LED, Fluorescent, Incandescent?

What are your lighting plans?

  • I will stick with incandescent forever even if I have to buy them from Canada.

    Votes: 7 8.0%

  • I am switching to fluorescent now even though they're hazardous.

    Votes: 31 35.2%

  • I will switch to fluorescent later.

    Votes: 5 5.7%

  • I am switching to LED lighting now.

    Votes: 10 11.4%

  • I will switch to LED lighting in a few years as they improve.

    Votes: 40 45.5%

  • The government sucks.

    Votes: 18 20.5%

  • On planet X, all light has been banned except for burning cow pies.

    Votes: 18 20.5%
  • Total voters
    88
I think it's a conspiracy to force people to misspell all these lighting technologies by making them all really difficult to spell. That makes everyone feel dumb and makes them more submissive - just like chemtrails and immunizations. :-P
 
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Re the right-wing "The Government is Trying to Poison Us on the orders of Al Gore" circle-jerk behind the anti-CFL propaganda, it's worth checking this Snopes page. In sum, the whole "you have to call in a HAZMAT team whenever you break a bulb" story is nonsense.
 
People probably got the hazmat issue confused with mercury thermometer spills whose instructions for cleanup are on the same page I cited in the OP: "Contact your local health department, municipal waste authority or your local fire department for proper disposal in accordance with local, state and federal laws." And then if you spill more than 2 tablespoons (uh, a lot more than a CFL or a thermometer, but still...), "it is mandatory to call the National Response Center (NRC)"

Even if you don't have to call hazmat, the EPA's bulb break cleanup instructions in the link in the OP are pretty amazing - I don't want that crap near my children.
 
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It might be interesting to investigate the supply side of mercury. The vast majority of mercury is a byproduct of the mining industry. Before the 90's, about 6000 tons/yr came from mining but in 1991 that suddenly dropped in half and has continued to drop ever sense. The amount of mining hasn't decreased so that means all the mercury that used to be recovered and removed from the environment is now left behind in the tailings. Is this the result of the environmental movement to block the commercial use of mercury?
 
rcronk said:
People probably got the hazmat issue confused with mercury thermometer spills whose instructions for cleanup are on the same page I cited in the OP: "Contact your local health department, municipal waste authority or your local fire department for proper disposal in accordance with local, state and federal laws."
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Why though? The process is really simple. Bring the thermometer to the dump.
Even if you don't have to call hazmat, the EPA's bulb break cleanup instructions in the link in the OP are pretty amazing - I don't want that crap near my children.
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Your kids eat more mercury than what is in the light bulb. The only reason why those rules are there is not because of health concerns more than it's tantamount to chucking your car batteries into the garbage. It's a dumb idea because it will cause problems with the environment.
Either that or I have been very unlucky. I installed 5 CFLs in my basement / workshop about 2 years ago. One was DOA, and 2 have died in that time period. These are major brand: Sylvania not the cheap ones that I gave up on a long time ago. I have had better luck with the 48 in fluorescent tubes, they don't fail completely, but they seem to lose light output over time.
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The most logical explanation is that the mercury in the light bulbs is decreasing. Nowadays most cfls fail because of the lack of the mercury to fuel the cfl.
 
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technoextreme said:
Why though? The process is really simple. Bring the thermometer to the dump.

Your kids eat more mercury than what is in the light bulb. The only reason why those rules are there is not because of health concerns more than it's tantamount to chucking your car batteries into the garbage. It's a dumb idea because it will cause problems with the environment.
The most logical explanation is that the mercury in the light bulbs is decreasing. Nowadays most cfls fail because of the lack of the mercury to fuel the cfl.
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I guess the "why" would deal with wanting to obey the law or something.

Please post your sources for the claim that my kids "eat more mercury than what is in the light bulb."
 
A pound of Mercury is around two tablespoons. The stuff is dense. So you have to call in if you spill over 1 pound of Hg. Gee.

A small medical thermometer has far more mercury than a hundred cfls. This explains the more intense procedures.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I guess everyone's talking strictly about household lighting and not other applications.

I use a number of different illuminated juggling props. For a long time I used this lighted wire stuff. It's a central wire coated with phosphorus surrounded by a spiral of two extraordinarily thin wires. You pass an alternating current from the thin wires to the central wire and the phosphorus lights up like a TV screen. I used those for a long time, but they were heavy (batteries PLUS a voltage inverter), and the solders on the thin wires were extremely fragile.
... .
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I saw a "human-powered" remote control somewhere on Instructables.com. You simply had to shake it to build up the charge so you could use it. Seems like the process of juggling might do the same thing? (Although it might add some weight to the props.)
 
