watervole | Light bulbs

Heh, I've already been using fluro bulbs because of the power saving.

I just wish they gave off light that was equal to the lightbulb I replace. They're too dim. :-(

Err, you're probably using the wrong wattage. My new bulbs are brighter than those that went before them. They use less than a quarter of the electricity and they look great (circular fluouescants) and are closer to daylight spectrum as well.

I might have used substandard bulbs as well, I gave up on them five years ago. I'm sure there are much better bulbs on the market today.

Regardless, this is a necessary step to take.

I've been using those in every fitting I have that will take them for several years now - I'm close to replacing the fittings which won't, but can't until my brother comes to visit or I persuade some other electrically minded person to do it.

And I replaced one of the bulbs in the shared hallway with one; I'm going to do the others as the old bulbs go - I pay for them personally because the freeholder won't.

You get a gold star! (which gives me an excuse to use my new icon)

The ACT government already gave me six bulbs for free. :)

It's an election year and our government, with their popularity in the dunny, is trying desperately to jump on every bandwagon available to try to become more popular, short of pulling out of Iraq. They've even asked the US to speed up its charging of David Hicks. Like their other knee-jerk reactions, there isn't the slightest hint of how they will implement it and what they will do about all the problems.

Will there be tiny compact fluoros for microwave ovens and fridges? Or will those just have to be dark in future? What about incandescent globes which are specifically intended for heat, such as for bathrooms, for hatching chicks and ducklings, and so on?

Making our power sources more environmentally friendly and more expensive so that more people will make the change of lighting type voluntarily where appropriate would be much more useful. Banning the ludicrously hot and dangerous (but trendy) halogen lamps would be useful and have no downside that I'm aware of, but banning all incandescents will either be a major pest, or will have exceptions made to it.

There's always a case for sensible exceptions. Fridge lights are very low in power in any case and only on when the fridge is open. (I don't know if LEDs are viable in these applications, but I'd be interested if anyone can tell me where modern LEDs are at in terms of usefulness/energy consumption)

Heat lamps obviously need to be excluded for farmers - though I suspect there are far more effecient ways of heating bathrooms. (I've never had one in mine)

Making power sources environmentally friendly sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I don't know any power source (including wind) that is perfect - though I'd love to see more exploration of geothermal.

While I must admit that I rather like your suggestion of making power more expensive as a way of persuading people to make voluntary changes, I doubt it would be popular with the electorate...

I agree that there might be sensible exceptions. What I'm getting at is that the announcement smacks of election-year propaganda, rather than any sort of well thought out strategy.

There has been some discussion recently of making power sources more environmentally friendly. Our main one is coal (brown in Victoria, black in NSW and Qld). Victoria has the dubious distinction of having the most polluting (CO2 per MWh) power station in the industrialised world. We have hundreds of years coal supply and the output from coal burning could be made much cleaner by trapping the CO2 and not letting it into the atmosphere. However, this would push up the cost of electicity by about 25%. While it mightn't be as immediately popular, building or retrofitting power stations would be far more useful than forcing everyone to do what most people are doing already.

It's a very sensible idea. Trapping CO2 at the power station allows it to be stored somewhere safe (maybe in old underground rocks that used to have natural gas).

If it only adds 25% to the cost of power generation, then it could be a viable option, especially as there would be major reluctance not to use the coal.

If we can use fossil fuels without the associated CO2, then I'm all for it.

but I'd be interested if anyone can tell me where modern LEDs are at in terms of usefulness/energy consumption

I've seen a few discussions in various bits of the internet about this - the conclusion is that LED lighting uses more energy for a given level of lighting than compact fluoro, but they are both more energy efficient than incandescent ...

A *major* downside on banning halogens is that they have the best approximation to a true daylight spectrum. There are situations where this matters.

But there are now a wide range of daylight-spectrum fluourescant bulbs. We have some in our lounge and Google shows far more.

They aren't true daylight spectrum. The halogen lamps have a fairly close approximation to a black body spectrum, while the "daylight" fluorescents are a mix of phosphors that give several spectral lines that together approximate daylight colour balance to the human eye. Most of the time that's good enough, but sometimes it isn't.

