Don't be so sure these days. I've managed to buy golf ball bulbs only slightly larger than incandescent ones. They are half the size of an incandescent GLS.
Many bulbs are fine these days. The main problem is that it is a bit hit and miss when you buy a bulb. Some are excellent. Some are dire. Some sort of labelling about light quality could seriously help here. Perhaps as well as the A-G scale for energy efficiency, they could institute an A-G scale for spectrum quality.
Christian.
Perhaps that is because of lack of insulation. All the houses I have run have had electricity consumption and gas consumption at a similar cost. I don't recognise the heating being considerably more than electricity.
Christian.
It may well be: you are certainly the exception, not the rule.
I think this is true of modern urban terraced/flat or semi-d type houses..but a larger detached house has a lot more exposed wall per unit floor area. whereas for a given floor area lighting requirements remain more or less constant.
You might say that that is a recipe to insist that all housing should be built in terraced or tower block form...;-)
..OTOH urban STREET LIGHTING is a HUGE waste of power - a fact that some councils have twigged to.
31.5 Ms in a year, not 3, so about 6 watts equivalent. 6 W thingy
But I bet there's a wall-wart associated with it that consumes more than 3W on standby :-(
So, say an average mileage of 12000 miles is equivalent to having 600W of lighting on all year. Some people use over 500W in a single room with halogen downlighters. If you have them in every room, you could well emit more CO2 from your lighting alone in one year than driving for 12,000 miles.
Even a more typical setup of 500W of halogen in the kitchen and an average of 150W in other rooms (some 100W incandescent and some halogen) could easily eat up a good 3-6000 miles worth of CO2 annually.
Christian.
Apologies. Miscounted the 0's.
Still at an average duty cycle of say 10%..Which is probably what lightbulbs actually get...;)
Actually no. The following article suggests that on a global scale, lighting alone emits the same CO2 as two thirds of cars. It is well worth tackling.
Christian.
Light's Labour's Lost -- Policies for Energy-efficient Lighting, 560 pages, ISBN 92-64-10951-X, paper ?100, PDF ?80 (2006) Type: Studies Subject: Climate Change ; CO2 Emissions ; Electricity ; Energy Efficiency ; Energy Policy ; Energy Projections ; G8 When William Shakepeare wrote Love's Labour's Lost he would have used light from tallow candles at a cost (today) of £12,000 per million-lumen hours. The same amount of light from electric lamps now costs only £2! But today's low-cost illumination still has a dark side. Globally, lighting consumes more electricity than is produced by either hydro or nuclear power and results in CO2 emissions equivalent to two thirds of the world's cars.
A standard incandescent lamp may be much more efficient than a tallow candle, but it is far less efficient than a high-pressure sodium lamp. Were inefficient light sources to be replaced by the equivalent efficient ones, global lighting energy demand would be up to 40% less at a lower overall cost. Larger savings still could be realised through the intelligent use of controls, lighting levels and daylight.
But achieving efficient lighting is not just a question of technology; it requires policies to transform current practice. This book documents the broad range of policy measures to stimulate efficient lighting that have already been implemented around the world and suggests new ways these could be strengthened to prevent light's labour's from being lost.
Actually NOT.
In fact it is a watt on standby.
And not that expensive either.
Assuming you had the lot on all the time. Which of course you do not.
Assumong that the ancillary energy requirements of your car - the energy into new tyres, brake pads and the like - is zero. Which of course they are not.
My biggests room - the kitchen . 35 sq meters - has precisely 9 50W spots in it. And three 40W candles. All on three separate dimmed circuits. 570W in total.
I think I would have noticed if the electricity consumption had trebled...the fact is they get at best about 4 hours of usage per day - more in winter, less in summer.
Let's say I could knock those down to 120W - saving on average 350W *
365 *4 or 500 KWh. If I could get dimmable CFL spots I certainly would consider it..but what am I saving..£50 a year. ONE tankful of diesel. In mioney terms.Or in carbon terms about 100 litres of fuel...
Great. When I used to work and commute, that would have lasted me precisely three days in the car..
but that only shows the problem - that there is a very wide spectrum of opinion on where that point lies.
I expect it would work that way. Its a lot of extra costs running the taxation system though, and would only alienate the end consumers. I'd much rather see the poor light quality of some cfls issue addressed, which is their prime problem. And the misleading power equivalance figures. And tip to base dimension labelling. This approach would satisfy what consumers want and avoid the extra costs of taxation.
