Edison Would Have Loved New Light Bulb Law, Says His Great-Grandson 473
New submitter futuristic writes with a link to Thomas Edison's great-grandson's take on Thomas Edison and the alleged demise of the incandescent light bulb. From the article: "My great grandfather's 100-watt incandescent will be replaced with new energy-efficient versions, including CFLs, LEDs, and — yes — new and improved incandescent bulbs. ... And my great-grandfather wouldn't have it any other way."
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolute bullshit. As much as any sensible man should support the new lightbulb law, Edison was *not* a sensible man. All you need to know to figure out his stance on old outdated technology versus new, superior technology is this: DC vs. AC, Edison vs. Tesla.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't old vs new technology, it was where he could make the most. I'm sure he'd love the new laws....if he could make a buck from them.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't old vs new technology, it was where he could make the most. I'm sure he'd love the new laws....if he could make a buck from them.
Well, wouldn't anyone love laws where they can make money from them!
Buffet uses loopholes to pay less taxes (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't Warren Buffet want to change the tax laws so he makes less money?
Well you can believe (A) what a man says in political speeches or (B) what a man does in reality. In reality Buffet uses loopholes to engineer his personal pay in order to avoid taxes. He pays himself in dividends, which is taxed at a lower rate than regular income. If he wanted to pay the same taxes as his secretary he could pay himself in money, an ordinary paycheck, the same way she and nearly everyone else is paid.
Buffet favors an inheritance tax but he then gives all his money to the Gates foundation, again avoiding taxation.
Classic 1% behavior. Do as I say not as I do. Reminds me of Senator Ted Kennedy, all pro environment and green energy until someone wants to put up wind turbines that can be viewed from his beachfront property.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not fair.
My financial worth is a fraction of a fraction of Warren Buffett's and I would be happy to have overall taxes raised if it would eliminate ills from society.
What disillusions me is seeing a progressive shift of wealth from the bottom of society to the top. This has been a mainstay of my rants for a long time [slashdot.org].
Whether your society has a flat tax rate or progressive scales, the 1% will have mechanisms and financial instruments to help them avoid paying their fair share; facilities which the 99% either don't know about or can't afford to exploit.
Re: (Score:3)
As to paying 'fair share' - the 1% pays its 'fair share' before it pays a single penny in income/corporate/payroll taxes, it pays much more than its fair share by creating the businesses, succeeding and running the businesses (despite the government trying hard to destroy those businesses).
The gov't is a system that allows the politicians to steal power that they are not supposed to be able to steal (power that they take that is not authorized for them to have by the Constitutional).
The politicians steal th
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying your point is wrong, but your argument does not hold. The top 5% control greater than 90% of the capital resources in the US, yet pay only 60% of the burden of maintaining that wealth (using the number you supplied). I'm not saying whether I support either side in this, I'm just saying you need a better argument.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
What bullshit. Anybody who wants to pay more in taxes can at any time do so, without be compelled to do so. ... The only fucking reason this hypocrite pays less taxes is because he sets out to do so from the beginning.
No, THAT is the real bullshit. There is no contradiction between using "loopholes" and simultaneously wanting the loopholes to be taken out of the system because the simple fact of it is that there is no such thing as a loophole - only legal and illegal actions. Buffet explicitly wants the capital gains tax rate to be increased such that taking his income as dividends instead of earned income won't save him or his cronies from the higher tax rates that regular people pay.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
No, THAT is the real bullshit.
Buffet is the owner of 1/3rd of all BH dividend paying shares, so any amount of money that BH pays in taxes is the amount of money that he does not receive as dividend payments.
When BH pays say 35% (if it does) in taxes, that's out of Buffet's pocket immediately. Then he pays 15% on his income, which is mostly dividends (he pays himself a small salary, around 100K or so, the rest is dividends).
Why is Buffet 'pro-taxes' discounting the fact that uncle Sam saved his company back in 08 by bailing out AIG, the end of which would have ruined BH (Buffet made insane leveraged bets through AIG in early 2008 for the mortgage market through AIG)?
