Obama saves consemers money in effort to wreck the economy!

[randomJACKASS]

Obama Toughens Rules for Some Lighting


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By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: June 29, 2009

President Obama announced tougher energy efficiency requirements for certain types of fluorescent and incandescent lighting on Monday, the latest step in the administration’s push to cut the country’s energy use.

The new rule , scheduled to take effect in 2012, will cut the amount of electricity used by affected lamps by 15 to 25 percent and save $1 billion to $4 billion a year for consumers, the White House said.

“Now I know light bulbs may not seem sexy,” Mr. Obama said, “but this simple action holds enormous promise because 7 percent of all the energy consumed in America is used to light our homes and our businesses.”

Of the two types of lighting covered by Monday’s announcement, the most important is “general service fluorescent lamps,” which commonly take the form of tubular office lights (but do not include the squiggly compact fluorescents commonly found in home lamps).

The other type of lighting covered by the new rule is incandescent reflector lamps; these cone-shaped fixtures can often be found in track lighting.

“We believe this will be the biggest efficiency savings from any appliance standard ever,” said Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, an advocacy organization.

The Energy Department has not updated the efficiency requirements for these lighting types since they were established by Congress in 1992. The department was supposed to update the requirement in 1997, according to Mr. Nadel, but it fell well behind on this and other appliance standards. In 2006 a federal court settlement required the department to move expeditiously to clear its backlog.

A broader push is under way to make lighting more efficient, aided by improving technologies. A 2007 energy bill mandated stronger efficiency requirements for the pear-shaped incandescent bulbs commonly found in homes. New efficiency requirements for two more types of lighting, floor and table lamps and outdoor lighting fixtures, are under consideration in Congress.

Susan Bloom, a spokeswoman for Philips, a major lighting manufacturer, said that her team was still combing through the lengthy document, but strongly supported the Energy Department’s efforts. “We’re all about helping to increase energy efficiency standards for lighting,” she said.

Source

Man this is just a sock in the eye to the big lightbulb makers. Those poor guys are so abused. It saves the little guys some money but I suggest you all get as many old incandescents in the highest wattage possible and stock up to stick it to the man!!!

 

[Altron]

The issue with flourescent lighting is CRI.

Maybe do a little optical research before lauding CFLs?

Incandescent bulbs are a blackbody radiation source. This means that they produce a continuous spectrum of light, a Gaussian distribution centered around a specific wavelength. This means that, for instance, a yellow light would be mostly yellow, but still contain a decent amount of orange, red, infrared, green, blue, violet, and ultraviolet.

However, flourescent lights do not operate on those same principles. They have a very jagged emissions spectrum, because they emit their light based on electron transitions, which have a pretty monochromatic wavelength associated with them. The lights themselves aren't monochromatic, because there's multiple transitions, but it makes a difference.

If you have an incandescent light, you might have 200 photons at 500nm, 195 photons at 495nm and 505nm, 185 photons at 490nm and 510nm, and so on - a gaussian distribution.
With a fluorescent light, you might have 200 photons at 500nm, and no photons at 501-599nm, but then 250 photons at 600nm. This is because of the emission spectrum of the atoms and molecules contained with the light.

That is what translates into CRI, or Color Rendering Index.
Incandescent filament bulbs have a CRI of 100. That means that all colors are accurate under them. If you have something that's blue, for instance, it looks blue because it reflects light at 450nm. With a CRI of 100, the incident light has a 450nm component, which is reflected the most, so the object looks blue.

However, with a low CRI, the object won't look blue, because there might not be a 450nm component. The closest component in the emission spectrum might be 500nm, so that the object would look green.

The best real-world example of CRI is the arc-sodium orange street lights that many areas have. You know how when you stand under one, everything looks kinda orangey and monochromatic, and you probably couldn't tell the difference between blue and green? That's because they have a terrible CRI. CFL light bulbs have a crappier CRI than incandescent, so many people, especially ones with worse eyesight, greatly prefer incandescent.

What I'm looking forward to is the use of HIR technology in bulbs. HIR is halogen infrared, and it coats the bulb in a film that reflects infrared to the filament, but allows visible light to pass through. You still get great CRI, but it more than doubles the lumen per watt efficiency.

That being said, the increased energy efficient and improved bulb life must be weighed against the increased cost and reduced CRI. Other things must be considered, such as production costs (CFLs are significantly more expensive to make), toxic elements found in disposed bulbs (tungsten is a lot better for the environment than mercury), and a multitude of other factors. This issue is not as one-sided and obvious as you make it out to be, but why listen to facts when you could listen to environmentalist propaganda? It's clear to me that you have not done adequate research on the subject of optics to be fully informed on the subject.