No option for already using fluorescent tubes? I can't stand the yellow lighting from incandescents and went and got myself some (not compact)fluorescent tubes with 5800 K colour temperature(i.e. slightly bluish, daylight).

El Greco said:
Halogen lights simply suck. Too much heat and they burn out too quickly.
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They last longer than incandescents and they're a good bit more efficient. They can be turned on and off as much as you like without problem(unlike flourescents), which makes them good for bathrooms, garages, storage rooms etc.
 
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That's impressive. I wonder if a light can be TOO bright for home use. There has to be a point where it actually becomes a risk to eyesight.
 
Soapy Sam said:
That's impressive. I wonder if a light can be TOO bright for home use. There has to be a point where it actually becomes a risk to eyesight.
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It's primarily the UV that does the majority damage. If there's no UV, then it would have to be extraordinarily bright to cause damage. Pretty close to full sunlight bright. At the the point where it could cause damage, it'd be extremely difficult to look at for more than short periods without causing actual pain.
 
Soapy Sam said:
That's impressive. I wonder if a light can be TOO bright for home use. There has to be a point where it actually becomes a risk to eyesight.
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There are two possible problems that I can think of in relation to this. First is that it's too much of a "point source", and that the surface brightness would be so high that it could cause eye damage. However, diffusers could take care of that.

The other possibility is that the device output can't be scaled down much further than what they showed. At 250 watts and 140 lumens/watt, you get 35,000 lumens, which is huge compared to a typical incandescent at around 1500 lumens. One solution here is to have a single light source for the whole house and pipe the light around as needed with fiber optics or something. That's not a great solution since there's not much fine-grained control, but given the efficiency it might work out ok.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
Dr. Trintignant said:
The other possibility is that the device output can't be scaled down much further than what they showed. At 250 watts and 140 lumens/watt, you get 35,000 lumens, which is huge compared to a typical incandescent at around 1500 lumens. One solution here is to have a single light source for the whole house and pipe the light around as needed with fiber optics or something. That's not a great solution since there's not much fine-grained control, but given the efficiency it might work out ok.

- Dr. Trintignant
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If it can't be scaled down any further, it's pretty much useless for home use. The whole point of modern development in lighting has been to reduce energy use and waste. We've gone from using 60-100W bulbs to using just a few Watts, and it should get even lower with LEDs. Replacing these with 250W lights really wouldn't help matters.
 
Cuddles said:
If it can't be scaled down any further, it's pretty much useless for home use. The whole point of modern development in lighting has been to reduce energy use and waste. We've gone from using 60-100W bulbs to using just a few Watts, and it should get even lower with LEDs. Replacing these with 250W lights really wouldn't help matters.
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The point is that you could have a single 250 W bulb for the entire house, and pipe the light around as needed--similar to central heating or air conditioning. Perhaps that is still too much light for a small apartment, but my 2-bed condo easily has 250 W worth of compact fluorescents on at night. Even if I couldn't decrease the total wattage, I would gladly take the increased light output and superior color spectrum. In fact, given my electricity prices, 250 W is just about at the point where I stop caring about costs and focus my attention on other effects.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
soylent said:
Many if not most people are used to their 3000 K spectrum and prefer their lighting to be yellow.
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Then they can put ugly yellow shades on their lights--it'll still be more efficient :).

It's hard to see how anyone could not prefer a ~6000 K spectrum after a small adjustment period. After all, our eyes evolved under daylight. I'd be surprised if there's even been any significant evolution since man's control over fire.

One thought is that our interior color schemes might be tuned for 3000 K lighting and not look so good at 6000 K, but they seem to look fine during the day, right?

Do recall that the color temperatures reported on fluorescent lights are not exactly accurate because the CRI is so low in the first place. It may be that a 4200 K light with a particular CRI looks better than a 6000 K fluorescent with a different CRI. But neither of these will come close to a true blackbody spectrum like the sun.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
But neither of these will come close to a true blackbody spectrum like the sun.
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The Sun's spectrum is not all that similar to a "black body" but it is a lot smoother than even the best fluorescents. That said, some of the higher end fluorescents have CRI's over 90 and these are pretty good. That is, the eye's cone responses with typical colored objects, is quite similar between these fluorescents and sunlight (aside from Kelvin temp).


T8's are about 5,000Kelvin and just a tad bluer than sunlight only and a tad redder than sunlight combined with clear sky and they have a CRI over 90.
 
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