BBC News Magazine: Those compact fluorescent lights may be greener – but don’t trust the labels
The Tracker, starting at least six years ago, started replacing old-fashioned light bulbs in heavily-used fixtures with those bent-tubed eco-responsible compact fluorescent jobs. They’d last darned near forever, pay for themselves many times over in lower utility bills, I was told and I believed it. But dang. A lot of them blew out or otherwise failed within months or a year or two. And they weren’t cheap, especially at first.
By sheer statistics and a sort of natural selection, as we replaced them the share of well-made ones went up. None have failed for a long time. They seem a net benefit – a reason that, along with solar panels, this house has a zero annual electrical bill. But they left a feeling we’d been slightly had.
And today at the BBC News Magazine a report by Ruth Alexander provides a whole slew of numbers and opinions that these bulbs, while they have merit, rode a wave of excessive hype just to get the small market share they now enjoy. Her story takes as its angle that European law will soon take care of that market share business by banishing the old Edison-type lights from sale over there. US regulations are similar. The story declares “eco-light bulbs aren’t what they seem.” Actually, they are what they seem. They’re just not what they told us they’d seem. It says here that one does not get as much light, as much durability, or as much economy as many manufacturers say they will. Alexander does not even get into the nuisance of worry over mercury pollution. But she does mention such subtleties as that the “waste” heat of an indoor incandescent is not wasted energy if it’s cool outside – rather, it takes a load off one’s furnace.
One hopes that such things as LEDs and OLEDs and will do better.
- Charlie Petit
December 11th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
If you reduce the heat produced by incandescent bulbs, how do you replace that heat? Of course, in the summer, in the south, you don’t. (But then, you have lights on for fewer hours.) In many climes, you turn up the thermostat, and consequently use more electricity, coal, gas, etc.
And then there’s the disposal problem. A scan of the disposal instructions for a broken compact fluorescent is scary, and that doesn’t speak to the electronics in the base.
My guess is that compact fluorescents are a flash in the pan–with a big bolus of profit for a few companies–and that warm white LED “bulbs” will be standard replacements for incandescents in a few years.