It's because BH is in business of buying out companies and restructuring them. When death taxes are paid, to raise the money to pay off the gov't thieves via IRS, the heirs have to liquidate all sorts of assets, including income generating business holdings. That's when the vultures in form of BH descend upon the company to buy the ownership at a firesale.
The real economic growth in USA happened between 1870 and 1913 under 0 income, payroll, corporate tax.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to save electricity, how about turning off the millions of street and parking lot lights at night? How about wiring homes with DC so that damn near every piece of electric equipment doesn't have to take a >10% efficiency hit in order to operate? Or a law to limit the number of hours a TV can be used (we can all agree that that freedom isn't needed anymore, right)?
Maybe we should have laws limiting the amount of power your computer can draw or how long it can be on. Or perhaps outlaw that scourge to computer efficiency, the hard drive?
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets drop all environmental laws while we're at it. Why should I have to pay a city sewage utility when I can just connect a pipe to my toilet and dump it all in my neighbor's yard, or even better the river.
These laws are put in to stop idiots from doing stuff now that will com back to hurt them and others later.
I can dump my sewage in my neighbor's yard now, but really damn quickly that neighbor will pop over to my place and pop me one in the face. I can guarantee you there are a LOT of people who do not understand dumping your sewage on someone else's property might be objectionable and might cause that response.
Just as there's a bunch of people who don't know those more expensive bulbs easily save you more than they cost, and using less efficient bulbs just hastens rising power costs.
Re: (Score:3)
That argument doesn't apply. If customers to purchase newer more efficient tech, they actually *save* money so it self-incentivizes/punishes and needs not be legislated.
The environmental laws are good to restrict when saving money causes external damage.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Property rights would protect you from people polluting your property. The EPA and environmental regulations exist to protect the polluter not you. The EPA and politicians set legal limits for how much pollution companies can put in your air and water without you being able to do anything about it. Also if they exceed this amount they paya fine to the politician not to you the person they harm. What a great system.
Re: (Score:3)
"Property rights would protect you from people polluting your property."
If they come on to your property to do it, then, yeah.
If they put the pollution into the water and/or the air, all of us acting in concert (otherwise known as government) have to stop them.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you live in California?
Our ban went into effect a year early.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Too late, it's already [citation.com] being done, in most localities in the US, anyway.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Like it or not, setting standards of construction, including efficiency standards, is the main reason for building codes.
On the contrary, in most cases building codes require you (the builder, that is) to hire engineers, or at least an architect. They usually explicitly disallow construction permits without a licensed architect's stamp on the drawings, and will often require the stamp of an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer even for a simple house. Requirements about soil properties, earthquakes, hurricanes, or anything beyond a simple house will usually require a structural engineer's stamp, as well.
Building codes (to the extent they are about houses) are far from sufficient to enable you to know how to build a decent house, let alone how to do it cheaply.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Things might work fine at your place, but they work better at other places.
I am living in Germany and per capita we use only 50% of the energy that the US does to create 90% of the wealth.
(Or even more wealth if you remove eastern Germany from the equation which still needs some time to catch up.)
Stricter regulations for cars, buildings, etc. are a big part of what makes this possible.
Imagine what would happen to the oil price if the US would get their efficiency up to the level of the other industrialised countries.
Re: (Score:3)
Imagine what would happen to the oil price if the US would get their efficiency up to the level of the other industrialised countries.
Why would the oil barons with the votes want that to happen?
Re: (Score:3)
Tesla invented the flourescent lightbulb to begin with. He did so to avoid patent issues with Edison. Tesla also though Edison's lightbulb was rediculously wasteful (which it is really).
I first started using flourescent lights myself not because of the alleged energy savings but because of the waste heat generated by a normal bulb. I lived in the desert then and cooling a house is hard enough in the summer even if you aren't fighting against yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Well these days there's a lot of be said for DC (Score:5, Informative)
But only because we've got technology they didn't back then. When it comes to long distance transmission, voltage is key because of Ohms law. The more current you have the bigger your conductor has to be to prevent loss.
