American consumers protest laws designed to phase out incandescent bulbs

New York Times article: Give Up Familiar Light Bulb? Not Without Fight, Some Say

Too late.

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.

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The Canadian factories are also closed.

Even though the incandescent bulb is only supposed to be phased out starting next year in North America, I am already having trouble finding 25W, 40W and 60W bulbs. I was looking for 40W and 60W to compare with the latest generation of LED A-19 bulbs and the 25W for local supplementary heating. (keeping my feet warm under my computer desk, even a 40W is too hot let alone a 1500W space heater)

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.

Paul_in_Maryland said:

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.

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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.

The advantage of using the incan bulb for heating is it only help warm up the room people are in allowing the thermostat to be set lower and not waste energy to heat up the rest of the house where nobody is.
Normally people are advised to turn the thermostst down and use a space heater for local heating. The inefficient electric heat is compensated for by less heat needed to warm up the rest of the house.
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My problem was the cold air on the inside of the window do not mix well with the hot air from the radiator on really cold days. This results in the temperature at floor level being 1 to 2 degrees below desk top level.
I was using the 25W bulb for local heating - raising the temperature underneath my computer desk by 1°C.

This is similar to the lighting at my computer desk.
I can light the room with a 250W incan. bulb. (Electric heating)
Or I can use 2*23W CFLs which uses 20% of the energy (Oil or gas heating)
Or I can use a 3W desk lamp as a keyboard light. Let the rest of the room stay dark. (Local heating)

A 23 or 25 watt CFL will be exactly the same for local heating as a 25 watt incandescent. 75%-80% of the power put into a CFL comes out as heat. The rest eventually turns into heat after the light is absorbed by the room. Same thing for any other cases of using incandescent to replace electric heating. Just replace the incandescent with the actual same wattage (NOT the equivalent lighting wattage) of CFL or LED. You'll end up with the same amount of heating, minus the small amount of light which escapes out the window. No reason at all to use incandescents here.

All the above assumes table lamps where most of the heat goes in the room. With can lights most of the heat will escape into the attic, and from there outside, making the entire "using light bulbs as heat" argument moot.

On another note, the proper way to heat electrically is with a heat pump, not a resistance heater. You end up with 3 to 5 times the heat per kilowatt-hour consumed. And they have systems where you can set the thermostat for each room, avoiding the waste of heating the entire house.

I can see incandescents working well for highly localized heating and applications where very directional heating is desired, but they just don't seem like they're well suited to space heating on any large scale.

What really irks me is that many of the light fixtures, table lamps, and even a very expensive chandelier that my wife and I purchased when we were married is not compatible with CFL bulbs and would be downright UGLY if you could fit one in there and it would tolerate the enclosed fixtures. I refuse to replace half or more of the light fixtures in the house because my government feels it is in my best interest to do so. So yes, I have am ample supply of incans and will acquire more.

Not much to worry about. The phase-out in the US is mainly for the inefficient ordinary A type bulbs. You can still get halogen versions of the A types that are more efficient. There are plenty of exceptions too, such as applicance bulbs, 3 way and perhaps chandelier types as well. Most PAR types are halogen now anyway, so they should not be affected. This isn't a big deal.

My electricity costs .15 per kw hr, so even the waste heat from incans doesn't make much sense when natural gas is so low now. In the summer, incans are a liability as the AC has to work extra to dispose of their waste heat.

With increasing population, environmental issues and the problems of foreign energy dependence, I'm all for reduction of energy usage.

Any online sites to get incandescents from? I'd like to get a stash.

What is wrong with searching local stores? While mostly CFLs there are some incandescents left. Corner/variety stores usually have some even when bigger stores like Home Depot are out.

Be careful ordering online. The bulbs may be 230V and not work in North America.

Home Depots website still shows:
100W 6 pack
60W 6 pack
75W 6 pack
60W 120 pack

EDIT

If you do not like CFLs look at LED bulbs. They are down to $20 each. While too expensive to change out the bulbs all at once, doing so one at a time is not bad. Over the next 5 to 10 years the savings in electricity will pay for the higher initial cost.

Home Depot near me has plenty of GE Soft Whites (and equivalent) in stock - it's not like they're being phased out next month.

Cheap as they are, I'm amazed that people don't already have years' worth of them on-hand anyway. Heck, I'm tempted to buy a number for resale later as contraband black-market "Cash only - no cops" goods...

Agree that CFL's and LED bulbs are immensely more cost-effective in the long term than incandescents:

(data courtesy of Home Depot's website approximately a month ago)

Of course, for local heating (desk lamp, foot lamp) there is a difference between a 25w CFL and a 25w incandescent. The radiant heat of the incan is both proportionately higher, and can be directed more effectively if needed. Shouldn't this be obvious to anyone discussing on CPF? I guess not.

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.

idleprocess said:

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.

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During the summer in good old Canada, the sun is up for the entire day and most of the evening..... we RARELY turn on any lighting during the summer months.... During the 10 months of NON summer, the furnace is in use and it burns hydrocarbons.... my light bulbs are powered by clean hydroelectric power with no CO2 emissions.

Ultimately, this "saving the planet" thing is a joke...... This planet is doomed... it will be destroyed when our sun goes supernova...... not if..... but when!

Regards

Kaptain "Whew.... I thought you said 100.000 years.... not 1000.000.000 years before the supernova hits" Zero

PS: Does anyone know if Summer is going to fall on a weekend this year?!?!? I'd like to know, so I can set my alarm clock..... Last time I overslept and missed the entire summer season!

Marcturus said:

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.

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Is photobucket helpfully inserting some other image besides a quick TCO comparison I did between some commonly-available incan/CFL/LED bulbs, or are you being coy?

100w incandescents have already been banned in California. Many stores still have them in stock, but are getting hard to find due to people stockpiling them. Some stores still stock on 100w bulbs, they are there one week and gone by the next week. Then they restock 2 weeks later, only to fly off the shelves lol.

You can still get halogen versions of the A types that are more efficient

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Brought this up before, but a 75watt halogen uses as much energy as a 75watt Incan.

Yes, I know the halogen is brighter but I know very few people who use a lower wattage halogen because they've calculated the lumen difference.

As much as I'm pro energy efficiency, I don't get this 'ban the light-bulb nonsense' and am becoming increasingly convinced it's because electronic makers are just paying the right lobbiests. Residential energy use is a result of lax building codes and poor fixture design planning - not light bulbs. I do corporate IT consulting and don't recall the last time I've seen an incan bulb in an office building.

Re the halogen energy savers. There are now energy saving halogens such as the Sylvania Halogen Supersaver and Philips EcoVantage. They are relatvely inexpensive and use 28% less juice than their older incandescent counterparts. 72w replaces 100w, 43w replaces 60w, etc.

I'm laughing at the people actually making a case for Incandescents being OK because they can save on heating costs.

The government should have done what they always do when they want the public to stop using something. Kept it legal, but taxed it. Invest that tax money in green technologies to drive the price of the "good" technologies down, until it gets to the point where you'd be crazy to buy an incandescent A-lamp.

Would you rather the government do away with them, or continue to allow them, just at 3 times the cost.

Agricultural suppliers?