Do New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don’t Work?

78 cfl,,, wow. I counted all the bulbs in our 1800 sq ft house. Including all those in the kitchen,,, the grand total was 31! In the average evening, we have 6 on in the kitchen making supper, 4 on in the living room. After supper, the kitchen goes out, the 4 in the livign room stay lit, one goes on in the Master. If we have office work upstairs, the stair light and the desk lights (2) come on. The outside lights only come on as needed. (All cfl, ranging from 3 watts to 15 watts

In our small remote house we have 9. Three or four on at any given time. Most cfl,s a couple of led's for night emergency night lights if the solar inverter is off.

Icarus

 

We have 22 lights on our boat alone, not counting instrumentation lighting. It is all 12V. It is split slightly less than half LED and half florescent, with the remainder halogen. I am working on replacing the remaining halogen bulbs with LEDs.

Tom

 

Yep, it's a lot of bulbs. The high ceilings/open areas require considerably more light than what I'm accustomed to, about twice the count I've had in previous homes. It's 2800+ sq. feet, 3 bed, 3 baths. There are quite a few lights in storage/garage/closets/utility that are very rarely used. (I converted some of them simply because I had some spare GE CFL's that I didn't care much for, and because sometimes ones in a storage area got left on unnoticed for a week.) Spots/tracks were in vogue when the home was built so that increased the count considerably in several rooms (I don't find them terribly efficient ways to light a room in terms of bulb count.) The large kitchen has 4 long tube fluorescents, plus 6 spots in tracks as well as one over sink and one hood. The position of the indirect long tubes sometimes let's us get by without turning on the dining room lights during dinner while leaving the kitchen spots off after finishing the prep.

Before I changed out chandeliers the dining room had 10 bulbs (now 5) and the living room had 16 (now 9.) I'm still optimizing the way we use the lights we have now that the fixture conversion is complete. We aren't really doing without, just picking the least amount of light sufficient for the task at hand.

Kids add a lot to the lighting bill, although they've gotten much better. I started unscrewing one bulb at a time from some of their fixtures when they left the lights on after leaving the room...this seemed to cure the worst repetitive abuses so I put the bulbs back in after a few days.

I don't use the outdoor lighting more than I have to. I almost never use the facade spots (although I have converted 5 of 8 with spare GE spot CFL's that I don't care much for.) We do use the new carriage lights a few hours a week during winter (not CFL's at present though...went for looks on this, but did cut the bulb count in half and reduced the wattage, and still have enough light to reduce it again if/when the bulbs give out.)

 

I would favor a public education program to encourage folks to *properly* recycle dead CFL's, not just fire them out with the household garbage

In the grand scheme of things, mercury emissions from coal plants vs energy savings with CFL's, the CFL's still come out ahead. Even more can be done if we keep all mercury sources out of landfills

That means older thermostats with mercury bulb capsules, *every* fluorescent tube (Includes CFL's), and let's not forget the backlighting in LCD's.

 

Our local municipality has a drop off site for ALL toxics,,, no charge. (that is the key!). If it save the government way more than it costs net/net. Paint, used oil and filters, bulbs, household pesticides etc,,, all accepted and disposed of/recycled properly. Very little midnight dumping in our neighbourhood.

Icarus

 

In NW Ontario they offer *free* drop off? I used to have a cabin in NW Ontario, the municipal dump charged $5 per garbage bag, $20 per half ton load, $5 per battery, and $10 for used oil up to 10 litres.

No surprise once they put on all those fees, there were garbage bags dumped alongside the road, oil spilled into old gravel pits, etc.

With used oil, I guess the lesser of two evils is to burn it in a used oil furnace. Yes, there are a lot of heavy metals gushing out the chimney, but that is far preferable to having any sort of oil enter the water table

 

Those of us living around the Great Lakes have to ingest a certain amount of mercury every day. It's much like coffee drinkers and caffeine. If I don't have my mercury I start to feel funny.

Tom

 

Jay,

Notice on my signature,,, I live in two very different parts of the world,,, NW Ont for much of the year,,, the Pacific NW for parts of the year,,, sometimes in Maine. Leads to some confusion in my posting on forums sometimes.

Our local dump,,(In NWO) which is really mostly a transfer station. They land fill much, but metals are pulled out, there is a drop off for Oil and lubes, batteries etc. Tires are taken at a charge.

At the main regional landfill in Thunder Bay, they take all toxics,,paint, oils pesticides, pesticides etc no charge,,, I don't know the deal with tires.

In Bellingham, Wa we have the toxic drop off noted above.

Icarus

 

At least it's a LNAPL rather than a DNAPL.

 

Although non-aqueos in theory, in practice you will find that most DRO's, RRO's, etc are a very complex mix of different compounds, some of which will co-mingle. Such as arsenic, zinc, cadmium etc

For example, one US gallon of used motor oil will contaminate 1 million US gallons of potable water

Proper recovery and recycling is an obvious step. So is using a high quality oil that doesn't need changing every 5,000 miles.

But the lesser of two evils, is to burn it in a special waste oil burner, instead of dumping it on the ground

 

The real point is to do neither!

Even if you live somewhere quite remote,,, there is a way you can return used oil for re-refining. If you buy in bulk, store your used oil in a similar drum, bucket etc, and figure out how to send it back!

