Short life and long cost. We have table lamps in the family room (where the TV is) with two bulbs and two switches each. All have 60W incandescent bulbs, though. We watch TV in the dark. The TV provides enough light to get a drink.
I changed the switch in the fan from a SPST switch to a off-low-med-high fan switch and wired the lights so I get zero, one, three, or four lights on. It's almost always left on one.
No, it changes with temperature, which changes (A *LOT*) with voltage.
The difference in resistance is, of course, larger when the bulb is cold because it heats very quickly, causing the resistance to go up quickly. However, if you increase the voltage 10% the current does not go up 10% because the filament will be hotter and a higher resistance. The power is not proportional to V^2, like a pure resistor, rather closer to being proportional to V.
Actually the cold Tungsten, a brittle fibrous metal, conducts about 10 times the current when cold than hot. The inrush current is high. That is why bulbs blow when you switch them on rather than during the day/night. The bending and flexing of the filament brings on the short life. Long life bulbs we use in barns and basketball courts.... are
140v bulbs and have a mid wire bridge wire that keeps the wire from flexing to far. They sometimes have a tiny amount of mercury or silver that reacts to the oxygen left in the bulb as well as any that comes out of the filament as it is heated.Mart> >
Watching TV in the dark is hard on the eyes so we always leave a dim light on. Some people take it even further with special lighting.
We only use the ceiling (fan) light when cleaning or when bright light is needed. Overhead light is harsh, IMO. The lamps on the end tables is much more diffused. At work, only for the darkest month do I have any light on in my office. Two windows on the north side is plenty.
It's never bothered either of us.
There are no windows where I work. :-(
+1
"What the heck.. I only leave lights on when I need them. I hope you guys reconsider, that we have enough things consuming juice. All the transformers, TV's, we don't need to keep lights on for vanity reasons."
We leave our front porch and coach lights on 24/365. We do it for security and never have to remember to turn on and off.
FWIW a DVR probably uses more elec than our 4 outside lights. And on top of that, electricity is not produced to precisely meet demand, quite a bit is over produced and goes to waste regardless if you use it or not.
Most energy conservationists do so until they get tired of waiting for their dish DVR to reboot.
The power companies have to have more generating capacity online than is currently being used to allow for variation in the demand for electricity. However that does not mean that they are actually producing more electricity than is being used.
When you turn on a light bulb, a little more current is drawn from the generator. The turbine driving that generator has to supply a little more power to drive the generator. If it is a steam turbine then a little more steam needs to be made to drive the turbine. To make the steam, a little more fuel (coal, gas, nuclear, etc.) needs to be burned.
When you turn off the light, the generator supplies a little less power. The turbine uses less power to drive the generator. Less steam is needed to drive the turbine. Less fuel is used.
If there is not a balance between the power being created and what is consumed then the generator would either speed up or slow down. To prevent that from happening the control systems for the boiler/turbine/generator adjust the amount of steam produced to meet the electricity needed from the generator. The steam boiler and the rotational inertia of the turbine/generator provide a buffer to meet instantaneous unbalances in the demand and demand. However the control system has to bring the supply back into balance with the demand.
Dan
I pretty much know how all of that works but if they were not always overly generating we would be having constant brown outs. Wind and Dam generators require no more energy to be consumed to generate energy.
I always thought Nueces county would be a good site for wind turbines since the wind blows there nearly all the time. And maybe the turbines would swat some of those huge mosquitoes.
No Kidding!!! I grew up there, Corpus Christi, and I vividly remember letting wind power push us down the sidewalks on our skate boards.
