One time I dropped a CFL in my parents bathroom, trying to change the over head light. It broke, of course. I was going to sweep it up with a dust pan, Mom got there first with the vacuum cleaner. I quipped to my Dad that all that air flow over the mercury bulb, we're all going to die.
But a strip of low wattage LEDs in a "light bar" makes sense because they can tolerate a few failures before the total light output becomes too dim to be useable. Mount them in standard packages that can draw power from a fluorescent ballast . . . Hey, off to the patent office you go!
I have been thinking about replacing the 48" shoplights in the basement. My wife says they flicker but I do like the nice, even diffuse light they produce even if it seems I am replacing ballast all the damn time.
I had a bottle of it - weighed a few pounds. Enough to float small, improbable objects on it. Good for shining pennies as Lowrider reports, pushed my finger in it a lot and my kids are perfectly non-existent. (-:
I believe the real issue is that when it's vaporized and inhaled (not sure if breathing the white phospor dust does it) it's pretty nasty. So never stand under a CFL that's about to fail with your mouth open.
They know. I read a study about the spread of mercury and they concluded that it ends up mostly in the very bottoms of waste trucks and in the sumps of waste transfer stations. Then it gets into the water and works its way up to the top predator. What I remember most about mercury is Minimata and those disturbing photographs. I am quite glad that CFL's probably won't be around much longer because LED bulbs are almost always going to be cheaper to make - no mazes of twisty glass spiral, all alike. (Remember Adventure?)
No doubt whatsoever. In the trailer for "Black Mass" about Whitey Bolger he says: "If nobody saw it, it didn't happen." I know in NY and NJ that principle governs much of the waste industry. Even my dog lives by the same principle.
Well, the press has to whip up a frenzy about everything. It's clearly high on their list of job priorities.
There are actually direct drop-in LED tubes that can replace fluorescent lamps without rewiring. Of course I first found out about them when the CPSC announced a recall of them..
Yes, they still work through the ballast. And yes, I get very painful headaches in visualizing how this works.
More common is a two or four fott LED tube which fits in the fluorescent fixture, BUT where it's hooked up directly to the 120V (in US) AC line. In other words, you disconnect the ballast and run the utility wires directly to the lamp holder clips at each end.
Roughly twice as efficient as the fluorescent system (i.e. half the wattage for the same light) AND they work fine in the cold.
NOTE: this is actually a great format for LEDs. The Big Problem with getting a decent amount of light from them is heat buildup. Even though they're much more efficient than incandescent, they still produce heat... so anything above the equivalent of a 40 watt incendescen - 8 or so watt LED, requires heat fins and venting and painful annoyances.
If instead of using the incandescent lamp form factor you (the manufacturer...) goes for two foot tubes, the heat is disspiated over a much larger area, so you can pump in more watts and get more light.
The LED quivlant of a twin-40 sells for 30 or so dollars. Well worth it.
These are already available -- the economical version requires rewiring the fixture to remove the ballast.
But, LED's are directional devices. The fluorescent tubes are inherently omnidirectional -- counting on any reflector to direct the light (as well as start the bulb)
In our case, the bulbs fail quickly. They just aren't intended to be cycled on and off as often as these. Turn them on for an hour at a time and they'll last much longer than turning them on for
15 seconds 10 times in that hour! :<
I prefer bringing light directly to my "task" area. E.g., inspection lamps right *at* my work area instead of overhead lights that try to cover it all.
OK, Don, cancel the trip to the Patent Office. )-:
Hmm. After I wrote that message I started thinking about just how you would power LEDs from the fluorescent ballast. I'll have to look that up because I am very interested in switching to LEDs entirely. Even though shoplight bulbs are cheap, they still contain mercury and even though much of the mercury in the ocean comes from Chinese and Indian coal-fired power plants, every little bit that doesn't sneak in some how has to help.
I could do that, I've changed enough failed ballasts that it would be a piece of cake.
Sold and Double SOLD! Thanks very much for the pointer. I'll report back on what I find.
Precisely. I took an old piece of shelving, spaced out 5 porcelain flush mount sockets and wired it so that it generally lit up the same area but it still wasn't as diffuse as a fluorescent tube.
My friend in AZ has been struggling for years trying to find reliable LED path lighting and heat dissipation is indeed a serious problem for LEDs. I wonder if we'll ever have truly "cold" light that radiates just visible light and very little heat.
Not hardly. Once upon a time there was the Montana Power Company and its rates were close to the co-ops. Then in the '90s a Republican state administration decided deregulation was a tenet of free trade capitalism that would lower rates for all. MPC promptly sold their holding to out of state interests and reinvented themselves as a telecommunications company. They were just in time to catch the dot.com bubble as it burst and filed Chapter 11 in 2003. Meanwhile the co-op locked in long term contracts with the BPA and maintained their rates with minimal increases in the last 20 years.
Small businesses and residential users had to suck it up as their MPC power bills doubled or tripled. Large companies like the aluminum smelters and paper mills that depended on inexpensive electricity shutdown, losing jobs and revenue for the state. Let's hear it for deregulation!