There's a massive multi thousand post thread in rasf that was discussing this, but I'm not going wading through that lot trying to find the exact references. They also mentioned another issue with fluorescents -- they use mercury. Now, it's possible to deal with this, and it's a lot easier to deal with it than with CO2 pollution, but I would not be happy with a major push to replace all domestic incandescents with fluorescents unless there is also a system in place for handling the resulting toxic waste. In California it's already illegal to put them into the domestic waste handling system, but it's not entirely clear what you're supposed to do with them instead.

Fluorescents *are* toxic waste, not just because of the mercury but because of some of the other nasties in them, and in the UK shops and factories are not supposed to dispose of them in the ordinary council waste collection. Hire a skip these days, and fluorescent lights appear on the list of hazardous waste you're not allowed to put into them. They have to be collected separately for safe disposal, at a substantial fee. But I'd bet that domestic ones will be slipped into the normal rubbish unless there's a serious education campaign and an easy safe disposal method -- and they add up.

I have switched the majority of our bulbs to compact tubes, but I still wonder why I can't find any figures for "cradle to grave" expenditure. There is so much more in a compact tube all sealed in that white block at the base that I wonder how much pollution was caused manufacturing it.

The absence of figures makes me think they must be bad because if they weren't we would have been told.

I'd be interested in a cradle to grave figure as well. Sometimes it can be the death of something.

Biofuels look good until you try that - then they turn out to use as much energy in fertiliser as they save elsewhere.

Mind you, this is before I consider the bulbs in my sewing machines, which are both incandescents.

Which reminds me...

I'm not aware of the 'multi thousand post' rant, but the fact is ha even ten years ago you could buy daylight spectrum fluorescents with a true colour match that equated to 5500 Kelvin with better than 97% accuracy GE made them - they were more expensive than the 'white lght' tubes (by a factor of 7 so the market was small.

Since then the accuracy has improved to the point where it's better than 99% and the cost factor is down to 5

I use them, worth it in my case (antique furniture restoration) but YMMV.

Regarding disposal, My local authority is one which does recycle fluorescent tubes (special bin at the local landfill also sections for electrical goods, fridges, metals, and green waste - which is composted.

Biofuel accounting is also dependent on the methods used to create the fuel. During the era of sanctions South Africa proved it was possible for a farm to be energy self sufficient if 10% of the area was turned over to biofuel, BUT and it's a big but they used the 'straw' to fuel the processing of the biofuel, and waste heat wasn't wasted.

The current biofuels accounting differs because they factor in transport of the seed crop to central processing locations and ignoring the 'waste' which was used by the South African farmer to run the processing, heat water and do the cooking.

There's been a lot of giving out free lightbulbs all over the country, it seems... we ended up with enough for half the house :)

Some doubt has been expressed about geosequestration of coal-derived CO2 of late, though, on the grounds that it can exacerbate local fault lines. Coming from Newcastle, as I do, I know I never want to experience an earthquake greater than 5.5. That was scary enough. Not that this means it is impossible, but just that some areas cannot embrace the idea as whole-heartedly as others.

It would certainly have to be areas with apropriate geology. Natural gas (as far as I'm aware) tends to occur in pretty much fault-free areas (otherwise it would have escaped long ago).

Been there for soemthing like fifteen years and at least four of my bulbs are still the "originals"! It's not about environment particularly - it's because they are far better value over time!

Substantially cheaper to run, much longer life - there's no real excuse for not changing over - even the old high capital outlay has disappeared with many supermarkets now charging under £1 per light.

Alastair

It also opens the argument about the benefits of nuclear power - whilst spent nuclear fuel is not nice, there is a negligible carbon footprint from nuclear power stations.

Some countries are very dependent on nuclear power - ISTR that something like 70% of France's electricity is from atomic energy.

Is the penalty (and problems) of spent fuel (and the security problems as well!) worth the saving of the greenhouse gases?

Alastair

But one of the ongoing problems is that fossil fuels will run out sooner or later -we will eventually need alternative sources - be they nuclear or based on "renewables" such as wind and water. Additionally, we are dependent on oil resources for other products besides energy - it may make some sense long term to conserve these resources for those products!

Additionally, do we want to be reliant on other countries for our fuel. Whilst there may still be a fair amount of gas and oil in "offshore Britain" the amount is finite and will run out eventually.

Alastair

Light bulbs

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Black body lighting

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