Sale of Incandescent Bulbs to End on Tuesday?

[Corporal Jones]

OTOH I must declare a vested commercial interest in

Ah so your the one who is going to replace my streets lights with LED's next month, will be interesting to see how they get on.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The term GLS (General Lighting Service) includes all standard pear-shaped and mushroom-shaped lamps with clear or pearl or white painted finishes. There are no SES versions, but there are ES (and GES) versions. It does not cover coloured versions of these lamps.

All the SES filament lamps I can think of come under the categories of Decorative lamps (e.g. candle, golf ball, etc), reflector lamps (e.g. R30, R40), and Special Purpose lamps (e.g. pygmy, oven, fridge, cooker hood, etc).

As I've commented before, the sales of all these decorative and special purpose filament lamps has been falling dramatically in any case. This, combined with many of them having been manufactured in the same facilities as GLS lamps which are ramping down, means you should assume they will become harder to find over time, even in the absence of any ban.

A German colleague tells me there's been a big fuss about it over there, and several of the retailers have stocked up with many year's worth of the banned lamps. (It becomes illegal to manufacture or import, but not to sell them.)

[Willy Eckerslyke]

No that's just you getting older.

I SAID THAT'S JUST oh never mind.

[Kim Bolton]

It's about mindset and control.

It's as if you're a squaddy in combat, being put on a charge because your combat jacket has 'idle ends' or not having the back of your cap-badge polished. Whether you're fighting the wrong war is an irrelevance at that level, but the control is total. Similarly with unplugging phone chargers or using CFLs or leaving your car ticking over in a traffic jam, they don't address the problem, but your mind is constantly focussed away from the big issues such as 'is CO2 really the greatest influencing factor in climate change'.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes.

Of course not.

They're also nearly 30% dimmer.

In other words, they're a fiddle by the lighting industry to mislead you into thinking you're buying a 30% more efficient lamp.

[Andrew Gabriel]

About 100m from substation.

242V this morning, which is typical. Have seen it as low as 239V, but only rarely.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It's a promise the LED lighting industry has broken for every one of the last 20 years!

There are some reasonably efficient LEDs in the lab, and available at really stupid prices. You have to wait for patents to age or expire before they can become consumer products though.

There really is nothing technologically on the horizon which allows you to make a 100W [equivalent] retrofit GLS LED lamp though. Widespread LED lighting will require new purpose- designed luminares to solve the thermal design issues which come with LEDs.

Commercially, metal halide lamps have already filled this space, and you may see these moving into domestic use as the chinese bring the costs down in bulk.

[Willy Eckerslyke]

All?

Regardless of distance, number of passengers, over the complete journey (not just airport to airport), always?

Haven't really thought this through, have you?

[Peter Parry]

Sort of in that some are the same form factor roughly as conventional incandescent, not necessarily, however, in Anglepoise type lamps where they may cause problems as they are heavier.

Of course not, they are several times more expensive and available up to a massive 42W (Osram Halolux) or 30W (Phillips Master Classic, typically 10 times the cost of a standard GLS). A different form factor Halolux is available up to 250W (also at 10 times the price of GLS).

The present legislation is largely as a result of years of enormous "lobbying" (cf bribery) of EU functionaries by Osram. European bulb makers can't compete with Far Eastern imports on incandescent bulbs and they are long out of patent protection. The revenue from domestic lighting was falling rapidly and this was seen as the only way of getting more money out of consumers and moving products back into patent protection - particularly the "GLS replacement" halogens. The idiot greenies, anxious to climb on any passing bandwagon smelling of manure, were willing accomplices.

Rather cunningly the Chinese wiped out the worlds Rare Earth metals mining industry in the 1990's by dumping and are now proposing to bar the export of rare earths from China. Terbium, used to give CFL's some semblance of a reasonable colour rendering index, would be barred from export so Osram may end up hoist by their own petard as the only bulbs with merely poor colour rendering will have to be made in China, the EU manufactured ones will go back to being the dire "corpse lights" of old. (The Toyota Pious and electric windmills could also become museum pieces if the Chinese limit the export of neodymium as expected).

[Mr X]

Why do you say that? Headaches are much more common with SFLs.

[Richard Tobin]

I have been replacing the 60W candle bulbs in a 3-bulb fitting with the 42W halogen bulbs. They're noticably brighter than the old ones. If course, the old ones are... old, but I don't think traditional bulbs deteriorate that much.

-- Richard

[Fevric J. Glandules]

On Usenet?

The main alternative to flying is staying where you are. This worked pretty well for a long long time. Thanks to new fangled technology like the telephone, it works pretty well now too.

[IanAl]

Not the alternative of staying put or travelling only a short distance.

[Andrew Gabriel]

They do actually. As the filament evaporates, the inside of the bulb slowly darkens. Furthermore, as the filament evaporates, its resistance increases, current drops, and power drops, so you get two effects significantly dimming a filament lamp as it ages. You may be replacing a frosted lamp with a clear one, and clear ones are more efficient. The etched frosted lamps we used to use lose around 2% of the light in the frosting. Due to the hazards of handling the hydrofluoric acid used for the etching, pearl lamps are now mostly frosted with an internal powder coating, and this is less efficient (I don't have a figure though). Many decorative lamps such as golf balls and candles have painted coatings, and these are much less efficient, often losing some

20% or more of the light output verses the clear equivalent.

Halogen lamps can be built to be more efficient than non- halogen filament lamps, or last longer, or some combination between on a sliding scale. In nearly all consumer lamp products, halogens are designed for longer life because people won't pay a price premium for halogen lamps which only have the same expected life as a non-halogen filament lamp costing a fraction of the purchase price.

The other problem is that mains filament lamps (halogen and non-halogen) get less efficient as you build them at lower power ratings, and that weighs in against these reduced power replacement lamps.

Philips built some GLS retrofits which use a low voltage halogen capsule and small switched mode power supply in the lamp base, similarly to CFL control gear. Those do deliver real energy usage savings because the low voltage halogen is so much more efficient than mains voltage filaments. I forget the exact figures, but something like a 20W version was equivalent to a 40 or 50W conventional lamp. Problem with these was that a) you can't go higher than about 20W because the heat will fry the integral switched mode power supply, and b) the cost of these was so high, that even taking the energy cost reduction into account, you are still well out of pocket. There's also only a very tiny market for people who care about their energy usage enough to spend extra on lamps, but who insist on using filament lamps for general lighting.

[Max Demian]

You're the second person to use the word 'luminaire' in this thread today. I've never heard it before. You learn something new every day.

[bof]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

234 here ATM, and 242 last night when I was reading the thread, I've seen it both lower and higher.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Sorry, it's lighting industry jargon for a light fitting (and I mistyped it anyway;-)

Also, 'lamp' is lighting industry jargon for a light bulb.

and 'bulb' is lighting industry jargon for the outer glass of a 'lamp', or a small battery torch bulb, or something you plant in the garden and grows into a flower, but not for a light bulb;-)

[bof]

At night I find the on/off flickering of LED brake lights particularly annoying, why not have interleaved arrays of LEDs that turn on at different times to give the effect of a constant light?

[Willy Eckerslyke]

Or falling.

Pedantic, me?

[bof]

I initially had a lot of trouble with CFLs not lasting long, but not had any fail for a year or two now, I suspect if they pass the 'infant mortality' end of the bathtub curve they probably do last a long time.

Although thinking about the voltage sub-thread, the voltage has been a lot more stable here lately (since a join in the street was replaced a year or two ago), so that might be something to do with it.