It's not that bad - maybe 1/3 of what it costs to produce the heat, give or take, depending on efficiency of your A/C and how much hotter it is outside than inside.
True, with exception of the amount escaping your house as light (and as optical band infrared) - normally a very small percentage.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
I would expect the energy consumption for that part is in the "end of life" part, which when combined with manufacturing and transportation amounts to 2% of total life cycle energy usage (assuming the CFL lasts
10,000 hours, 4% if it lasts 5,000 hours).I would think that the mercury gets recovered and everything else gets landfilled, especially if they are using lead-free solder.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
A fridge light is normally on for so little time that it does not make sense to spend a lot of money on a more energy-efficient replacement.
Meanwhile, I would not put CFLs in a fridge due to the cold, long warmup time, and the fact that most CFLs have starting-related wear and shorter operating life when on-time per start is so short.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
I, Don Klipstein, need to correct my cost-per-1,000 hour figures for CFLs, since I erred in a way unfavorable to CFLs.
It turns out I don't always do math well when my stomach is empty and I smell dinner cooking.
The CFL cost figures below are correct if the CFLs last 1,000 hours instead of 4,500 hours. The correct figures if they last 4,500 hours are $3.50 per 1,000 hours less. The incandescent figures below are still correct.
In , I, Don Klipstein wrote in part:
I should have said $2.43 per 1,000 hours.
I should have said $2.98 per 1,000 hours.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Brilliant, (blast, didn't mean a pun), but to thank you for the correction.
An aspect that I have not seen any maths for is the amount of mercury that has to be recovered/ disposed/lost through broken lamps compared to the amount of mercury that would be emitted into the atmosphere through combustion of coal for use of candescents.
On 8/26/2009 3:06 PM Don Klipstein spake thus:
That's certainly at odds with at least the impression one gets from the reports one sees on TV from time to time, touting how "responsible" recyclers are now recovering the materials from such things as discarded electronics, rather than shipping them overseas and letting 7-year-old barefoot children pick them apart in a junkyard.
I would have thought that the electronics would get ground up and then reclaimed, at least to some extent. Wouldn't it be just wasteful to put all those metals back into the landfill?
Then again, maybe I was being naive.
I know.... you are right
I'm just an "optimizer" by nature and cant help myself!
But....... if there are 400 million people in the USA and say 100 million homes.... and if we save just ONE watt in the fridge bulb.... that is 100 million watts saved!!
I'm the same.
I thought it was below 300m, so a few less watts saved!
snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net wrote: ...
Only for the minute fractional portion of time the bulb is actually on which is, indeed, a quite small fraction--say 5 minutes would be extremely high value for a day. 5min/24hr-->0.35% --> your optimism gets down to where it's only something otoo 350 kW which wouldn't even be detectable in the overall grid.
Conservation is fine but some things are so minuscule as to be unworthy of fooling with or worrying over.
Thanks. I enjoy irritating progressives.
..
Acturally that is what is happening. The market place will, in time come to a decision. Right now it is too ealry to come to a decision, but we have millions of people working on it. In time they will decide.
It is much the same as the early days of the automobile. They had gasoline, electric, steam etc. In time the gasoline engine became the winner. Today that we are relooking at the auto industry and maybe we will come up with a different answer this time, but as we may come up with a different answer back when the early light bulbs were competing with gas and oil lights.
It gets corrupted from time to time, but in the end the market place usually comes up with the right answer to this kind of question.
Still tho....
It seems like a great place to use an LED lamp!!
And easy to retrofit if such an LED lamp was available!
I told ya..... I cant help myself . Ha!
Yeah..... except healthcare
It would if the government would stay out of it. Most of the healthcare concerns trace back to tax policies that (1). tie insurance to the work place and (2). lead to you and me only paying (on average) out of pocket only about 20% of the costs. We really should TRY free market before we dis it.
