Australia Pulls Plug on Old Bulbs

I think we should go even further and influence people to buy led lightbulbs instead of CFL's. In the 80's the only LED's you could get were yellow and red because they could not produce a good "white" light with clear LED's. The color was yellowish, but advances in technologies have spawned a successful "white" and bright led lightbulb that fits into your incandescent applications like the CFL now does. You can find these at http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/index.aspx There is also a really cool party light that changes colors smoothly. The only problem with these is that this is the only manufacturer of LED Lightbulbs that I know of and like anything else, until it's on the market a long time, the prices are pretty steep per bulb.

However, on the upside they are guaranteed for something like 60,000 hours which is pretty well all of your life used in a regular environment. What can go bad in them? a resistor? Even though there is a high price for them now, according to their studies they will save a lot every year. The bulb they compare with a 60 watt conventional bulb is their 2 watt bulb and they have different bulbs for all different applications, such as floodlights, nightlights, light-bars and light-strips. Very Cool! The cheapest one I see is $14 USD. At the link above they show just how much you can save by using these. For those that do not like the white, flourescent light, they make a yellowish light with their "Suns Dusk" light ($14.95)

I know I am not the only guy out there that has to remind his children and spouse to be more conscious about turning lights off. Sometimes I come home and they have all left to run errands or to visit family and all of the lights are on, all of them.

If every U.S. household replaced just one standard 60 watt bulb with a CC Vivid LED bulb, we could save 24,184,400,000 watts or 24,184.4 mega (million) watts per day. National savings information based on 103,000,000 households with an average use of 4 hrs per day per house. Based on gross watts. One of the largest power plants in the U.S. could be eliminated as a result of each U.S. household replacing just one standard 60 watt bulb with a CC Vivid LED Light bulb. Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, located in Wintersberg, Arizona, is the largest nuclear generation facility in the U.S. producing over 3,700 megawatt hours of electricity a day

It's very interesting! Lets get the word out and see if we can produce a lot more manufacturers to drive the cost down!

Great Post!

I have been researching LED Lighting for sometime and found your post googling, the part about every household replacing just one bulb really struck a nerve. The most interesting site I found for LED products was one that sells LED Neon replacement, on the site they don't have the products listed but if you look in the catalog section they have everything from LED neon to led street lights.

It's a hidden treasure, but will share it with this forum http://www.ledneonflex.com

Thanks for the great post!

With home electricity tariffs approaching £0.10/kWh on most tariffs, a local calculation shows that for duties exceeding 10 minutes per day, replacing a single 40W tungsten bulb with a 7W lumens-equivalent version is a more attractive investment than placing the value of the replacement in any high-street interest-earning account, including ISAs [tax-effective Individual Savings Accounts].

Mr. Edison's bulb's future looks bleak.

See here: www.elecosn.com

Here are dimmable LED Bulb, and LED incandescent bulb

As long as they are just going to ban NEW bulbs, and allow those currently in use to be used till the end of their lives.

I wonder how "green" these new types of lighting are in manufacture compared with the old types?

Only the added pollutants from the plastics that float downwind to a suburban neighborhood, freshening your backyard family Bar-B-Q with the fragrance of melting smoldering plastics and the chemicals that manufacture them. You get this taste in your mouth and then get a drink from your well water supply that is contaminated with Chrome Plating chemicals that they use to manufacture the reflective backing on each of these bulbs. After the BBQ you decide to relax and go fishing but you find it odd that the fish you caught has 3 eyes and two tails but you blame it on genetic incest in the fishes family tree. I guess I would take this slow poisoning rather than extra nuclear waste making my drinking water glow in the black-light. Really I would say that there is not much compared to the environmental benefit of having them,you can choose from the manufacturing company that would go out of business if it was caught dumping chemicals in the ground or an extra coal fired power plant that they are now determined to destroy the earth trying to bury the gases from. That gas is going to end up in our water too. Those incandescent bulbs sure do heat up a room in the house! I wonder how much heat we will stop producing by eliminating them LED's are cool to the touch. I think they are the better choice when you look at the picture as a whole.

As long as they are just going to ban NEW bulbs, and allow those currently in use to be used till the end of their lives.

From what I understand the plan is to phase out the use of incandescent bulbs by restricting the availability of them with legislation. The problem is that as usual it is a political driven thing and they havn't thought it through properly. There are many cases where there is no option but an incandescent bulb and if they muck up the legislation by put a blanket ban on all incandescent bulbs it is going to be a monumental stuff up.

Personally I believe that LEDs are the way to go in the long run but they are not available in the diversity that is needed nor in sufficient quantities to make them a real solution.