Well transformers can easily and quite efficiently step up and down AC voltage. So you can have hundreds of thousands of volts, far more than you'd want in a home, over a distribution line. There was no equivalent technology for DC back when the current wars were going on.
Now there is, thyristors. They are solid state devices that do a good job of efficient DC-DC conversion. So it is possible today to do HVDC lines and indeed it is done. There are some advantages (like no skin effect).
Prior to that the best there was is mercury arc valves. Those worked and were used, but had some serious limits. Even then, they didn't come on the scene until about the 1920s, and the current wars were back in the 1880s.
So sure, if we redesigned the grid today, maybe DC would make sense, however there are some things that AC works really well for. Thing is, we didn't design it today, we designed it in the 1800s and back then, AC was it. Edison's DC plan called for there to be generators all over the place since long runs were out of the question. That is a shitty way to do things, not only because you don't want generators in your neighborhood but because as with many things, generators scale with efficiency in terms of size.
Re:Well these days there's a lot of be said for DC (Score:5, Interesting)
HVDC is OK.
DC for homes is not - it's quite difficult to arc-proof a switch for 110/220VDC. In the late 1930's, when DC was being phased out here in Australia a couple of relatives of mine experienced arcs in DC light switches that progressed out of the switch and up the cabling feeding them. Only way to stop them was to go and find the next breaker upstream.....
Re: (Score:3)
HVDC isn't okay. It's freakin' great, which is why power companies are moving their transmission lines to it. It's damn near lossless compared to AC.
Re:Well these days there's a lot of be said for DC (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, that's why every single device in my house has an AC/DC converter, to convert that superior AC to something that they can actually fucking use.
Puts out a ton of waste heat in the process too, although since it's winter now, I suppose that's just as well.
The AC/DC converters to your electronics are where you're spending most of your energy, huh? Do you have those hooked up to your fridge? Air Conditioner? Washer and Dryer?
AC power is the way to go power large motors. you don't need a commutator. Brushless DC motors are actually AC motors, btw, they need an inverter.
Only if you are a cheapass (Score:3)
The best motors these days are ECM, electronically commutated motors, and they are DC. They have to rectify the AC signal internally before it is switched. They provide superior control and efficiency to standard single phase AC motors. Thus, you find them on higher end gear. Two things I got somewhat recently that feature them are my washer and my air conditioner. The washer uses it primarily for speed control. It is a direct drive motor and can do all kinds of different speeds, reverse direction, and so o
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) The power wouldn't even _get_ to your house without being wasted on the way if it were DC
2) For things actually needing much power, you use AC anyway and don't convert to DC.
Re: (Score:3)
1) The power wouldn't even _get_ to your house without being wasted on the way if it were DC
I thought the advantage of AC was that you could use a simple transformer to step up the voltage along the way to counteract the drop, not that AC is somehow magically immune to voltage drop. AC leaks electromagnetic radiation too. There isn't an efficient way to step up DC, so AC is still the best for this purpose.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
No, not really. It wasn't until fairly late in the 20th century that DC-DC converters and switched-mode power supplies became usably efficient. Prior to that, AC was the only realistic way to bump power up to high enough voltages to do long-distance power transmission without *huge* resistive losses. So yes, if we were designing the power grid today, DC might be practical, but a hundred years ago, it wasn't, at least not scalably.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Voltage... and DC Voltage transformers are not as good as AC, not to mention they would need to rebuild the electric grid from the ground up, and as someone said elsewhere in the thread, powering a house with DC causes serious arcing problems.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
You can't transmit power over long distances at end-user voltage; the resistive losses make it impractical. A century ago there was no efficient way to step DC voltages up/down for long-distance transmission; AC made it possible to use simple and inexpensive electromagnetic transformers for this.
Even today, if we supplied DC to individual homes it would still need to be at a voltage too high for most electronics (that pesky resistive loss issue again), so you'd still need converters. Yes, they would be DC-DC instead of AC-DC, but this would only make them marginally more efficient.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
AC vs DC flamewars? Damn, slashdot must be older than I thought.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, my light bulbs composed of LEDs? Yes, they're DC.
