Australia Outlaws Incandescent Light Bulb 944
passthecrackpipe writes "The Australian Government is planning on making the incandescent light bulb a thing of the past. In three years time, standard light bulbs will no longer be available for sale in the shops in Australia (expect a roaring grey market) and everybody will be forced to switch to more energy efficient Fluorescent bulbs. In this move to try and curb emissions, the incandescent bulb — which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light — will be phased out. Environmental groups have given this plan a lukewarm reception. They feel Australia should sign on to the Kyoto protocol first. A similar plan was created together with Phillips, one of the worlds largest lighting manufacturers."
Re:Let's call it what it is -- prohibition. (Score:3, Informative)
They're also used as an inexpensive heating element for things like battery houses and pump houses (to keep the tanks and pipes from freezing and the batteries at a temperature where they operate efficiently) in rural areas with cold climates. A 60 watt bulb on a thermostat will keep an insulated pumphouse above freezing in subzero weather. (Of course you use more than one for when they burn out...)
More roadblocks for people trying alternative energy in areas where it makes economic sense.
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
It's 2007, not 1997.
Re:Let's call it what it is -- prohibition. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So much for rheostats (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean using CFLs designed to work with dimmer switches. Like the ones made by GE [gelighting.com] and numerous others?
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Australia gets almost 100% of it's power from fossil fuels. As far as I know they burn a lot of coal.
California has a much more diverse energy base than Australia. In fact Australia has the highest carbon output per person in the world last time I checked.
They are a large country with a low population density. Australia doesn't have a lot in the way of hydroelectric resources and they have not embraced nuclear power. They do have a lot of coal.
Re:Environmental Groups? Bah. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder - have the safety issues been consider (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder how many hands people will have to lose before they consider allowing exceptions to this one?
Not a big risk in the home but in the UK at least, the wiring/lighting regs for industrial use say that adjacent flourescent lights must be spread across the three phase supply to eliminate the possiblity of the 'stroboscopic accidents' you suggest.
Re:So much for rheostats (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gelighting.com/na/business_lighting/fa
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mercury Contamination (Score:5, Informative)
Source: USEPA 'Fact Sheet: Mercury in Compact Fluorescent Lamps CFLs', 2003
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
The "sunlight" are very cool, but I use them where there is insufficient lighting (mostly outside and in the basement) because they look much brighter than they are.
The "full spectrum" bulbs are a little cooler than incandescents, but make artwork and tapestry look great (or faded if it is).
CF bulbs are not by any means universally cooler color than an incandescent though.
Re:Carbon trading and CFLs (Score:5, Informative)
I've replaced all mine. Cheap. The instructions on the box say to put them in the recycle bin when used up. Easy.
What was the problem again?
Re:I wonder - have the safety issues been cons... (Score:5, Informative)
RFI from CFLs (Score:5, Informative)
In case anyone is interested in specific figures, there is a chart of RFI versus frequency from a typical CFL ballast here [nxp.com] (go to the very end of the document for the graph).
Whole house surge supressors (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you can. When I had my fuse panel replaced with circuit breakers, I had them install whole-house surge supression. (they're installed in two of the circuit breaker slots, one for each leg)
There are also suppressors that don't go in the circuit panel [smarthome.com]
Either way, you're going to need an electrician, but it is possible.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, even old fashioned flourescent strips flicker at 120Hz in the US, not 60.
Thirdly, any flourescent (strip, compact, whatever) manufactured in the last 15 years will have an electronic ballast - so the flicker will be around 20kHz to 30kHz depending on the design, and imperceptible to any human.
Re:Let's call it what it is -- prohibition. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let's call it what it is -- prohibition. (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly you've never actually used them, just like regurgitating what someone with an agenda wants to tell you.
For your information they are extremely bright (in fact they're probably underrated - I find the '100 watt equivalent' ones too bright for an average room). They also work just like any other light and are fully bright immediately.
