Paul_in_Maryland
Flashlight Enthusiast
New York Times article: Give Up Familiar Light Bulb? Not Without Fight, Some Say
The Canadian factories are also closed.New York Times article said:Last fall, General Electric closed its last major United States plant producing the old-style incandescent bulbs, in Winchester, Va.
From an energy standpoint, it makes perfect sense to use incans in the winter; whatever energy isn't used for light, helps heat the house, making them, in effect, 100 percent efficient. It's unfortunate that legislators fail to draw this distinction.
That's a big "it depends."
If you have electric heat, then electrons flowing through an incandescent filament generate the same heat as going through a heating element elsewhere in the building. Of course, this only works during the winter; during the summer it's counterproductive. You'll also likely see much better distribution of heat from an "electric furnace" in a central heating/air conditioning system or from distributed heaters such as baseboard strip heaters.
If you have gas or oil heat, then it's more efficient just to burn fuel in a furnace. An electrical plant burning some fuel will put less than half as many BTU's onto the electrical grid per unit of fuel burned as a furnace combusting fuel locally. I know that when I lived in an apartment with electric heat, my electrical bills were pretty outrageous summer and winter alike; when I moved to another apartment with gas heat, it was stupidly cheap to heat.
And it's nice to get credit at zero percent interest. Idleprocess, as you keep pasting this funny table into these discussions, please tell us where you do your banking.
You can still get halogen versions of the A types that are more efficient