You may well find that over the next 5 years or so that they will gradually start to need to be replaced as they begin to leak or break down.
Some people believe that the mercury can escape into the body as a cumulative poison.
I'm not sure about that, but modern filling materials are stronger and adhere better than amalgam filling material so when it comes to replacement
T i m formulated the question :
No, it was inside the actual device -usually the higher power rated devices.
Liquid mercury I believe.
Me too. I've had a couple replaced with nice modern ones in colour- matched resin because the old ones were knackered, but the rest are still slowly poisoning me :-)
Kev wrote:
As far as wasting fuel is concerned, crunch the numbers, it's easy enough.
Let's say you use 1 litre of petrol taking your tube to the dump.
But 1 litre of petrol releases 7 MJ (MegaJoules) of energy.
There are 3.6 MJ per kwh (kilowatt-hour).
So you have used approximately 2 kwh of energy going down the dump.
Your tube has burned for 5000 hours before giving up the ghost.
So the extra energy cost of taking the dead tube to the dump amounts to a cost of 2kwh divided by 5000 hours = 0.4 watts per hour of usage.
Strictly speaking, the cost is 0.4W per litre of petrol per dump trip, so if you live 2 litres away, the savings must amount to 0.8W per tube
Now, as most tubes save about 75 percent of electricity over filament bulbs, I'll leave it to you to judge whether taking dead tubes to your particular dump is worth it.
For example, if you replace a 100W filament bulb with a 20W low-consumption tube, your savings are 80W per hour. Over 5000 hours that is 400,000 watt-hours or 400 kwh.
This translates to 400 multiplied by 3.6 (kwh to MJ conversion) or
1440 MJ, which is equivalent to 1440 divided by 7 = 206 litres of petrol.So if you live nearer than 103 litres of petrol away from your dump, you will save by replacing one 100W filament bulb with a 20W fluorescent.
If even if you live in Land's End, and dump your tube in Scotland, the planet will be better off.
Lets assume 30mpg, 0.5l to get there, 0.5l to get back, means the dump is about 3 miles away I doubt many people live that close to a dump these days. In urban areas the round trip might be 30 miles, rural a 100.
Those figures don't look right 2kWhr (eh? a measure of power [energy use per unit time] not energy, joules is energy) to shift a tonne 6 miles at speed. And what about the (in)efficiency of the internal combustion engine? You may be putting 7MJ in but you don't get 7MJ at the wheels.
They're not right - the gross calorific value of petrol is ~10 kWh per litre, not 2.
I'd just put the sleeve from the new tube on the old one, then put it to one side for the next time there is another reason to go to the tip, and dispose of it then.
No need to smash it up to get it in the bin, or make a special journey.
cheers, Pete.
;-)
And (as mentioned elsewhere) most of us don't drive to the tip with just one tube.
And ignoring the fuel use pollution for a sec, wouldn't all the stuff that would have probably ended up in landfill also equal 'pollution' if we hadn't bother to filter and recycle it (or bother to dispose of it properly)?
What I often see is those folk with (typically) Merc 4X4's stacking empty 42" Plasma TV cardboard packing boxes, XBox boxes, and at least
5 bags of rubbish (each week) up against the nearest lamppost (on a Thursday night ready for a Monday collection) ;-(Maybe the one kid they drive 1 mile to school (past the recycling centre) is illergic to flat packed cardboard (there must be room in that great big vehicle surely ..?).
OTOH you see an old dear *walking* into the recycling centre with one carrier bag full of neatly torn up cardboard and one empty sherry bottle (bless) ;-)
Ho hum ..
All the best ..
T i m
You're quite right; shouldn't rely on a fading memory. Found this table on the web:
Fuel type MJ/L MJ/kg Gasoline 29.0 45 LPG 22.16 34.39 Ethanol 19.59 30.40 Methanol 22.61 14.57 Gasohol (10% ethanol + 90% gasoline) 28.06 43.54 Diesel 40.9 63.47
This means my figures were optimistic by a factor of four; so don't live further than 25 litres away from a dump if you only want to take one dead 20W bulb there.
It's interesting to note the misconception by Dave Liquorice, who you quoted. When looking at the energy balance, the energy used to move the car is irrelevant; the important thing is the energy you have to use (in the form of petrol) to get it to move, which includes all the energy losses.
