The same thing happens to incandescent bulbs. If you put a regular light bulb in an enclosed housing it's going to burn out fast due to the excess heat, too. This really is a baseless attack.
There are several types of fluorescent lighting, with different color temperatures. Granted, their spectra is not the same as sunlight, but you can mix more than one type for a more pleasant effect.
Incorrect. That article is comparing the estimated exposure from a broken CFL with the exposure from eating Albacore[1] tuna. The actual mercury content in the CFL is obviously much greater.
[1] And not all canned tuna is Albacore. The stuff sold as "light" tuna is typically lower mercury content (don't have a source handy at the moment.)
I've broken one bulb in a decade. But by being an early adopter and using them for more than a decade I've prevented hundreds of times as much mercury from entering the atmosphere.
People used to play with mercury as a toy, even drink it just to watch it pass through their digestive system. It's a very good thing people don't do that stuff anymore, but there are probably far worse things than mercury hiding in household items and chemicals.
I bought a huge box of big CFLs when a nearby store went out of business, for something like less than $1 a pop. Not quite a lifetime supply, but I am definitely not going to be an early LED adopter.
Generally speaking, you are looking at this incorrectly, and if enough people share your views, it impedes progress. By voting with your wallet on newer technologies you help to fund further advances. Granted, it takes millions of people to make a difference but I would hope that the HN reader would be leading the way.
Unfortunately there are also plenty of bar owners who are voting for carbon filament incandescents with their wallets. They are even less efficient than tungsten, they last less and the glass gets black from soot, but they look oh so hipster.
I'm not saying that everyone has to lead the way, but that if enough people do then progress continues at a faster pace. 4k monitors will be commonplace in 3-8 years, for instance. The rate of early adoption will determine how fast companies invest in them.
I wasn't being sarcastic, I for one think that incandescents should be banned (and I think they have been in several countries). The reason that has to happen sooner rather than later is not progress for progress' sake IMHO, but the environmental damage inefficient obsolete tech causes.
Why should they be banned? Why should people not be allowed to waste electricity and glass? We don't have shortages of either, and by melling's argument doesn't dumping money into electrical generation encourage advances there, the same way that dumping money into LED leads to LED advances?
Basically: If you want people to use less power, then increase the price or ration it. Don't ban an unrelated technology. If you want people to use less glass, haha are you kidding me, glass is made of dirt and easy to recycle.
Is there any harm caused by incandescent bulbs specifically that I have somehow missed?
By your logic, we should have not banned CFCs in household goods but instead made them more expensive.
The reason for why we want to have energy efficiencies is simply because we only have to produce so much more electricity to power everything else. We have not reached a point where nuclear, solar, or wind is cheaper by the MW than coal and as a result we'll continue to build those for the foreseeable future. Banning inefficient and obsolete light bulbs will prevent us from needing to burn more coal and other harmful fuels.
If we didn't have this problem with electricity generation then banning something may become less desirable.
CFC deplete a limited resource. Electricity doesn't inherently do that. If you're in charge of the laws, you can make non-polluting energy cheapest and do far more good than coming at the issue from the side by legislating light bulbs.
Or you could be really direct and make a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power, letting everyone choose if they want to buy some renewable/nuclear energy for their wasteful bulbs.
No, but for the moment it does actually do that. And you can change what sort of light bulbs people use faster than you can change your large-scale power generation technology.
(I do agree that making environmentally-better energy cheaper is likely a more powerful way of reducing the environmental cost of electricity use than telling everyone to stop using incandescent bulbs. But "X is better than Y" is a reason for doing X, not necessarily a reason for not doing Y.)
> a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power
Enforcing that one would be an interesting challenge. A law that says "no selling incandescent bulbs" is rather easier to enforce.
By your logic, we should have not banned CFCs in household goods but instead made them more expensive.
Lots of people would agree with that or the point in general that financial penalties work better. Legislation should mandate results, not dictate methods.
Are there any studies on how effective each method is? It seems fairly complex, depending on how good the methods being dictated are, how price-sensitive consumers are (and how well-informed about what costs/saves money), costs of switching, in some cases economies of scale, etc.
The conventional wisdom here (Denmark) has been that a mixture of the two achieves best results: a high tax on energy to provide an across-the-board untargeted price incentive, plus specific targeted regulations aiming at cutting out the largest sources of inefficiency and encouraging economies of scale in more efficient technologies. So for example district heating is now mandatory if you're in an area where it's available (no furnaces in new construction), and this seems to have been quite effective in increasing its adoption, which in turn makes it easier to build efficient district-heating networks and cogenerating power plants, since there is a dense customer base.
I don't know specifically. I do know that all of the "alternate fuel" tax credits are a giant scam. How does spraying kerosene on coal make it clean? No clue, but the government will pay you to do it if you say it's alternative.
I suppose anything is possible. The point is it would be better for the government to mandate results (lower emissions, which can be measured) than methods (spray kerosene on coal and hope it does something useful).
In what way? I used to think that when I first tried them ~6 years ago, and switched back to incandescent. But I tried again ~2 years ago, and now I can't tell the difference between a name-brand CFL and an incandescent bulb. Visually appears to have the same color temperature, no flicker, instant-on brightness. I'm sure there are still low-quality off-brand CFLs that take time to get to full brightness, but it's been years since that was true of the good ones.
The only cases where I don't see a CFL replacement yet are decorative clear lamps where the filament being visible is part of the aesthetic.
* To me, they just look dark. A 60W-equiv rated CFL is never as bright as a 60W incandescent, more like 40W when new.
* There are notable gaps in the spectrum causing color distortions. CFL light mostly features a greenish or violet shade and looks "hollow". Tungsten and halogen are way better, even after 20 years of CFL development.
* Most, even the more expensive ones are not really instant-on. They reach their max brightness after some time
* As I regularly switch off lights in rooms that are empty, they tend to fail rather fast.
That last one is the killer for me. CFLs don't get anything like their rated lifespan unless you leave them on all the time. In my experience they burn out faster than incandescents.