Re:Have they fixed the fault tolerance? (Score:3, Informative)
You need to get your power fixed, or move. I live in a townhouse which had really bad power problems when I first moved in. Over the summer, whenever the air conditioner of any neighbor turned on, my lights would dim and my UPSes would go off. Still, my CFLs survived for the most part. The ones that died came from another apartment and were 2-3 years old by the time they died. I still have some which are pushing 4 years now.
Talk to your neighbors, see if they have power issues too. It could be mostly a neighborhood thing (our neighborhood needed an upgraded transformer as a first step, and still needs more line upgrades which are in the works). Call your power company, find out if they have a "power quality" department that handles non-emergency power issues like this. My problem was that they kept sending over techs who were trained to fix outages and emergencies, whereas you might need an upgrade to the grid near you.
Of course, it could be a combination of that with internal wiring. Don't put up with inadequate internal wiring from your landlord. If you are having issues with things like CFLs dying, then your power is probably bad enough that you could build up a legal case if you needed to. Still, it's best to start cordial, and have the landlord have a qualified electrician look at everything and see if there are any reasonable ways to upgrade the setup (replacing old circuit breakers, etc.).
And relating to your other equipment, you should probably get a ground tester and see if all of your outlets are grounded. If they aren't, that could pose a real fire hazard if you plug in equipment that expects a ground. I've seen people put up with really remarkably bad power, especially on college campuses. If you spend a little time on it, you can really improve your own power and that of everyone who rents in your place in the future. We spend tons of money on electricity every month, it should be of reasonable quality.
Re:Crazy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More than Australia (Score:3, Informative)
However, I will NEVER put CFLs in my living room (it has halogen tracklights anyway), kitchen, bedroom or bath until they produce one that gives off light that doesn't look like the bleakest day in February in Canada. I want the light to look natural and comfortable. I want to be bathed in the light of the warmest summer day as viewed from a comfortably shaded (but not dark) location. CFLs don't cut it yet. Since this is where the industry is headed though... I hope they will make moves towards creating decent CFLs that won't require filters or other bizarre tricks.
Finally, the gel suggestion while it might sound like a decent idea is actually a load of crap. The problem that all CFLs seem to suffer is not that they product the wrong colors that you can filter out. The problem is that they LACK the appropriate level of certain colors to produce something that feels natural. With a lot of work, you probably could filter out the more dominant colors to try and emphasize what's missing, but that would result in a VERY dim output. What's really needed is a better balance of phosphors to produce the REAL full spectrum and not what some marketroid labels as "daylight".
Re:Have they fixed the fault tolerance? (Score:2, Informative)
I decided to try again with a different brand with a different color range from 1000bulbs.com, this time buying 14 bulbs, 6 for the light bar above, and 8 for a lightbar in the master bath. That was 3 years back, and every one of them is still working fine, they also get to full bright much quicker than the ones I'd tried previously. All were globe shaped.
Source seemed to play a huge role in life. Or at least brand.
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
Environmentalists who have a gram of economic knowledge know that capturing externalities by converting access to the commons into a market commodity is the most sustainable way of ensuring environmental efficiencies. Once the commons (in this case, the atmosphere) is no longer freely available for dumping, a well-designed market will automatically compute the costs and distribute them appropriately.
Every environmentalist worthy of the name knows this: if you restrict access to the commons via a market then environmental efficiencies become economic efficiencies, and you do not have to waste enormous resources trying to maintain unsustainable economic regulation.
This worked extremely well in limiting sulphur dioxide emissions in North America in the late 90's, to the extent that everyone was astonished at how quickly "cap and trade" reduced acid rain. There is no reason to believe that something similar can't work for carbon emissions. The only issue is that like any market it must be free of political interference. When that happens we get disasters like the East Coast fishery in Canada, which has been mismanaged due to political manipulation of catch limits to the point where major commercial stocks have collapsed.
Treating access to the atmospheric commons as a limited, ever-shrinking, tradable commodity is something that absolutely everyone whose political agenda does not trump reason and responsibility ought to be in favour of.
Re:Have they fixed the fault tolerance? (Score:2, Informative)
My electric grid is not the most stable either. I am constantly getting power surges and brown outs. I have had to buy a UPS as a result for my PCs.