Re: (Score:3)
You mean, my light bulbs composed of LEDs? Yes, they're DC.
Hmmm... a single LED is a DC device, but if you used a transformer (a highly efficient device btw) to drop the voltage to a reasonable level and arranged the LED's with opposite polarity, the circuit could run off AC just fine. Each LED would flicker at 1/2 the line frequency which may or may not be a problem (i hate the flicker of old style flouro's so I'm guessing it would be a problem), but you might be able to put some capacitors in there to smooth things out, but i'm too tired to visualise it properly
Re: (Score:3)
As best I can tell, that's how LED Christmas light sets are wired. They have a whole bunch of LEDs wired in series, each running on unrectified AC. You can easily see the flicker when the limbs blow around in the breeze.
Re: (Score:3)
The modern LED downlights don't actually convert to DC. They simply use half of the AC wave to power on. They don't run on anything resembling a flat steady direct current.
Ultimately though this is just nit picking. Anyone who cites the fact that the electronics in their house have an AC/DC converter as evidence that DC is somehow superior to AC quite clearly has no idea on how electricity works, is transported, or is mass converted. AC has massive applications without which we would be sitting in the dar
Re: (Score:3)
The LED itself needs a heatsink as well. Like power transistors and CPUs, power LEDs produce loads of waste heat (less than incandecent or CFL but still a signifcant amount). Also LED life shortens significantly when heated above 50C or thereabouts, so the heatsinks need to be relatively large to dissipate enough heat at a small temperature difference.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Not this person's point, but one situation that I still haven't had seen a reasonable replacement for is dimmable bulbs. Despite the advertising, I have yet to see a dimmable fluorescent bulb, I've seen several that claim to be, but none that either fit in a real light fixture, or actually dim. The only LED bulbs I've seen in the stores so far also do not dim. So for now the only way to have control over the amount of light put out by your light fixtures is to use incandescent bulbs.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Incandescent technology isn't being banned, just being pushed to evolve a little. If you need to dim look for 29, 43, 53, and 72, watt halogen bulbs. These replace 40, 60, 75, and 100 watt standard bulbs respectively and comply with the new law. These are marketed under the Eco Smart brand by Phillips, Super Saver by Sylvania (Made in USA too), GE also sell them. These are more pricey than standard bulbs and the Sylvaina ones are 1/4 inch less in diameter, but are a suitable replacement.
Re: (Score:3)
This is about the fact that current incandescents only convert about 10% of the incoming electricity into light and throw away the rest as heat.
Bulbs with greater efficiency need less electricity for the same amount of light.
It's about forcing conservation.
Conservation means lowering of demand for electricity, which means less pollution, and less expense building new generation facilities.
Lowering the demand for electricity lowers the demand for the fuel used to generate it.
Lower demand for the fuel makes i
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Dimmable CFLs do work, (they're used in nearly all LCD monitors, other than those that now use dimmable LEDs). Neither is as simple as a dimmable incandescent, but they are available and they do work. However, dimmers designed for incandescent bulbs are not optimal [wikipedia.org] for CFL or LED lights. Your best option to replace incandescent bulbs in dimming fixtures are the newer, more efficient incandescent or halogen bulbs, or replace both the dimmer and the bulbs.
BTW, only standard bulbs are affected by the new regulations, specialty bulbs (e.g. "decorator", "teardrop", "sconce", etc.) are not affected. These are the types of bulbs most frequently used with dimmers.
I never said there aren't valid uses for incandescent bulbs (particularly halogen bulbs), I only challenged the OPs statement, and I fully expect him to fail to provide a single valid example that justifies his statement.
Re: (Score:3)
As for the price... well, it depends. Are you willing to spend $1 now to save $3 over the lifetime of the product? Because that's the ratio you're looking at for LED bulbs over incandescents, even at $40 for a 17 Watt (75 Watt equivalent) dimmable LED bulb.
Re: (Score:3)
and the law excludes specialty bulbs for reasons like that... appliance bulbs are excluded.