After all, you are charged for the energy your low-consumption bulb uses, not just for the light output it produces. If that was the case filament bulbs would reign supreme, as you'd only be paying for their one percent light efficiency and not for the 99 percent heat.
Quite! I was looking at the energy balance for just one bulb; if you took a crateful, plus all the other junk etc in one run, it makes perfect energy sense!
It has been pointed out that one of my figures was wrong, by a factor of four. I posted a reply to that a little while ago. The break-even trip for one low-consumption bulb is now 25 litres of petrol to the dump.
Put the wrong figure down to too much sherry over the years LOL.
Quite!
What astute observations of our modern society. Cheers!
Kate
Just thinking about it, I went over to low-consumption bulbs about 25 years ago.
At the end of the first year under this new regime, my annual consumption of electricity fell by 25 percent, and the Electricity Company came round and changed my meter - perhaps they thought something was wrong with it ;-)
But I've just thrown away (down the dump) my last lamp of that era, a
25W big heavy beastie that sat unnoticed in the lounge all that time, gently lighting the corner it lived in.If it was on for 6 hours per day, that's roughly 2000 hours a year, for 25 years, = 50,000 hours of use and saving 75W per hour.
That's a total of 3.75 megawatt-hours *saved* by this one lamp alone, about £300.....
Gasp....
Kate
You can do just as well training the nippers to,
!!PUT THAT BLOODY LIGHT OUT"
In the style of Warden Hodges;))
Ta ;-)
I do think there is a (inverse proportional) link between the need to massage 'self' and responsibility to the rest of us and the environment?
The same folk who put out a whole lorry load of unsorted 'rubbish' out for the dustman are often the same who drive without seatbelts, talking on the cell phone, cut though the petrol station / bus lane and after buying 20 Rothmans leave a trail of celophane / silver foil (whatever) fluttering in the wind behind them?
And why find somewhere to park the car (truck) and walk to the fish & chip shop when you can simply park on the pavement outside or in the middle of the service road and think saying "I won't be a minute mate" or leaving the hazard flashers on makes it ok?
And emptying the ash tray on the pavement outside my house or slipping the KFC box / drink / bag under the car (rather than in the bin 4 paces away) is something the rest of us appreciate?
Oh well .. ;-(
All the best ..
T i m
Or pushing an old pram laden with empty Buckie bottles, depending on the neighbourhood ;-)
Owain
Hey, it's all recycling! ;-)
I helped a mate heave an old and broken photocopier into his skip the other day (couldn't find a home for it on Freecycle).
We were surprised a couple of days later to see it gone ;-)
All the metal stuff (rads, suspended ceiling stuff etc) he sticks down the side of the skip and that all goes too .. Pikeys have something going for them .. (a bit of recycling) and his skip doesn't fill as fast ;-)
All the best ..
T i m
It's all depending on the state of the scrap metal markets. 10 -15 years ago they wouldn't look at ferrous scrap. "Too long for our motor mate".
DG
Naw it's the weekend brain doesn't work well at the weekend with the ankle biters about. B-)
Still not convinced that comparing the energy used by the appliance with the energy used to transport when dead it is particulary useful. Indeed it just shows that saving up your waste until you have a full load is much better as the energy used is then spread over many more items.
Depends on the pressure. There hasn't been significant liquid mercury in them for years, since concerns over mercury hazards began.
One of the reasons why mercury is such a scare-story is that "mercury sniffers" are a common hand-held test device for the clueless OHS bod. With one of these you can find "mercury" traces in almost every old industrial site.
No, it was in the insulator compounds we didn't use - unless you were fooling with '60-'70s vintage VHF power transistors. It was also beryllium oxide, not beryllium metal, which is fragile and a dust hazard. The metal itself is relatively stable, so nothing like so hazardous. Old jet engines could be full of it too - watch out for those igniter harnesses.
Beryllium also turns up as a hardening alloying ingredient in some bronzes - particularly springs, relay contacts and spark-proof bronze tools. It always amuses me (I'm sick like that) when I see a big oil-refinery spanner on eBay described as "Cube brand, freshly polished for display"
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