Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The hybrid lightbulb

As you will no doubt have gathered by now, the evil EU has demanded that we switch to using CFL lightbulbs. People are outraged, of course; while increases in police powers, software patents and so forth can get through without anyone really knowing or caring, the government had better not mess with our beloved lightbulbs. I'm reasonably certain that more fuss was made over the CFLs than has been made over NAMA.




Why are people so annoyed? First, some people don't like to be told to do sensible things. They can take responsibility for their own actions, and it is none of the government's business if they want to drive their SUV at 200 miles an hour while smoking a cigar, drinking gin, talking on a mobile phone and updating their Facebook. This is their right as an irritating person, and it is their duty as an irritating person to lecture everyone else on how the nasty politicians are taking away their freedoms. There is nothing to be done for these people. Except possibly a government ban on suicide.

Then there are those who fear that if they drop a CFL their house will be the next Chernobyl. For whatever reason, mercury is the scary substance de jour; any amount of mercury, no matter how small (as long as it's not from fish, which may safely be ignored unless you're really paranoid), will immediately kill you and/or give your children autism.

The third group have more of a point. These are the people who are concerned by the way CFLs switch on. CFLs don't come on like those large old fluorescent tubes, with lots of flickering and clicking followed by full light; rather, they start off dim and smoothly get brighter. This is actually pretty unpleasant if you're used to normal lightbulbs.

So, here is my idea. Take a CFL. Add a small, powerful incandescent bulb, or LED bulb, or something else with a low lifespan and/or high power consumption. When the whole assembly is first turned on, both will come on such that the sum total output is equivalent to the light output of a 100W incandescent. As the CFL bit heats up, the other bit dims, until eventually it's operating on CFL alone. Light output doesn't change over the whole process. It might be tricky to match colours acceptably, and it'd add some cost, but I think people would pay a premium; the current setup really is quite annoying. I'm actually very surprised no-one has done this yet, and I can't find much reference to anyone even suggesting it.
Posted by Robert Synnott at 1:16 AM
Labels: , ,

7 comments:

  1. "The third group have more of a point. These are the people who are concerned by the way CFLs switch on."

    Mmm, that was an issue in the early going, but CFL technology has improved dramatically. My apartment is roughly 90% CFL and while yes, they do take about a minute to reach peak brightness, the first switch-on is hardly "dim". Think of it as a 60-watt bulb switching on at 90% brightness and then ramping up.

    The other amazing thing about CFLs is that you can replace incandescent (right?) bulbs with comparable CFL bulbs and end up with MORE brightness for less wattage. I don't buy brighter bulbs than "40w" because the 60w equivalent is overkill.

    Finally, DO NOT buy those "daylight equivalent" CFLs (the "bad" bulb version is GE's "Reveal" series). They cast a weird blue pall and make your home look like you've got a Stargate going in there or something.
    ReplyDelete
  2. What about the mercury in CFLs? There's no convenient way to dispose of them in many parts of the EU.

    I'm very sceptical about CFLs myself. Will it really make much difference to our electricity energy requirements? Enough to make up for all that mercury that's going to end-up in land-fill and leaching mercury into the water table?

    It seems like potentially this could be a net negative..
    ReplyDelete
  3. Apropos of nothing, how does the EU deal with "retired" thermometers?
    ReplyDelete
  4. I can't imagine that it does.

    On the mercury issue. The amount of mercury produced by the burning of coal for power greatly exceeds the amount that would be released by CFLs, even if all CFLs were sent to landfills. Of course, there's more mercury in the old-fashioned strip lights, as well. I don't see this as a huge issue.
    ReplyDelete
  5. According to this coal power accounts for 1.5kt tonnes of mercury emitted to atmosphere each year. According to various sources, CFLs contain about 4mg of mercury. According to this world production of CFLs already exceeds 2bn units/annum.

    If we presume CFL production will stabilise at higher levels than today (i.e. that we're still in early days of conversion to CFL), and that 2bn would reflect lower bound of CFLs disposed of per annum, then we can expect that CFLs will account for 8kt - that's quite a few times more mercury to be disposed of into the environment over coal power.

    Further, atmospheric dispersal very likely would result in more disperse pollution.

    Finally, CFL does not replace coal power, so the polluting effects do not cancel out - they add up.

    If we had plenty of clean, CO2-free power would we be forcing a switch to CFLs?
    ReplyDelete
  6. Err, I'm slightly assuming that the energy savings from CFLs won't be that big, obviously ;)
    ReplyDelete
  7. "If we had plenty of clean, CO2-free power would we be forcing a switch to CFLs?"

    Almost certainly not, but we _don't_...
    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)