulbs. Halogen bulbs have always been expensive, at around $2.00 a bulb. I’m wondering if there’s some intrinsic reason hey’re so expensive, of if the cost will come down if more people buy them. Right now in the lower wattages it makes no economic sense to buy them as opposed to stockpiling regular incandescents.
A 100 watt replacement pays for itself- 24 watts saved * 1000 hour life at 8 cents a kilowatt hours saves $2.00, the cost of the bulb.
A 40 watt replacement- 12 watts saved saves $1.00, so it costs more to use an energy efficient bulb.
I know halogen bulbs have an extra capsule inside where the actual bulb is , but I see conventional bulbls on sale for a quarter, so I don’t see how a halogen bulb is 8 times more difficult/expensive to manufacture.
maybe. it’s still the case that a conventional incandescent is a filament inside a glass bulb, and a halogen is a filament inside a glass capsule filled with halogen gas, which is inside a glass bulb.
businesses aren’t obligated to lose money on their products.
What exactly do you know about the manufacturing costs of either type of bulb? Is your “don’t see how” based on facts you can share, or is it just the way you feel it ought to be?
Manufacturing cost is just one of several factors that determine the selling price of an item. Eight times the price does not necessarily, and in all likelihood doesn’t, mean eight times the manufacturing cost.
Halogen bulbs already pay for themselves depending not only on how much they cost compared to incandescents (which will vary from place to place - I’m astonished that you complain about 2 $ !) but also on how much the electricity costs. Cutting your electricity from 100 kwh to 30 can be a quite noticeable amount.
Over here, Halogen have certainly paid for themselves for me and everybody I know off because they last ages. I don’t know how much incandescent bulbs cost normally because since 1990 I have bought energy saving bulbs except for special uses (and even those have been replaced for a good decade). The last I saw were our local electronic market offering “special incandescene bulbs now that they are forbidden to manufacture” which was about 4 bulbs for 5 Euros or more, and I thought to myself “Serves idiots right for getting ripped off”.
Sure they are. Governments routinely implement price controls on goods and services, sometimes to the point where it’s no longer profitable to sell them. But they’re still offered, either as a loss leader or because there is some other legislation requiring the business to offer them.
You can argue semnantics, but to me the question is can you walk into a store and buy a non-halogen pack of four 100 watt bulbs for a dollar. The answer is no, and to me that’s a ban, whether the bill is to make 100 watt bulbs illegal to sell, or to mandate an efficiency requirement that they can’t reasonably meet in order to be sold.
Halogen bulbs do a lot less than cut electricity from 100 to 30, if they did using them would be a no-brainer. It’s more like a 25-30% savings. They have a 28 watt replacement for a 40 watt, the 12 watts account for, over the 1000 hour life of the bulb, a $1.00 savings in electricity, which is 8 cents a k/w hour in my area. Since the difference in cost in a bulb is $1.75, they don’t pay for themselves in energy savings.
I’m just curious as to whether it’s going to ever make economic sense to switch. Years ago halogen bulbs cost $2.00, and they still cost $2.00, while the cost of CFLs has really gone down.
Huh? For one thing your sentence structure makes no sense. That and nobody is forcing you to buy Halogen bulbs. What you are describing is the free market keeping incandescent bulbs at a low price and halogen bulbs at a high price. Please provide a link showing why you believe you are going to have to buy halogen bulbs; that may help me understand what you are upset about.
Which products have both price controls and a requirement that the manufacturer offer them? (Heck, I’d be curious which products are under price controls, particularly in the US.)
One particularly notorious example is tickets for certain bus and train routes in the UK, which have had such restrictions for over a hundred years. It started when the rail companies started buying up and demolishing inner-city housing, forcing city workers into the distant suburbs whence they had neither the time to walk to their factories nor the money to ride the trains which had displaced them. Following pressure from the factory owners the government stepped in and forced the rail companies via legislation to offer cheap commuter fares. To this day transit operators are required to keep certain routes running at certain schedules and at certain rates, whether through legislation or contract. Since some of these are a loss for the companies they put they put the absolute minimum effort legally or contractually permitted into operating them—some routes, for example, run maybe once a day or once a week and are not listed at all in the published timetables, nor are the stops marked at the stations. The vehicles usually run completely empty.
It’s not hard to find examples of price controls and production quotas on other goods and services, particularly in times of scarcity and/or in more centrally planned economies.