Once again _not_ nannying forces one to look at actually solving the problem, which is surely a far better option.
Yes. But... Part P was believed at the time by the govt to be a measure that would prevent adverse effects on people. My point was that a) whenever one body regulates others, it will make mistakes. b) in practice its level of comprehension may be so poor that it is simply disruptive and counterproductive.
This is just one more argument against governments fiddling with the minutiae of peoples lives, because they arent really competent to do so.
NT
I'm not sure they are that misleading. It is just that they take a few minutes to warm up.
Christian.
Note that replacing _working_ CRT monitors with LCDs is counterproductive energywise. Although it reduces electricity use, the money cost and energy cost of buying the monitor are never paid back by these reductions. So those of us with an army of CRTs should ideally keep them.
yes, pc psus are so inefficient because its slightly cheaper that way. Laptops underclock CPUs to reduce energy use, but in desktops consumers just want faster, they dont ask about energy figures when buying. Labelling with typical anual energy use & cost might swing a few sales to more efficient machines.
NT
I understand, but I dont think that makes it logical to recommend any halogens.
no, if you want task lighting, put the lighting where the task is and use some flavour of fluorescent. Halogen is not a good choice.
I cant help but notice that when people talk about LED lighting its always 'will'. 'Will' means 'doesnt.' LEDs simply do not compare well to anything for normal domestic lighting. They are niche products only, the rest is just hype.
But that is a self contradiction. High production cost equals a lot of energy input in production, making the thing not so energy efficient after all. High purchase price means again it does not compete cost wise. LEDs are simply not on a par with cfls, and never have been. Flourescent technology has been the winner for general lighting for many decades, and still is.
Its just as possible that LEDs will never get there. They never have so far, and LED technology has been around for decades. But what really counts is theyre not there today - and never have been.
We can specualte about the future gains in LED technology, but other technologies also advance over time, and have always won over LEDs to date. LEDs have their place, but it isnt for general lighting. To illuminate the picture, just look at a graph of efficacy versus year for LEDs and flourescent from the 1930s to today. LED is way behind.
NT
Because laptops are designed to do this otherwise battery life would be really bad.
PCs are a collection of interchangeable components made by manufacturers who simply want to make money.
To make a low power machine you can't use these intgerchangeable components and you shouldn't use anything x86, which is an environmental and technical disaster area. A mac mini uses 20-30W I believe.
You can compare Apples and Apples when you see that Apple stopped mentioning laptop battery life since the switch to Intel.
Jon
Haitz law says that LED brightness doubles ~every 2 years and in fact it's getting quicker than that. LED products are already in the market place in niche areas such as architectural lighting and signalling. Also they are getting pushed into larger and larger LCDs as a result of regulation. In the automotive area the drive to remove mercury is now quite serious and the EU and other regulatory bodies are able to skew normal market economics resulting in earlier tipping points. One of the big reasons LEDs don't compete is that the volumes are too small AND the companies producing them are still working on high margins. This is not sustainable as Taiwan and China (who generally care less about intellectual property) move into the market prices will drop significantly. At the moment ~1/2 the cost of a white LED is license fees for other peoples patents. This means you're total energy market is not as accurate as you might think although clearly lawyers do generate lots of hot air.
The other thing you're wrong or at least over egging is improvements in fluorescent technology. There has been very little improvement in CCFL over the last 20 years and newer developments like HCFL and EEFL are not more efficient they just offer control benefits around things like dimming and flashing which are not important for general lighting.
Cheers
Fash
Absolutely. Anything that could be done to dispense with those hideous sodium and mercury vapour lights would be superb.
Er. If you had the whole lot on all the time, it would be far worse.
The 3000 mile figure was using the 10% duty cycle that Nat Phil suggested. Certainly not 100%.
Well, the house has considerable energy input into cement, plaster, paint, even wood. What is your point?
Perhaps you were commuting more than average? Perhaps your car was obscenely wasteful. My Peugeot 107 would go 450 miles on 33 litres of fuel. Were you commuting 225 miles a day? Were you driving a wasteful car? Could at least some commuting be done using telecommunications?
Christian.
Whoops. I mean 150 miles a day.
Christian.
It actually isn't bad - MacBook Pro seems to be quite a bit better than nearest equivalent PC hardware. Part of it seems to be that MacOS X does a much better power management job than the Redmond Rubbish.
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