Re: (Score:3)
I had a CFL in a fridge (had a few spares). It was actually working okay, the only downside is that it was not instant on, it took a second.
Re: (Score:3)
They work just fine. In fact, their higher efficiency makes them a better choice than incandescent for use in fridge/freezer lighting - which is why most commercial fridges/freezers for display use use LEDs.
Re: (Score:3)
They do, many new fridges come with LED lighting for efficiency.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
So it seems that your answer is that yes, yes it really is too hard.
Re: (Score:3)
appliance bulbs are not covered by this law.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit on the "cost too much" when you look at the long term for LEDs. Maybe not for every bulb in the house, including ones used a very low percentage of the time, but for those you use as little as 1000 hr/yr (2.73 hr/day), an equivalent LED is a LOT cheaper than a 60 watt incandescent.
Incandescent, 60 watts * 1000 hrs/yr = 60 kWh/yr = $10.50/yr = $210.00 in 20 years - plus $10.00 for 20 bulbs in 20 years.
Total for 20 years = $220.00
LED, 12 watts * 1000 hrs/yr = 12 kWh/yr = $2.10/yr = $42.00 in 20 years - plus $25.00 for 1 "bulb" in 20 years.
Total for 20 years = $67.00
And yes, the Philips #285106 12 watt 800 lumen A19 "bulb" is rated to last over 20,000 hr. It is dimmable, and I'll go out on a limb and guarantee it will not make you puke. This is not the usual crappy puke-green bad-light-pattern LED. The warm light it makes is a dead ringer for incandescent light and the pattern is very close to an incandescent. If you have trouble buying it for $25, just order two of them on line from Home Depot and they will waive shipping charges (to USA at any rate). Since when does having it in "your local store" make any difference in the on line age?
I used 17.5 US cents per kWh for my calculations; it's what my electricity costs and I believe its a fair representation of world rates; of course they vary from a lot less than that near the Hoover Dam to more than that in some places. Anyway, the break even point for the LED over the incandescent is clearly way below 10 US cents per kWh.
Re: (Score:3)
The calculation showed that you save $8,40 per year on a $25 investment, so the pay-off time is about 3 years.
Even if you have to borrow money against 8% interest to make the investment, you'd have paid down the loan in 3.5 years from the savings.
Re: (Score:3)
Running halogens at reduced voltage wears them out quickly.
Re: (Score:3)
Since LEDs are already substantially cheaper if life cycle terms than incandescents, just why are they not great already? See this [slashdot.org] analysis.
I think he's assuming (Score:5, Funny)
...that had Thomas Edison been alive today, he would have held the patents on these assorted new lightbulbs.
Edison didn't invent the light bulb... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Edison didn't invent the light bulb... (Score:5, Informative)
...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors. (wikipedia.org)
Read on:
Thomas Edison obtained an exclusive license to the Canadian patent. Thomas Edison developed his own design of incandescent lamp with a high resistance thin filament of carbon in a high vacuum contained in a tightly sealed glass bulb which had a sufficiently long service life to be commercially practical.
Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he developed an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.
The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting.
Incandescent light bulb [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps this will give you a small taste of Edison's achievement:
Much is said about the subdivision of the electric light by certain gentlemen, who hope to distribute it throughout our houses from one central [source] and furnish it cheaply and abundantly in our cities. I am one of those who do not believe in the impossible, but I say that, with our present knowledge, this problem is unsolvable. Sir William Armstrong can only keep thirty-seven lamps going ; Lane- Fox could only show twelve lights ; Professor Adams could only produce from the most powerful dynamo-electric machine, by calculation, one hundred and forty lamps. Where is the subdivision ?
Popular Science Monthly/Volume 19/July 1881/Recent Advances in Electric Lighting [wikisource.org]
The system that emerged from Edison's lab included practical designs for generators, mainline distribution systems, home wiring standards, switches, sockets, fuses, training programs for linesmen and electricians.
Essentially everything you would need for wiring a city without burning it to the ground or electrocuting half the population.
