Abdabz

I try to recycle my old bulbs by planting them in my garden. I've bene doing this for years and not once has a flower grown
Lots of sliced up moles though in bandages everywhere, which is weird. I wonder if there's a link?

Triggaaar

boomer

...so are you trying to say that "bulb watts" are less than "central heating watts", or did you simply fail your O-level physics (or maybe 11-plus)?

Have a read of Mick's post a few down from your's if you get confused!!!

mb

carl

The watts measure the input power, not the output power. I guess your central heating is more efficient at converting energy to heat than your lightbulbs, otherwise we'd all have great big incandescent radiators powered off the mains.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

WTF?!

Energy can't be created or destroyed - a 100W bulb draws 100W from the supply, and emits nearly 100W of heat plus a little bit of light (which ends up as heat eventually anyway).

Efficiency is just a measure of what proportion of the energy coming out of a system is in a form which is useful. As soon as you define the purpose of a device to be 'heating', then by that definition, efficiency is practically 100%, because all energy eventually ends up as heat. (Look up 'heat death of the universe').

What this means is that if you have a 100W bulb on, then in order to keep the house at the same temperature, you really do need 100W less from your central heating system. And yes, that does mean that energy-saving light bulbs deliver precisely zero benefit any time you have electric central heating on.

Using electricity for heating is shockingly wasteful anyway. I seem to recall that the theoretical limit for the efficiency of a power station is somewhere around 40%, with the remaining 60% of the energy that was originally present in the fuel being lost as waste heat which gets dumped into the cooling water. So, if you have electric heating or cooking at home, even though you get 100% efficiency from your heating appliances, you're still only 40% efficient overall. Burn the gas at home on a hob or in a boiler and you can do much better.

Yet despite this, we hear proposals to force the change-over to ugly, flickery fluorescent bulbs containing toxic chemicals - and no pressure or incentives to convert people to gas cooking and heating.

Politics.

GCollier

Banning incandescent light bulbs...utter beaureacratic bollocks.

There is a much simpler solution than a plethora of petty laws and regulations...simply price electricity to take into account the side-effects of its generation (cleaning up emmissions, developing alternatives to fossil fuels) and then let people CHOOSE what they wish to spend their money on.

Gary.

Abdabz

FFS Is there nothing that governments wont try to ban on the back of bullsh1t propaganda???

SWRTWannabe

So, if a power station converts 40% of the input energy into electricity, and the remaining energy into heat, then perhaps the answer is that we each have our own power station in our gardens - rather than wasting the heat in a cooling tower, we can heat our houses and our water with it

De Warrenne

That, my friend is precisely, the idea behind micro-CHP. The only difficulty is that they tend to be only 10-15% efficient at generating electricity, which means in the summer, when there is little demand for heat we might end up creating more of those evil GHGs

De Warrenne

yeah, but....

that does not reflect the primary energy (and thus the environmental impact) of the fuel use.

Lets assume that the electricity comes from a nice CCGT with ~50% efficiency. Then we're actaully talking about 200W to produce ~100W of heat from the lightbulb compared to ~100W (with a little bit of losses - say 10%) of gas to produce heat from your GCH system.

Therefore roughly twice as polluting (at best) to heat your home with lightbulbs than a gas heating system.

ricardo

Apart from the fact that the light ends up as heat too... as does all the other standby power for the telly and the digibox and whatever.

De Warrenne

Fine, please continue to heat your house using whatever random electrical devices you can find (hairdryer, oven, mobile phone charger?) I'll use my central heating system, which was kinda designed to do the job and I'll be paying 3p a kWh (delivered) rather than 8p kWh (delivered) for the privilege

Oh and with a carbon consequence of 0.19 kg/kWh rather than 0.43

OllyK

Rather than making figures up that suit your claim, do you have any figures derived from scientific experiments?

CharlesW

I suspect the biggest influence on the Brussels bureaucrats responsible for this, was all the lobbying by the manufacturers of said "energy saving" light bulbs.

ricardo

The comparison was with electric heating in Andy's original quote, so it all comes from the same place.

Brit_in_Japan

If your electricity bill decreases as a result of using energy saving light bulbs then de facto you have reduced your energy consumption. Nobody keeps warm by gathering around an incandescent light bulb so any increase in central heating costs will be negligible.

If still worried about heating costs turn the thermostat down by 1 degree and put a jumper on!

De Warrenne

Do a teeny bit of research on t'internet and you'll see I'm not making this up

try CCGT efficiency in google

De Warrenne

aye but only 20% or so of us have electric heating - rest (ca. 20 million households) are on gas

Bram

[quote=rest (ca. 20 million households) are on gas[/quote]

Why ain't a laffing

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Did you even read the second half of my post? The bit that goes...

Brit_in_Japan has it right:
...the point being that, compared to the energy used for domestic heating, the energy used by a light bulb is minuscule anyway.

You COULD keep warm by gathering around light bulbs, if you had enough of them. But, even if you don't, putting 100W of energy into a light bulb means you need 100W LESS from somewhere else to maintain the same temperature.

My point? The saving from energy-saving bulbs is even less than it first appears - a far, far better option would be to promote the use of gas for cooking and heating instead of electricity.

OllyK

Indeed if you look at the article linked earlier in the thread, while a CFL may reduce the amount you pay, it doesn't reduce the amount of power the power station has to produce and supply. Plus they are not environmentally friendly from a disposal point of view!

Leslie

So from the point of view of the authorities having thought it all through. it is similar to holding the Millennium celebrations in the wrong year then!

Les

logiclee

Ban the bulb but the same people agree to increase low tax air travel.

The Government only wants to look green, a 737 doing just one three hour flight produces similar emissions to 250 family saloons doing 10000 miles each.

So for evey three hour flight shouldn't a 737 pay the equivalent tax to 250 road fund licences + the same tax level on the fuel?

Changing my 60W lamp for an 11W is going to make a massive differene.

Green my ****.

Cheers
Lee

Nimbus

I heard an article on Radio 4 a few weeks ago when they were talking about this subject. They had someone (government I think) on who was promoting the use of CFLs. He stated categorically (after direct questions were asked) that CFLs do not use more energy than standard bulbs when they are first switched on, and that repeated switching on and off does not reduce the life span of the CFL. I wish I could remember who it was that was making these statements...

Fart Man

****, I broke a few CFLs in my life....why aren't I dead yet?

Admittedly CFLs are a gripe of mine, I've lost 4 fairly newish bulbs due to leaky outdoor light fittings (again new). And boy, when they short out, they go with a bang! Obviously I'm out of pocket, with them costing much more and lasting the best part of a month (I paid extra for fancy "normal" looking bulbs ) and then there is the environmental consequences.

And annoying thing is the tubes are fine; Just the circuits boards that fires them up is fried. So the "dangerous/pulluting" bit is still perfectly servicable but because they are "disposable" items, they have to chucked due to the circuits being knackered - what a waste.

What needs to be done is to modify the designs so that the circuit boards and/or tubes can be replaced seperately, like that of industrial/commercial CFLs or strip lights.

CFLs are easy enough to crack open (they just clip together, so replacing the faulty head or base as separate parts could be made very easy if the internal wiring had plugs rather than being soldered. I feel its an opertunity wasted both from a business point of veiw and environmental.

Fart Man

Those already exist in the form of BLT/PLL/PLT/PLS bulbs/fittings. Ballast circuit is part of the fitting.

And last bit just summed up my idea in two lines

20% share is my only and final offer