 

[randomJACKASS]

Because we all know that environmentalists primary goal is....



































Wait for it!




















Killin' Babies!

And stealin' republicans money!

 

[Gonz]

Bought a bunch. Put 'em in. gave 'em a year or so. Incandescent or bust.

I'm all for choice. If you chose to purchase CFL's to light your home or office, great. I no longer have use for them. My choice.

So far, there's one big money maker from the green movement...General Electric. Hey, don't they own radio, TV & print?

 

[Altron]

Bought a bunch. Put 'em in. gave 'em a year or so. Incandescent or bust.

I'm all for choice. If you chose to purchase CFL's to light your home or office, great. I no longer have use for them. My choice.

So far, there's one big money maker from the green movement...General Electric. Hey, don't they own radio, TV & print?

Was it CRI that did it? Colors of stuff don't seem right under them? Just curious... I use CFLs, I don't really mind losing the CRI in most situations. I like being high-tech I guess, lol, since I usually live in a dorm where I don't even have to pay for electricity.

 

[Winky]

I love it the kid goes off and
Mark wouldn't know the difference between
Bremsstrahlung radiation or a Thermionic emission.

Personally I still use a Halogen light here on my computer desk.
Due to the issues with CRI, blower boy mentioned.

I would love to replace it with the light source he eluded too
but it isn’t yet feasible?
I swapped over to CFL’s years ago in every application I
could years and years ago.

My wife and I have had a running joke for years about the
"light bulb aisle" I love light sources.

CFL's are awesome in everyway (with the exception noted by the kid)
The danged things last forever compared to regular incandescent bulbs
and use SO much less electricity. What with the ever escalating electricity
costs and the absolute needs to power the life support system (aka A/C unit)
during the summer I couldn’t give a rats ass about carbon emissions
or how much Hg ends up in a landfill, I want my fricken power bill to stop
going up and up and up during a depression!

If the government wants to poke its nose into our light sockets
it should be pushing SSL's

No Mark, the government has any right what so ever to tell the American
people what kind of God Damned light bulbs to screw in it’s sockets!

So Kid, are there any regular E27 socket bulbs yet?

 

[Gonz]

Didn't notice a problem with colors, it's just that the light seems insufficient (none of them wimpy assed 13w bulbs either). My eyes bothered me after hours of wintertime indoor lighting. I put a couple of incandescents back in & the problem disappeared.

Mark wouldn't know the difference between
Bremsstrahlung radiation or a Thermionic emission

Huh?

 

[Altron]

LEDs take away many of the drawbacks of gas arc tubes. They're cheap to produce, don't require a step-up transformer, don't contain any toxic elements, and use less energy. They have a better service life, and can be made very compact. However, they still have the problem with CRI. However, I think it would be possible to improve CRI by using a variety of LEDs in a single fixture, which would be used for people who are bothered by low CRI. If, instead of a dozen white LEDs, you used 3 red, 3 yellow, 3 green, and 3 blue LEDs, you'd get about the same color light, but with a much better CRI.

Right now the biggest obstacle is just cost of manufacturing.

 

[Professur]

I've got one neat LED bulb, that actually shifts colours, or you can set it for any particular colour you prefer.

 

[MrBishop]

Still no 'daylight bulbs' for LED or Neon/Halogen

I've switched over most of my household bulbs... they do a good job in reducing heat in the summer...beyond that, I'm not seeing the price of my electricity go down a large amount, as promised.

 

[Professur]

Still no 'daylight bulbs' for LED or Neon/Halogen

I've switched over most of my household bulbs... they do a good job in reducing heat in the summer...beyond that, I'm not seeing the price of my electricity go down a large amount, as promised.

Nor will you. At the consumer level, you'd be lucky to break even over the life of the bulb. All the power consumed by lights in a common house would barely add up to the daily consumption of your dryer or oven. Add in equalized payments with winter heating, and it's beyond a joke.

But at the level of an entire city .....

but then, turning off some city lights would save far more in the long run. Stop projecting lights up the side of empty buildings, perhaps.

 

[Frodo]

Yep, the Demonicrats strike again. I will say what I say to all liberals...Get f_ck out of my house!!

These bulbs are true crap. Trying to read by them is almost impossible. On the other hand, I hear mercury makes great fertilizer.

 

[Gonz]

SAVE UP TO 30% over conventional bulbs*

*over the life of the bulb

So, take a 10,000 hour bulb & divide the savings...a whopping four or five cent over 2 years.

 

[Winky]

Osama saves economy!

What you see before you is a masterpiece of deception.