Holy crap, he's not lying.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy, on the other hand, is a university professor who appears to have actual research behind his claims. It goes against him, of course, that he's attempting to improve or revive his famous great-grandfather's reputation with this article, but the research looks real and I presume it's open to review.
How refreshing.
And the free market always finds a way... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And the free market always finds a way... (Score:5, Informative)
And they sold their original stock which they had from before the efficiency rules, then customs stopped the importation of any more because they are not idiots and know a smartass when they see one.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&twu=1&u=http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/kleinheizgeraet-heatball-zoll-haelt-40-000-gluehbirnen-auf-11065089.html [google.com]
People are missing the major point here: There is no incandescent ban in the US, only an efficiency requirement. If someone can invent a filament bulb which meets the requirements they are free to sell them... oh wait they already did and it is called a halogen bulb; you can pick them up at any hardware store.
Sure, Edison would have been thrilled (Score:4, Funny)
Of course Edison would have loved modern lightbulbs -- what's not too like? Cleaner more aesthetically pleasing light drawing lower power. Of course they last longer, and don't break as easy so people buy less, but hey -- can't have everything right?
But -- if these lightbulbs had been invented by a competitor such as Tesla -- well, many household pets would have to lay down their lives to fight off this infernal contraption that is a peril and danger to us all.
Frankly, Edison was an asshole. Brilliant -- but an asshole nonetheless.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
CFLs most certainly do not last longer. I have boxes full of dead ones, whenever I need a new one I call GE and get a free one on warranty. Since none of them have even been on the market for the 5 year period, I don't even need a receipt.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I have put them on a common circuit, a 60-watt incandescent and a "100 watt equivalent" (about 23 watts actual, base down). If it's turned on and off frequently (10, 20x a day), the incandescent beats it by almost a factor of two. If it's left on most of the day, (1-2x a day) it's about even. If its in a horizontal or base-up orientation, or a closed but not recessed fixture, the CFL is about half or less than an incandescent. And the infant mortality is tremendous in all cases.
As far as I ca
Re: (Score:3)
I'll see your anecdote and raise you with my own. I have a CFL that I run approximately 20 hours per day, once on, once off. I have had it in use for 4 years; that's 29,200 hours. It's rated for 8000 hr. Still seems as good as new.
I have a fair number of CFL's I use about 4 hours per day, or 1460 hr per year, that have been in use for about the same 4 years (5840 hr total) and still work fine. One of them is horizontally mounted in a fully enclosed fixture.
Incandescents are typically rated for 1000 hr, but
Chasing the sun (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for energy efficiency, but I've yet to find a CFL or LED that feels as good as the light from an incandescent bulb. It just brings the most natural experience. The best ones I've seen are the 100W lamps with neodymium (purple) coating [zoomoo-aquaristik.de] which corrects the spectrum to be more white. There's also 60W versions of those, but as the filament burns cooler, it creates a bit too yellow/red light.
I've also tried a plethora of different CFLs including the "hifi" full spectrum ones, but they always give a bit of synthetic experience. The spectrum is still lacking. The modern HF ones are flicker-free, but I maybe can still sense some kind of subliminal flicker. Things like that. They just give the body a message that "something is wrong". Then again, there might be some other industrial high-power lamp types that give good results.
So, I've been in search for great lighting in the same sense like someone seeks the ultimate IPS display. After all I would probably be better off just moving to some sunny country. :)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I fear what we're seeing here is the birth of the optical equivalent to the audiophile.
I'm highly doubtful of stuff like "synthetic experience", "I feel something is wrong" and so on and so forth. It's the exact same language audiophiles use.
Not to mention that stuff like that is a self-fulfilling prophecy - you're sensitive to the kind of lamp and you're thinking that something must be different, so obviously there is something different.
Particularly
Re: (Score:3)
No the words used are used because the person doesn't know how to describe exactly what he is seeing. While Audiophiles use the words the same way they are not hated for that reason, if that were the case we may as well just hate all people who make subjective reviews, be it movies, books, wine, music, sound quality etc.