I suppose that by restricting the incandescents, the hope is to stimulate the market for the other types, allowing mass production on a grand scale and the inevitable reduction in unit cost.

There lies the problem for the public, as without legislation, the price will be market led, and come down dramatically. With legislation, the companies have a locked-in market, and can keep the extra profits.

We have just had a visit from the Scottish Tourist Board inspector and been told that we should fit dimmers to all our room lighting. As our new 'energy efficient' lamps can't be dimmed we are in a bit of a fix! No doubt we could fit LED lamps if there were any to provide a suitable warm (2700K) room light.

(Last year I produced prototytpe LED lamp drivers for installation in an English Cathedral but the cold white light wasn't a problem when beamed on old stone walls)

Can somebody get a grip on all these civil servants and bring them into the real world.

I changed most of my incandescent bulbs to fluorescent and didn't see a discernable impact on my electric bill. I purchased an Energy Star refrigerator and my use went down 20%. Sure, every little bit helps but lets go after the big sources. My gas mileage went down significantly when they went to 10% ethanol as an oxygenate in gasoline. Why didn't the government check that out before changing the gas formulation? Let's give incentives for changing to more efficient major appliances, home heating, and automobiles. We can worry about the light bulb police later.

The changes taking place regarding incandescent bulbs sound very good on the surface but the are some minor problems, maybe not so minor in some cases.

Just in my medium size home I have seven dimmers which will not work with fluorescent or LED, special dimmers and ballasts are required. The cost to replace these is about $60US each -- that is if I do the work myself. I used some of the nice Green Bulbs (10K hours) for my exterior garage/driveway lighting and the kitchen lights which are on the same circuit and have a dimmer flashed like strobes. I removed these $10 light bulbs and wallah no flashing.

Sounds like another way to burden the middle class, again, with saving the environment.

Just like cars the light bulb will become so expensive you will need to take a loan to buy one.

This whole venture smells of self interest, either political or finanial. The materials involved in compact flurescent lamps, and LED lamps are far worse than those used in normal tungsten filament types. Not to mention the berylium, and mercury used inside. The galium arsenide, and indium nitride, phosphorus compounds, hydrogen fluride, chromium salts, and many other nasty chemicals used to produce the products such as sulfuric acid, nitric acid, cyanide salts.

They may consume less electrical power; but the polution they may cause could well be worse, than the extra power used if we don't bother.

Where will we despose of the dead bodies when they give up and die?

Will we not swap one danger for another?

What about all that electrical noise caused by their control gear?

Where will it all end? Safe "neutron generator" controlled Thorium reactors are what we really need. See Cosmos magazine or look it up on the web.

I think we need to build a colony on the moon and when we get it finished we will populate it with politicians. Then we can actually solve some issues, the reason we will be able to do this is simple. Once we remove all of the "shit" in our way, we will be able to see and smell clearly and will not argue our way to no solution. We will create solutions in an quick, orderly and smart fashion. When I was growing up I didn't notice the outright greed of all of these companies, maybe I wasn't paying attention but all I see from every company is PURE GREED and it pisses me off that some company could be so blind as to what they are doing to everyone else because of their greed. I think we should put them in single file and use them for fuel, ALAS! the first ever 100% efficient machine in all of history! Once we keep their tentacles from dragging us down as a productive and harmonic society, we can work together as a planet! Rise up against them! If the whole country rose up against this war, against this stupid spending, they would have no choice but to listen or kill us, they won't kill us they have a mastercard to pay for! Our retarded president is using his mastercard that we are paying for to finance his stupid oil fight and if he had a brain we could have already produced an alternative fuel with half of what he has cost all of us. I used to support him on the the terrorist attacks but his stupidity has shown me how leaderless we are, a fly in a spiderweb! You know what its like when you step in dog shit, you just can't seem to do anything right until you get it off your shoes. It's kinda like that! Sorry to take it out of the subject, I'm a Dave Ramsey fan, all of this stupid spending got me fired up!

Everything you have written is true. I addition we may save on electricity usage - but it will never filter down to the consumer as far as cost is concerned, as soon as the bottom line for the utilities goes down because of lower usage their rates will increase to compensate any loss in revenue for the utility. It all falls on the middle level wage earner -- as always.

Hi Brainwave,

I have liked the idea of the thorium reactor from the moment I first heard about them. I think the whole concept is a very elegant solution to nearly all the problems associated with nuclear power.

I plan to give thorium reactors their own discussion on my An Engineers Look at the Future of Energy blog in a few weeks so look out for it in the Sunday mail out.