The governor that brought the disaster on went on to become chairman of the RNC and was Bush's butt buddy, going on to a lucrative career as a lobbyist.
I do speak seven languages; nobody understands five of them but what the hell.
Repairs over the decades have replaced it all with composite or crowns but I spent a good deal of my life with a mouthful of mercury amalgam. The mercury was inert and never leached out of the amalgam; honest.
Then there is all the fish I eat. The pike have enough mercury you could nail them to the barn door and use them for a thermometer.
Oh, and I chewed the lead paint off the brightly colored beads on my stroller.
don't misunderstand; I sort of a tree hugger and support cleaning up the environment but there's also an inordinate level of panic and paranoia used to nudge the sheep in the desired direction.
I've wondered about those twisty spirals. The company also produced the helical flashtubes for strobe like the animation towards the bottom of the page:
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They were all hand blown. Glass blowing was considered one of the plum jobs and most of the girls, er, women, wanted to try out for it. Some got it, most didn't. It was one of those things where you just had to know when the glass was ready to bend and how much pressure to keep on the tube so it wouldn't collapse.
Knowing that, I can envisions factories packed with young Chinese women sitting in front of burners twisting spirals and the odd glass swan when the boss isn't looking.
because its composition is very much like Michaelangelo's "Pieta" (the cruxified Jesus held in the arms of his mother Mary).
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Photographer Eugene Smith was beaten and partially blinded by company goons for taking the photos that finally exposed the Chisso Company's pollution. When Smith died the copyright of this very famous photo passed to his wife who returned the rights to the family according to their wishes. They wanted no further publication of the photo of their daughter, who died at age 21. The small copies that still exist (nothing ever vanishes from the Internet!) really don't capture the impact of Tomoko's blind eyes staring into space.
Naw, I've got this PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE that I'm convinced is going to revolutionize modern industry! It works on the same principle as Escher's "Waterfall" -- but 37.4% more efficient!!
It's not really practical. The ballast runs at many hundreds of volts with very low current. So, you're taking something that was autotransformed
*up* and now trying to bring it back *down*. Conversion == losses.
I decided that it wasn't going to be worth the effort to salvage a cheap fluorescent fixture!
I have 6 or 8 "retractable cord reels" (?) that I plan on installing on the garage ceiling. This would allow me to "pull an outlet down" wherever I need one (the walls are inaccessible as they are lined, floor to ceiling, with industrial shelving).
I figure, at that time, I'll install some new fixtures alongside each of the cord reels and make *one* big remodeling mess instead of *two*!
You just have to remember not to put a regular fluorescent lamp in there, thereafter!
You can use a diffuser in front of the lamps. But, to be effective, the diffuser has to be set apart from the lamps -- cutting down on your usable space. It's my garage lighting problem, again: need point sources to be high up (to throw light more uniformly without requiring a multitude of fixtures). But, then they need to be *brighter*...
E.g., we have 8 ceiling fixtures in the living room that bathe the room pretty uniformly. The ceiling is only slightly higher than nominal (floor is actually lower). Had the ceiling been 12 ft or more, the lights would have been ineffective. You'd need far brighter ones (for the same spacing) -- and then would burn your retinas each time you happened to glance up at one!
[This is one of my pet peeves against LED point lighting. My eyes don't "recover" like they did when I was younger]
We've (AZ) not had any problem with the token path lighting ("landscape lighting") fixtures, here. Light is a slightly different color...
Heat is proportional to voltage across the lamp and current through it. You need "power" to make light. The question is: how much power to make how much light?
[I suspect there are some chemical lights that run cool. But, probably not "rechargeable"]
I had a CFL that looked pretty much like a small incandescent bulb. Then I broke the glass and found there was a twisty spiral inside.
Wow. If I leave that part of the page showing, is it still animated while I'm looking at another window? What if I scroll up a page so it's not showing. Is it still using computer cycles?
Not blowing but bending, we did a tiny bit of in high school chemistry. Just straight tubes bent to an angle. It was fun. Blowing would be a lot harder, especially starting from just a blob.
Lead paint is a real issue. Other than that I agree with you.
And it goes the other way too. In maryland the director of housing for the state suggested that mothes would feed lead weights to their chilren to raise the lead level in their blood so they could get a a money judgement from landlords. I don't think any of the mothers had thought of this, partly because I dont' think it woud work.
China had to dismantle their hodge-podge of lead acid battery makers amd form them into an organized consortium because lead poisoning had gotten completely out of control in several districts. Looks like China's not quite got the hang of environmental protection.
Japan has a pretty unique history of ignoring the obvious (like they had already lost the war in mid 1945). Especially if "saving face" is involved. (They're still pissing off China re: WWII issues.)
They know that Tokyo Bay is ringed with chemical factories and huge storage tanks that will likely rupture in a big enough quake. They also know when those ruptured tanks spill into the Bay, it's going to create a toxic stew as great as any the world has ever seen since primordial earth. They even have a name for all those tanks ringing the bay ("The Poison Necklace").
I believe they're still arguing about who's going to pay to quake proof some of the nastiest chemical vessels (if that's even possible). Ironically, they're turning their nukes back on. What's one little accident, anyway?
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