Audiophiles are hated because of their persistence in belief against all facts. The vast majority of what an Audiophile hears is entirely due to a placebo effect and has no measurable differ
Re: (Score:3)
>>I've yet to find a CFL or LED that feels as good as the light from an incandescent bulb
Me as well. Flicker from CFLs and LEDs is noticeable to me, so I can't stand to have them around me in any rooms that I spend a lot of time reading, or in front of a computer.
Fortunately we'll always be able to buy our lightbulbs from Canada. I know a guy who works in a grey market lightbulb store there.
Re: (Score:3)
I had no idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I had no idea there was going to be a ban on 100W incandescent bulbs. I currently have 4 150W bulbs and they're in use as modeling lights for my AlienBee strobes. They work well cause they provide really good reference lighting, they're cheap ($2), I haven't replaced them in the 4 years I've had them and they're fully dimmable. I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing if I have to replace them, anyone have any experience with that? Are there replacements that will be just as bright that will work with a dimmer or do I just have to hope these bulbs never die?
Re: (Score:3)
Specialty lighting bulbs are exempt from this law, and those would fall into that category.
Also anything bigger than 150W or smaller than 40W is exempt.
The /. crowd used to mock this kind of story... (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea that someone's great-grandson should be taken as some kind of authority on what his grandfather would think -- which in ITSELF is just an "appeal to authority," void of any real meaning.
So this is an appeal to an appeal of authority. Or is it an appeal to authority of an appeal to authority? Whatever, it's meaningless.
- aj
We still need incandescents for some things (Score:3)
Banning them outright is indeed silly. Incandescents work very well for things like ovens, outdoor porch lights in -40 weather. Also they really are more environmentally friendly in places like a closet that you only turn the light on a few times a day for maybe a minute or two, where a fluorescent bulb would never warm up and have its lifespan significantly shortened by frequent starts.
Now a room that is lit for an hour or more a day, yeah for sure I ditched all my incandescents a long time ago and haven't regretted it, even in fixtures with glass covers. The thing I like most about compact fluorescents is that I can get a much brighter bulb with less heat and watts. Where I'd have a 60 watt bulb in a lamp before (hate indirect lighting!), I can no put a 75 or 80 virtual watt CF. Little 25 apparent watt fluorescent bulbs are excellent in a reading lamp. This said, I'm not convinced they are actually cheaper and I can't say they've saved me money. They don't seem to significantly outlast incandescents, and while they do use less electricity, the savings are not that much compared to TVs, Computers, Fridges, Stoves, Furnaces, AC, etc.
My shop is lit with a row of fluorescent tubes and a bunch of very large (200 watt) incandescent bulbs. Winters are brutal on the fluorescent bulbs. They flicker a lot while the ballast warms up. As well we replace more fluorescent tubes each year in the shop than bulbs (why would cold affect the tubes?). Which is nice because the bulbs are 20 feet overhead. Getting reliable, energy-efficient replacements for these bulbs would be very nice but I haven't seen any yet.
Re:We still need incandescents for some things (Score:4, Informative)
My shop is lit with a row of fluorescent tubes and a bunch of very large (200 watt) incandescent bulbs. Winters are brutal on the fluorescent bulbs. They flicker a lot while the ballast warms up. As well we replace more fluorescent tubes each year in the shop than bulbs (why would cold affect the tubes?). Which is nice because the bulbs are 20 feet overhead. Getting reliable, energy-efficient replacements for these bulbs would be very nice but I haven't seen any yet.
The problem with fluorescent tubes is that they need a sufficient temperature to get the correct mercury vapor pressure in the tube. If the pressure is too low, the discharge current will be too low giving poor light out, and an unstable discharge leading to flickering. The tube will need an abnormally high a voltage from the ballast, this will cause excessive sputtering from the tube filaments, shortening the tube life dramatically.
To an extent, the use of electronic ballasts can help, as electronic ballasts operate in an almost constant-power mode, whereas magnetic ballasts act instead as a current limiter. If the tube pressure is too low, the electronic ballast will still deliver near full power to the tube, whereas the magnetic ballast will severely underdrive the tube, leading to a prolonged warm-up time, during which time the tube is overstressed. Electronic ballasts also prolong the life of the tube and improve efficiency and reduce flicker due to the use of high frequency drive.
