replacing halogen lamps

It's Unix. Of course it's better than Windows.

I''ve been able to sleep and restart the Mac for the last two months. It was last rebooted in early July. In that time, it has been on and off literally hundreds of fixed and wireless networks, had applications exited and restarted or just left dormant. It has behaved faultlessly.

If I try to do anything close to that with Windows, I'm lucky if it lasts a day between reboots and a ridiculously long start up time because of all the crap that gets loaded.

I do still have a very small number of legacy Windows applications that don't have equivalent Mac versions. I can run these in Parallels with XP or dual boot with Bootcamp.

yes, but the average town has about ten times as much street lighting that is on ALL NIGHT as the homeowners bulbs contribute.

I am all in favour of eradicating the lot frankly.

The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:

I'd gladly get rid of streetlighting. Better I'd like to get rid of the lights on the side of the new White Elephant Centre a hundred yards or so away. They shine outwards not downwards and are vile.

I'm not so sure, I made a SFF PC with a fairly modest 1.6G CPU, normally it idled at 60W, with maximum underclocking/undervolting that dropped to ~40W.

Then I got a 1.7G Centrino laptop, when the screen was off it idled at

For a PC that's on 24/7 and needs to be silent, IMHO it can work out cheaper to get a laptop that uses little power than a desktop with all the mods to make it as quiet as possible.

With firewire and a big external disc it would make a good home server too. Plus it has a built in UPS :)

cheers, Pete.

But the cost of electricity (per kWh) is greater than Gas (per kWh) so=20 though I would agree, from my experience that the two bills may be=20 similar that is not the same as same energy consumption.

Over the past two years extensive renovation changed my pattern of=20 energy use: I have probably saved =C2=A310 per quarter just by installing= a=20 boiler that /does not/ have a pilot light. Using a combi rather than=20 electric shower should make a difference to relative rates of=20 consumption though it is difficult to tell so far.

On 25 Aug 2006 04:40:13 -0700 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@care2.com wrote this:-

Indeed. Only when they have hard to fix faults is it worth replacing them.

...up to their misleading level. Equivalent powers are quoted compared to non-standard gls, though they like to phrase it so people think otherwise. Real life equivalence ratio of 4 is closer the mark. This is one of the reasons first time users think they make the place look grotty, theyre putting the wrong power bulb in.

NT

Haitz law is not a law of course. Really we'll just have to wait and see. It would be unrealistic to expect no ceiling to LED efficacy, and as of now we simply dont know where or when that ceiling will occur.

yes, some of which they suit fine. But not general lighting.

none of which is general lighting

will this make enough difference?

These technologies are not what I refer to. The newer techs used in general lighting are much further back on the curve, and are triphosphors, electronic ballasts, spiral tubes and electrodeless lamps. These are the ones relevant to general lighting today.

Fl tech has gone through the same piecemeal improvement process as LEDs, starting back in the late 1930s when fl lighting began. And its continuing.

LEDs may overtake fl yet for general lighting, and equally they may fail to, but 2 things are for sure:

- for general lighting today LED is not a reasonable choice.

- LEDs have some way to go to catch up with todays fl technology.

NT

This does mean we can predict the point at which LED lighting becomes a viable consumer product -- it's when the patents run out. So take a peak performing LED today, and that product could become a mass consumer product in about 20 years time.

A second fundamental problem with LEDs is their inability to work at the same temperatures as most existing light sources, which means they have to be very much more efficient (which they aren't) or much bigger (to dissipate the heat whilst maintaining a low temperature).

There's a factor of 2 performance improvement in fluorescent phosphors which is awaiting whoever first works around Stokes shift. I suspect we will start seeing minature metal halide lamps as contenders to halogen downlighters in the next few years too as the HID headlamp patents expire. Other lamp technologies aren't going to sit still for the next 20 years just so LEDs can become viable commodities.

People's experience may also vary according to their local supply potential. Incandescent bulbs are very sensitive to voltage. People living in a house with 250V will get a much brighter output from a "100W" incandescent than people living with 230V. The CFLs won't vary nearly so much.

Christian.

Street lighting could be much better designed. They should be made to point downwards, both to save energy and to make the sky darker. Remember, though, that those sodium lights are much more efficient that even fluorescent lighting (they give out twice the light) and there is probably less than one street light for every house, even given all the non-residential roads.

Christian.