Average CFL has 3.5-4 milligrams of mercury. If you take your dead ones to Home Depot or any recycling dropoff point recommended by
I saw one cite saying 24% of CFLs are properly disposed of. It is an EPA document giving numbers that I consider a bit optimistic for amount of mercury in CFLs and how much mercury emissions from coal they prevent:
Meanwhile, suppose as a less favorable example replaceing a 60 watt incandescent with an 18 watt CFL that lasts 4500 hours. That saves 189 kilowatt-hours.
Replacing 100 incandescents with CFLs should on average prevent emission of more mercury than the CFLs contain, and with 75 watt ones it is on average a close call. Replacing 60 watt incandescents should reduce net mercury introduction to the environment if the recycling rate improves from 24% or if national average life expectancy improves to 5300-6000 hours (likely soon).
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
You make an excellent point about equivalence. That is, if we have already accepted the amount of Mercury in the environment emitted from power plants, then there is no need for hand-wringing, or even a discussion, about the equivalent amount from CFLs.
I agree with Bub , we should shoot anybody that needs to "study" this. The facts have been here years. 20+ years ago I started my push to replace incandesants with T8, those incandesant "Electric Heaters" that put out visable light as an offshoot are a waste. Now just go down to your local hardware store today and buy some Cfls, it wont hurt you, it doesnt need anymore studying, its been done.
Thanks for those links. made interesting reading. In summary it would appear that upping the recycling rate and emission controls on coal fired power stations in 2018 will be the key to reducing Hg emissions.
You know there is a chance, a very remote one perhaps, that inefficient incandescent bulbs used inside a fridge (a mere convenince any way) are a wasteful use of electricty? After all the heat from the bulb has to pumped out of the fridge interior to restore the temperature each time after the door has been opened and the light has operated for a few seconds. IF one watt per bulb could be saved some calculations show .................. Fridge opened say twice per hour for 12 hours per day =3D 24 openings. Average length of each door open =3D 15 seconds. Daily total door open and light on time =3D 24 x 15 seconds =3D 6 minutes. Use of bulb using one watt less power Kilowatt hours saved 1 x 6/60 (one tenth of one hour) divided by 1000 =3D 0.0001 kilowatt hours/day. Per year 365 x 0.0001 =3D 0.0365 kilowatt hours per year. If electricity costs 10 cents per kw.hr electrcity cost saved per year =3D 0.0365 x 0.1 =3D one third of one cent per year. Ah yes but we have to pump that much less heat out of the fridge, so halve the saving? And the light goes off, or so we are told, when the door closes? And every time the fridge door opens cold air spills out and some warmer air enters that has to be re-chilled. Hey! This seems to getting rather pointless? There MUST be other reductions in electrcity consumption that make more sense nation wide etc. and are more effective. For example I left the light on over the front door for over a hour longer this morning (just forgot about it!) that probably cost me (electrcity consumption) one half a cent; tut tut. I suppose I could install a light sensitive fixture and have it turn itself off. But that fixture would cost me around $15 to $20. And that can buy a lot of relatively clean hydro powered electrcity! And such fixtures do involve electronics that may or not be recycled safely when the fixture breaks down which it will inevitably do? And hydro power is pretty reliable; provided climate change doesn't bugger up water flows. Burning say coal doesn't make any sense at all. Big additional hydro development in Labrador Canada (if and when it gets off the ground, in a manner of speaking) that will be capable of providing clean power to New England states etc.
I expect it depends on where the lamps are being recycled. There are certainly some very sophisticated recycling operations that grind everything up and then do an automated sort of the different component materials.
Whether a particular lamp dropped off for recycling makes it to one of those operations, probably depends on location. Of course most people just dispose of the lamps in the regular garbage stream, so then it depends on what post collection sorting operation is in place.
On that last part, yes it is naive to think that much of any of these recycling efforts makes any real difference. Some of the stuff we have been recycling for the longest time such as glass is a net negative environmentally to recycle, but it makes folks who don't look at the details feel better.
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