For extremely cold environements, you need to use low temperature fluorescent tubes. These use a different gas mix and mercury charge, this ensures that the discharge is stable and tube parameters appropriate at temperatures as low as -40 C.
So now where do I get 75W incandescants? (Score:3, Interesting)
My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.
Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.
I'm not the only Tesla fan... good (Score:4, Interesting)
Tesla was amazing. Edison was a huge jerk-hole. There's a lot of detail that has already been said supporting my position. I just wish the rest of the world would learn about the two and how we have Tesla to thank for AC power and a lot more.
The problem is that Tesla's story also includes his vision for FREE ENERGY. If you can't put a meter on it, you can't add it to the history books... or something like that.
He would love it. (Score:3)
Finally, solar panels and LEDs could show how to use DC networks.
Re:FP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really?
Chances are he would have held one or more patents on the new light bulb so it would have been a source of income for him.
Re:FP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. That's pretty much what I was going to say.. If he had the patent(s) on it, he'd praise it as the best thing since ... well ... the light bulb. If he didn't, he'd be pushing all the reasons that it was horrible and dangerous.
That's the way he played.. Otherwise, we would be praising the successor to the Joseph Swan light bulb.
Patents are a bitch, and Edison was the original patent troll.
Re:FP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Edison would have loved LEDs and hated CFLs. LEDs are always DC and CFL always AC inside.
Re: (Score:3)
If we're going to be pedantic... You can't feed Alternating Current to an LED. By definition, the current won't flow the reverse way, so it's not AC. Alternating voltage, sure, but not AC.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs [wikipedia.org], suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Re:FP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, that would have been "Consolidated Edison" eventually shortened to "ConEd". Otherwise, you're absolutely right. How much did he cheat the world from, by not funding Tesla? We'll never know.
Well, unless the conspiracy theory that Tesla managed to make himself immortal, and moved to Argentina to pursue high energy experiments for gravity control and space travel are true. I kid you not, I picked up a really good book on Tesla. The last two chapters went into this wild conspiracy stuff. What an awful way to ruin a really informative book. I was under the distinct impression that the publishers read the first few chapters, and confirmed the facts, but no on bothered to read the whole thing before it went to press.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, the "Tesla Oscillator" and tele-geodynamics. It should be clarified, it wasn't an electromagnetic field, it was a steam powered oscillator. He did demonstrate that harmonic oscillations could be felt throughout a building, with a very small input force. He was looking at sending waves (and therefor power) around the world, much like his work in harmonic oscillations in the atmosphere, which was people dubbed his death ray. For the world wide scale, the waves were spaced something li
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not drumk but I love incandescent bulbs too. I've tried many CFLs and none of them give warm light, none of them give full brightness immediately at power-on, none of them are mercury free, none of them handle cold temps well.
Sure. But you're only considering one side of the pros and cons list. On the other side you've got the facts that they consume less energy and they last longer.
We waste electricity in so many other ways
Is not an argument for continuing to waste energy with lightbulbs, but an argument to find lots more ways of not wasting energy as well as not using inefficient lightbulbs.
Anything that's "instant on" or uses a transformer ("wall wart") is a vampire sucking off energy and wasting it. Cell phone chargers or any kind of charger, cordless house phones, computers, video game consoles, TVs, VCRs, DVD/BR players, stereos, laptop chargers, monitors, printers, microwaves... these are only a sample of the vampires in your house.
That's uninformed. Someone told me the other day that I ought to unplug my laptop charger when not in use. So I looked it's spec up. When there's no MacBook attached, it uses 0.03W
Re: (Score:3)
They do not "pump out radiation and mercury vapor". They give off EM radiation, aka "light" and "RF", not ionizing radiation, and their RF emissions are fairly small. They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube. The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb. Therefore, even if you break a CFL bulb after using it, it will put less mercury into the environment than the ex