Fantastic, Incandescent bulbs are banned.

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It shouldn't be surprising at all MrAl, the luminous efficiency of typical incandescent bulbs is only between 2 and 5%. So best case scenario 95% of the energy going in is turned directly into heat. Figure a couple 100 watt bulbs per room, more in larger houses and you're talking a pretty significant source of heat. CFLs I think are in the neighboorhood of 20% efficient, this is still abysmally low but it's 4 times better than an incandescent so the amount of heat they put out is significantly lower. The homes heating system has to make up for this difference.

We have a few warm white CFL's the high frequency switching makes them flicker free and the light quality is difficult to tell apart from our regular incandescent bulbs. We'd be using all CFL's right now but the 3 way CFLs are physically too large the stick up out of the top of our floor lamps and you can directly see the bulb which is horrid.

The energy efficiency is hard to beat, but people seem to forget they contain mercury and if EVERYONE used CFLs that would likley become a pretty serious problem, because VERY few people are going to remember to properly recycle their bulbs.
 
Compact fluorescent (little curly) light bulbs are usually warm white with a pink and yellow colour (like an incandescent light bulb) and a colour temperature of 2700 degrees. Osram-Sylvania sell them with warm white (2700 degrees), pure white (3000 degrees) and outdoors (3500 degrees that looks blue). I use their pure white ones.
 
Just thought of plasma bulbs.

Don't know whether that stuff is available on market

..with a cool white light of course
 
Is the heat/early failure problems of some bulbs just because of the electrolytics used in the ballast, or are there other devices that fail too? I just don't know what the major failure mode of the bulbs are when heat is the issue.
 
Most of my burned out CFL bulbs have black at the ends of the fluorescent tube.
I think they stopped because the electrolytic capacitor dried out due to the heat.

My city's electrical utility company gave away free CFL bulbs. They were recalled because the Chinese manufacturer copied somebody else's certification label. Mine dripped burning plastic on my table when it burned out. Luckily my son saw the fire and extinguished it.
 
I had one let out black smoke in my office. It smelled bad for a few days. Otherwise they have been fine and do the usual flickering when they are dying. Do these things dim over time? I'd swear they were brighter when I first put them in. I have the 'outdoor' colour temp bulbs in my office. Otherwise the ones we have in the main living area are more yellowed (warmer).
 
Do these things dim over time?
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It depends on what quality they are and how long they run before they die. If they die fairly quickly you will never notice it.

But if you have the good quality ones that last for thousands of running hours they will get slightly dimmer over time.

I have one in my shop on an automatic night light circuit and it has at least 15K hours run time and is now about 2/3 the brightness of its low hours twins.
(I have no idea how it has ran that long!)
 
Last edited:
DirtyLude said:
Do these things dim over time? I'd swear they were brighter when I first put them in.
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If they are made in China then they are probably defective when new.
I had one Osram/Sylvania CFL bulb that was made in China fail and I reported it to the local Osram/Sylvania office. They sent me a case of CFL bulbs that were properly made in Germany.
 

Hi there,

It is surprising to me because i used to have to use a 1300 watt electric
heater to add supplemental heat to a medium sized living room. That was
in ADDITION to the regular heating which would not bring the temperature
up enough on cold days, and even that wasnt enough to make much of
a difference. Yes, incand's are very inefficient light sources and make
better heaters than light bulbs (ha ha ) but still 200 watts just doesnt
do very much. It's the plain wattage i am talking about here, not the
bulb itself. 200 watts worth of light bulbs probably wouldnt even glow
in that living room (he he).
Now if it was a very small enclosed area i might believe it, such as
under the covers in our beds. If we were able to take 200 watts worth
of bulbs under the covers with us, that would be more than enough
and probably 100 watts would do it even on very cold nights.
Think about this...some CPU's use almost 150 watts...that's a lot
but not much when it comes to heating a room in a house.
Along that same line of thought, the surface area of a heat sink is
not very much in comparison to the surface area of the walls, ceiling,
and floor of a room in a house, and the temperature rise has a lot to
do with the surface area of the heat sink, rising less for more surface
area. Think about how good a heatsink for a CPU would be if it could
have the surface area of even a small room...temperature rise 0.1 deg C
maybe?
 

You've got a VERY poorly insulated house then - perhaps you should do something about it?.
 
My new furnace burns inexpensive narural gas and is 96% efficient. It uses a plastic pipe to feed its exhaust outside. Its exhaust is slightly warm moist air.

The sound of the air blowing is much louder than my old furnace. I'll call the service dept to see if they can turn down the speed of the blower. It is a variable speed DC motor.
 
Nigel Goodwin said:
You've got a VERY poorly insulated house then - perhaps you should do something about it?.
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Hi Nigel,


He he, yes perhaps, but then the other poster didnt specify his
insulation either

I agree that the insulation has something to do with it too though.
But that's what i based my observations on.
Also, 200 watts spreads pretty thin over four walls and a ceiling and floor.

Why, how many degrees do you think a 200 watt bulb(s) can raise
the temperature of a medium sized living room if it has average
insulation?
 
Last edited:
MrAl;815419 Why said:
In a modern super-insulated house you can't even use 200W bulbs, human body heat keeps it hot enough without any extra heat source.

Even in just a reasonably efficiently insulated house, an extra 200W will do some good though.
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Only drawback with fluorescent light I found is their severe RF interference to the AM broadcast band

That nasty radiation has got a good range to cover the entire house even if we turn off at our part
 
Unfortunately most of us live in houses built by factories or by people who had far more concerns about saving money during construction cost than saving it down the road on energy savings.

I know people with high efficiency houses that have 5 times the volume of my house but yet use about half the heating energy I do.
I also know some people with houses even worse than mine.

My house has a market value of around $1500. (1974 trailer house, reasonable condition) To do a full reinsulate and rewindow job would run about $9000 in materials alone. With contractor labor figure it to be closer to $15K.

For that price I could buy a better house thats about 15 -20 years newer with slightly better insulation and windows but still it would only cut my energy usage by about half.

For me it was cheaper and easier to just build the boiler system I have now and burn the basically free fuel thats available to me regardless of my homes insulation values.
I am however putting a new roof on and adding nearly three times the insulation in the ceilings as it presently has this fall and thats still pushing about $3000+ in materials alone.
 
Does anyone use AM any more?.
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I dont know if its official yet but there has been a rumor floating around for a few years now that possibly in the next decade or less the public AM radio band is going to be decommissioned and alloted to other communications services.

Reason being that it has a rather small and shrinking following, Mostly old farts who dont care about sound quality or range of coverage.

The overwhelming amount of other competing formats that have good followings, good sound quality, and far wider coverage is just making it obsolete basically.
There are a few power house AM stations that are profitable just by the massive areas they cover but overall it just a shrinking broadcast format with marginal sound quality and lower profits every year.

It is already at the point that I have seen a number of home receiver units now that dont even have an AM band built into them! To me that evidence says that unfortunately Its probably going the way of 8 tracks and cassettes. It will always have a few die hard followers but still its got one foot in the grave and no ones bothering to call the paramedics!

I dont know if its officially true but I have heard it mentioned and argued about on the AM stations my dad has on when he is working in the barn. So to me that says someone has been talking about it!
 
Reason being that it has a rather small and shrinking following, Mostly old farts who dont care about sound quality or range of coverage.
Click to expand...

Here in San Diego most AM radio is from Mexico. Hardly a US market anymore. Still a couple stations like in Los Angeles but nothing like ten years ago.
 
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