Icarus

 

Yes, I agree. However, at remote sites it's not always practical to "return to sender." Human nature being what it is, given all the abandoned gravel pits where you have your home in Ontario, it gets spilled into a quick hole and magically disappears

As you may be aware, there are a lot of FUDS (Formerly Used Defense Sites) in Canada, with nowhere near the cleanup standards that CERCLA and SARA demand, AKA "Superfund"

As an example, the Mid Canada Line radar picket. Operational in the mid to late 1950's, and abandoned by the mid 1960's. There were 8 Sector Control stations, fully manned and equipped with runways, machine shops, megawatts of diesel generators, etc.

All the electronics back then were vacuum tube, klystrons (Thermionic microwave generator) etc. Transformers had PCB's in them. The 8 SCS's on the Mid Canada Line were used to support unmanned axillary doppler radar stations, 80 across Canada. All of them used diesel generators. Such locations as Bird, MB, and Winisk, ON

The Pinetree Line had around 40 radar stations at its peak, most of them were manned. Similar issues, similar problems. Locations like Baldy Hughes, BC, Alsask, SK, Armstrong, ON, etc

All of these sites are heavily contaminated with DRO's, GRO's, RRO's BTEX, PCB's, mercury, the list goes on. If the American experience with cleaning up White ALICE, DEW line, and former bases in Alaska are any indication, it would cost tens of BILLIONS to clean up

All those diesel generators and trucks needed frequent oil changes. I don't get why they just dumped used oil on the ground, or in a hole. For example, at the White ALICE sites and DEW sites in Alaska, it was SOP to have a drywell, or weep hole, in the ground under the shop. Just dump the used oil in the hole, it magically disappears

They could have just put the used oil into the DFA tanks and burned it in the generators. Since a lot of those sites had POL tank farms with a quarter MILLION gallons of DFA storage, I don't see how much worse the contamination would have been if comparatively teeny amounts of used oil had been burned along with the DFA

 

must be a WA state thing... we have Hazo House here. free dropoffs of toxics but they do have somewhat liberal limits. can only drop off a maximum of 5 gallons of paint PER MONTH....(actually they dont keep track so its pretty much 5 gallons per trip).

last time i was there, i could tell by the look on the guy's face that battery disposal education is sorely needed here. he obviously had no idea what to do with the bag of dead batteries i handed him.

 

Speaking of burning things, when I worked for Rockwell we did a control system for Stearns Catalytic. They had the contract to burn all of the old nerve gas in the U.S. arsenal. The prototype system was installed on Marshall Island, where if anything went wrong only the operators would die (and a few others that don't count by U.S. standards). Reading the list of error messages was horrifying. I called the project "Stearns Paralytic".

Tom

 

In all the years that I've been using CFLs I have yet to experience one failing in its first year.

Here in Japan regular flourescents (non-CFL) have been very common in homes for decades, as people here like their homes brighter, which would have used a lot more electricity and put out much more heat with incandescents.

The average Japanese dining room, kitchen, living room or bed room uses circular or straight flourescents, but CFLs have become very common where incandescents were in use before.

When I moved to my current home 9 years ago and bought new lamp fixtures for all the main rooms, I installed CFLs or circular flourescents throughout. The living room and the dining room table are only on their second set of CFLs during time.

Most of the first generation of bulbs in those rooms didn't actually burn out before being replaced, but merely lost some brightness (the phosphor coating wears out a bit), so I swapped them for a new set and gradually used the old set to replace less frequently used incandescents left in the house.

 

The dumps in Manitoba - at least the ones I've been to - only charge you if you're dumping obvious commercial amounts of trash/waste. Consumer waste is free, and even then you have idiots who dump along roads

The cabin I used to own in NW Ontario, they had a "bag tag" which cost $4 per garbage bag. Half ton load was $20, $10 to drop off used oil, $10 per tire, etc etc

Despite the fees, that particular dump was poorly run. It wouldn't have surprised me if the employees there simply dumped the motor oil in the swamp behind the road

 

Here is an interesting bit of math:

• Annual mercury emissions from coal fired power plants in the USA (1999): 48 tons
• Overall electricity saved by switching all incandescent lamps to compact flourescents: 7%
• Mercury pollution saved by burning 7% less coal in power plants: 3.36 tons
• Amount of mercury in a CFL: 4 mg
• Number of CFLs that would have to improperly disposed of per year to match cut in mercury pollution achieved by switching to CFLs: 1,000,000,000.

Note that newer CFLs contain as little as 1.5-2.5 mg of mercury, driving the break-even point up to 2 to 3 billion improperly trashed CFLs per year.

 

Hmm, I thought it was Johnston Island. Maybe I'm thinking of something else

Wasn't the final version installed at Tooele, Utah, at the Chemical Weapons Depot?

"Stearns Paralytic." Yeah, I'd carry a sidearm at all times if I was in such a facility. First whiff of chemical agent, pop go the brains. Better than suffering with horrible chemical nerve agents. The *good* agents are ones that almost instantly kill you

The bad agents are those that make you suffer in horrible agony for a few days, even with the best of medical care

 

Hmmm got to thinking about incinerators, such as those used to burn chemical weapons. I once dated a girl from Queens, NY, who pronounced things a wee bit funny. Eg:

Garbage = "goibage"

Incinerator = "insinuator"

etc

 

No, you are correct. I had a brain fart. It's tough getting old.

You know though, in my defense, Johnson Atoll and Marshal Island are pretty close together at this distance. Next thing you know I will think Kwajalein is in Lake Michigan.

Yes, the main system was installed at Tooele, Utah. You don't want to transport that stuff very far.

Tom