I wrapped a large piece of cardboard around me to get started and would unfold my arms to spread the card board to increase wind resistance/speed. My first attempt with a 2'x3' piece of plywood resulted in me being knocked off of the skate board immediately. ;~)
Your theory is correct, but in practice it is a bit different. Have you operated a steam boiler? They can be modulated for output, but they don't react quite like the throttle on your car. If demand changes quickly, the boiler will lag. If the boiler is down it can take a while to get to operating pressure. If demand suddenly drops, pressure has to be bled off as the boiler will continue to produce steam for a time after it is shut down. Our operation at work is much smaller and less sophisticated than a power plant, but boilers are started 20 to 30 minutes before production and are shut down 15 to 20 minutes before production stops.
At home, the voltage at my house is higher at 6:30 AM than it is at 7:30 when industry is coming on line. I know this from burning out bulbs, checking voltage and conversations with the power company.Power plants also keep a boiler or two hot in anticipation of loads or emergency shutdown of the present boiler on line.
At about 4 PM the power company would like to see you start doing the laundry and running your dryer.
And not to mention the fact the home lighting probably represents less than 5% of the energy used. I doubt that if everyone in a city turned off half their lights at once that the power company would make an adjustment much less maybe even notice the drop in usage.
I think your estimate is low by a factor of about 3
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that in
2014, about 412 billion kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity were used for lighting by the residential sector and the commercial sector in the United States. This was about 15% of the total electricity consumed by both of these sectors and about 11% of total U.S. electricity consumption.
And one line below what I quoted is this gem:
Residential lighting consumption was about 150 billion kWh or about
14% of total residential electricity consumption.
Ed,
I do agree with your comments about the need for extra boiler capacity to buffer load variations and the lags involved in operating a boiler. I did not bring them into my original comments to try to keep the level of complexity in this discussion reasonable.
I suspect that the reason that the voltage at your house is higher at
6:30 AM and then drops at 7:30 AM is due to the increased voltage drops in your local distribution system as loads increase. I do not think that your local power company is allowing their generator voltages to drop as the load increases. That sort of operating strategy would create problems since their grid is also connected to the national grids.The power companies would definitely love having a constant load. This would allow them to maximize their profits.
Dan
Perhaps we have a difference about the definition of 'always overly generating'. I agree that they have need to have more generating capacity running than they are actually using to prevent brownouts. However that generating capacity is not producing more electricity than is actually being consumed (including distribution losses). If the turbines (or whatever is driving the generators) were producing more power than what is being consumed by the generators (produced electric power and generating losses) then the system would be unbalanced. As a result, the entire system would try to speed up or dump power into the national grids and try to speed up the national grids. That does not happen because the control systems try to maintain balance by throttling the turbines.
Dam generators do require more water flow to generate more power.
Wind turbines are pretty much getting free energy to drive their generators (ignoring initial and maintenance costs). If we had enough wind capacity to supply our energy needs then I would be in more agreement with your initial statement: 'quite a bit is over produced and goes to waste regardless if you use it or not'. However we do not have that much wind generation capacity. We are still paying the fuel costs for most of our power generation. That fuel cost is directly related to the amount of electricity produced.
We do not generate more electricity than we consume and then waste the rest.
Dan
Not to mention that for every kWh of wind (or solar) generation capability on the grid, another kWh of coal/oil/nuke/hydro generation has to be paid for. The only "free lunch" is the fuel cost. The rest of the costs are duplicated.
The point I am trying to make is that the same energy is being consumed to produce electricity whether the electricity is being used or not. Turning off a light bulb is not going to save the energy that is being consumed to generate electricity.
And originally the point I was making that turning off a few lights in your home might add up to a few dollars consumer savings over the course of a year but hundreds of thousands of households will have to all participate in turning off lights to "maybe" show up as a drop in demand a percent or two if that much.
Yes but not at a cost.
Correct, unless any of it is being stored, but the power companies do use more energy to guard against brown outs, and that energy is going to waste if not used.
Perhaps but the power companies are not going to drop electricity generation because lights bulbs are being turned off. They don't want brown outs. Consumers compelled to "save the planet" by changing thermostats, or getting more efficient systems/better insulation and or changing to bulbs that use less energy.
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