Well which is it, can you buy them for 25 cents each, as you said, or can you not buy them for 25 cents each, as you said?
That’s not a ban, and that’s not semantics. Words have definitions that allow us to understand each other. If you want to make up your own definitions, then have at it, but don’t expect anyone take you seriously if you can’t make your point accurately.
I thought you were using Halogens as synonym for CFLs or energy-saving bulbs. But now you seem to mean two different types. Which is it?
And the saving is two-fold: not only the money on electricity*, but also in life-span. Every good energy-saving bulb I buy has at least four times, usually 8 times as long a lifespan as a normal incandescent. If you get only 1 000 hours from your bulb, that’s incredibly low. My bulbs give 10 000 hrs routinely, and last for years.
Of course, that’s similar to claiming that the price for gasoline is what you pay at the station. In reality, the more electricity you use, the more you as tax-payer and as citizen have to pay for the production - new coal plants or nuclear plants have to be built, with aid from the government. So saving energy is not only good for the climate - which will also benefit millions of people - but also good for taxpayers. That is, if you built a sensible infrastructure …
By halogen bulbs, he means halogen bulbs, like these. They are rated for only 1000 hours. If you don’t like the characteristics of CFLs or the cost of LEDs, then these are about your only choice (in the US) once the 100 watt phase out begins.
Ah I see I got them confused. The ones that are quicker than energy saver, but only use 1/3 less than old-style bulbs.
I don’t know if they pay for themselves, because they are the only alternative to incandescents in those areas where energy savers are not practical - bathrooms and floors, where you only turn the lights on for 5 min. at a time. Therefore 1 000 hrs is quite long because you use them so little. Once the next 5 or 10 years have passed, I assume that LEDs have become cheap enough to replace everything.
Yes cost is not the only reason to chose a bulb, light quality matters to a lot of people. So some people will go for halogen not because there is a payback over IC, but because it has the quality of light that suits them.
It seems like in all lighting products (IC,Halogen, CF, LED) there are different quality levels of lights, but with IC and Halogen even the cheap ones seem to work well.
Additionally if you use resistance heating to heat your home (not uncommon), during the heating season a regular $0.25 IC light bulb could be your cheapest lighting option including power costs.
So if nothing’s being banned, in 5 years I’ll be able to walk into a store and buy a 4 pack of old fashioned 100 watt tungsten filament bulbs, not halogen, not CFL, not LED or anything else, just the kind of bulb we’ve had for 100 years? As in Wal-mart, not some guy marketing screw-in “electric heaters”?
I have about 30 edison screw sockets in my house. $60 a once a year or so isn’t that much of a burden, and I think I get more than 1000 hours out of a lamp since they’re all on dimmers. I was just wondering why halogens cost 8X the price of non-halogen bulbs when their’s no electronics, etc. in them.
So which type of the “new” bulbs last longer and are more efficient? LED’s or CFL’s? I’ve replaced just about every incandescent bulb in my house with CFL’s but I generally dislike the “shade” of light they produce. I like LED’s output and coloration more, but aren’t they quite a bit more expensive than CFL’s right now?
That’s a fair question, and from what I’ve seen, the answer seems to be, “it depends”. As I understand it (and, please, if I’m getting this wrong, feel free to correct what I’m saying), incandescents aren’t been banned in the U.S., but they’re being required to conform to higher efficiency standards.
So, if a manufacturer is able to create a 100 watt incandescent which meets those standards, and brings it on the market, then the answer to your question is “yes”. If not, then the answer is “no”.
I’m not a scientist, so I have no idea how difficult a task it will be to design incandescent bulbs which meet the new standards, or what those bulbs would cost.
LED bulbs are far more expensive than CFLs for a given light output. At least, LED bulbs worth buying. I have almost all LED bulbs in my apartment, but haven’t had them anywhere near long enough to comment on lifespan. I will say that I have been severely underwhelmed by CFLs in this regard. I had a CFL in my living room lamp which lasted about a year and a half. The “globe” style ones I had over the bathroom mirror started dying within 6 months. My folks had a couple in fixtures in the basement where the ballasts burned up (there is still visible blackening on the socket and fixture.) CFLs hate being turned on and off for short intervals. LEDs don’t care.
The other gotchas with LEDs right now are 1) many bulbs are specified for non-enclosed fixtures only, and 2) omnidirectional bulbs seem to top out at 75 watt equivalent.