In situations were I want a warm or ambiant light, I just use a proper shade. If you walked into my living room, you would never know I was using CFLs.
Re:-20C (Score:2, Informative)
They take time to warm up but they've worked flawlessly all winter for me and saved me a TON (read: paid for themselves) on my hydro bill.
The one I've got in the garage takes a few minutes to get bright but I'm not exactly hanging in my garage when it's -20 ya know??
I'm using the Phillips bulbs everywhere in the house, might want to give them a shot...
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
There is no such thing as a greyish tinge to light. In subtractive color theory, grey is made by adding black and white. In additive color theory, grey is just a dimmer white. It is not a tinge. If something seems grey, add more light.
There is no way for anything to have a "pinkish/yellowish tinge." It could be one or the other, or it could be orange. Pink is desaturated red. Red and yellow make orange. Pink and yellow makes light orange.
The problem I think you are encountering is not an actual color temperature issue, but a color accuracy issue. There are a lot of different ways of making colors that all look the same to a human eye. You could make orange by mixing red and green light, or by using an orange light. To the human eye it looks the same, to a spectrometer one "orange" looks like peaks in the red and green wavelengths, the other looks like a peak in the orange wavelengths.
Because phosphors only emit light in a very narrow band, CFLs use a combination of phosphors to approximate white light. But instead of a continuous spectrum of color mixed together to make white, you are getting just red, green and blue mixed together to make white. The light looks white to the human eye, because we only have red, green and blue receptors, but some other colors will look off because the light is not full-spectrum. There is no way to fix this with gels, either. There is nothing there for a gel to subtract.
Here's what wikipedia has to say about the quality of light in CFLs:
No, problem not solved (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More than Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Also, almost half of the lights in my home are CFL, and during last 3 years I've had to change 1 CFL and about dozen or two normals ones.
It probably takes about 30 seconds until CFL reaches the maximum brightness, but for me 90% brightness is usually enough for anything that I need to do within that timeframe.
Basicly the only reason that I haven't changed all my lights to CFL is that I have still 50 old lightbulbs left, but once they are gone, I'll switch to use only CFL. Except for my outside lamps, CFL really don't like winter and temperatures of -30C or more. They often just die in a week or so. Though some people have been lucky and their CFLs have lasted a winter or two.
Re:More than Australia (Score:2, Informative)
I recently re-did much of the lighting in my house, and found that none of the CFLs I found in the hardware stores produced suitable light for my purposes. I do use CFLs in the garage, on the front porch, and in the office- but for the kitchen, my bedroom, my wife's vanity, and the dining room, (think: places we spend the bulk of our time) my wife and I rejected CFLs and used either incandescents or mini-halogen floods.
One thing that made CFLs a non-starter in the kitchen and dining room was the fact that my wife wanted to be able to dim the lights for meals. No CFL will work on a dimmer, unless you're willing to tolerate loud, scary buzzing noises coming from your fixtures.
Undaunted, I started shopping- and in the process, really started paying attention to the quality of light they produce. Compared side by side, the differences in quality of light between CFL, Incandescent, and mini-halogens are dramatic.
Having grown up in Alaska, where it's dark in the winter much of the day and all night long, I appreciate the value of good lighting, not just for the health benefits involved in avoiding too much time under standard fluorescents, but also simply as a quality-of-life thing. As a result, I (and I expect most people to do some form of this) tried several varieties of CFLs, determined that the light they produce sucks despite the branding that says 'like sunlight' and 'full spectrum', then gave up and installed lights I actually liked.
Re:No, problem not solved (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Australia (Score:4, Informative)
here [lightbulbsdirect.com] is a chart on color temperature (of course they do invert it just for fun).
here [lightbulbsdirect.com] is a chart of CRI ("full spectrum is greater than 90", and higher means more colors are distinguishable, it makes a HUGE difference).
Re:More than Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, the old "you can't be percieving it that way; it's not in the theory for you to do so."
Sure, if you're talking about setting the background color on your web page. With a lightsource that is a collection of narrow spectra some illuminated surfaces could look pinkish and others could look yellowish.