During the last revolutionary war, it's estimated that only 3% took the field against the Brits. Another 10% assisted by providing support. If you haven't checked out van der Boegh's site, it's worth doing. I found his on-line novel "Absolved" to be well-written and quite entertaining. I dare say most Gulchers will too.

Fireplaces are sort of interesting that way. They don't really produce much in the way of net heat - unless you have something like a heat recovery unit. Then you let the hot air go up the chimney, it heats the heat exchanger, the air in the exchanger is circulated back into the house and suddenly it's too hot to wear clothes.

Your example is BS.

What percentage of Americans move in a two-month period? (Answer: About 2%.)

Given the relative prices I offered, what is the payback period for the 500 v. 2000 hour bulb?
(Answer: 746 hours not including the time/effort to do a second bulb change.)

Will a 500-hour bulb last 500 hours?
(Answer: About half the time. Failure intervals are generally expressed as MTBF, which means roughly half of all 500 hour bulbs will fail before 500 hours.)

When the Germans buy 2000-hour bulbs and move out in two months, they take the light bulbs with them. And they still save money over your approach because they get $2.68 worth of light bulb for a buck as compared to the loser's choice… your choice.

Now if you plan to DIE within 500 hours of bulb use, go right ahead.

If you could ignore supply side economics, the cost of any commodity would only be the cost to procure it and transport it plus profit. So of course gasoline is $3.50 a gallon because it costs 10x as much to distribute as it did 40 years ago (or the dollar has lost 90% of its value in 40 years). Right?

Wrong.

We've never had shortages of gas in America, right? Wrong.

You seem incapable of comprehending that the fact that there's relative plenty of some resources NOW does not mean that those resources will be plentiful FOREVER. Energy is one area where demand is outstripping supply. Take a look at California and its rolling brownouts, a result of NOT ENOUGH POWER. Guess what? If their demand had been 10% lower, NO BROWNOUTS. Global demand for energy is expected to rise by 35% over the next 30 years. That means that if morons keep buying YOUR argument, we'll need a new power production plant for every three that already exist. OTOH, if we were to reduce consumption in current usage by 25% over the same period, we might be looking at one new plant for every 10. Are you really so dense that you cannot see that? Or do you think power plants are free and grow on trees?

The majority of people (esp Americans) ARE morons. And they're getting dumber. What's your alternative explanation for electing Obama… twice?

I do get the sense that the early CFLs were crap. And if you've got some reason to not want to have an extreme low-power hf transmitter around, the electrode-less lamps may not be for you. But they are improving (as they must if not to be totally left behind). The HID lights seem to be for more large-scale lighting. Think in terms of lighting your entire front yard or your marijuana grow (a common use). They're also not friendly in terms of being turned on and off. You'd never want one for your kitchen light because once on and then off, they have to cool before turning on again. Also, service life is greatly degraded by frequent cycling.

Overall, for most applications, if you want high-quality light, the halogens seem to be the best bet. LEDs are pretty good - but high-wattage LEDs aren't cheap and if for any reason the heat sinking fails, your 50,000 LED can become a 10-second LED! After that, incandescent, and CFLs. Incandescents won't improve. CFLs will.

In a year or two CFLs will probably be the low-cost general-purpose king, but right now, the metal halide is reputed to be the fastest-growing light tech. Must be a lot of retrofits going on.

Regards the nasty bits in the lights - LEDs, incandescent, halogen generally get a pass. I sense that the mercury and tube coating of CFLs (and fluorescents generally, for that matter) are largely overblown. Metal halide is interesting because the gas inside can be at pressures as high as 70 atmospheres! That's right, almost 1000 psi. And they get HOT. That's why they have an "inner" bulb and an "outer" bulb and are NOT recommended for uses where spewing 700F glass pieces might present problems. In industrial use, these lights typically have a housing to catch any hot shards. Oh yeah. And they require a ballast, with is an additional cost (often more than the cost of the light).

Halogen, fluorescent and LED look pretty good to me. In a few years, I may add CFL.

Usable energy doesn't appear out of thin air. It's a commodity, like wheat or gasoline, and its price is affected by demand.

Reducing demand by 5%-10% means less plant is needed, less fuel is needed and demand is decreased. That means lower prices and less consumption of natural resources.

Where's the evil?

The analogue is gas prices/auto efficiency. As gasoline prices rise, consumers naturally look for options that reduce the impact on their bottom line. Your argument would be that this is evil too.

What the government has tried to do is the equivalent of forcing everyone to buy a Prius. That's insanity. But the goal of everyone using more efficient auto technology is not in any way "evil". It's just that the implementation should follow from market demand.

Unfortunately, while the market eventually figures things out, it can be very slow to respond because it is comprised in large part by imbeciles.

Not to defend the government, but imagine how things might be different if, instead of waiting until gasoline was expensive to develop efficient auto tech, it had been done 50 years ago? At the very least, demand would be less and gas prices would be lower. But there wasn't any profit in it because at that time gas was cheap and the microcephalics buying cars saw no need for efficiency.

Unfortunately, the average person is a moron. They see no farther ahead than what expenses will do to their bottom line THIS week. Most will buy a 500 hour bulb as readily as a 2000 hour bulb - never factoring the the operational cost of the former is FOUR TIMES the latter. If the purchase price of the 2000 hour bulb is up to 4x that of the 500-hour bulb, it's a better deal. But people don't think that way. They see the former is 67 cents and the latter is $1, and they buy the cheap bulb… BECAUSE THEY'RE STUPID.

While I don't doubt that there's corruption in the government's implementation of the high-efficiency bulb efforts, the intention is to flatten the curve - to avoid the spikes in electricity pricing that we've seen in gasoline pricing. In effect, the goal is akin to keeping the price of gasoline below $2/gallon, not by rationing it, not by subsidizing it, but by reducing demand through more efficient vehicles.

What's evil about that?

Oh, and if you want to buy gasoline, wheat and electricity just to waste it - that's your privilege. But you don't need light bulbs to waste electricity. Just keep the heat running in your house at all times, and use fans to exhaust the air that is too hot to be tolerable. Or buy a big resistor and just run your electrical feed directly into it. You'll be able to waste megawatts every month.

CFLs? I have two of them. They're both burnt out and I have not been impressed with them. I have no plans to buy any more for the foreseeable future - but I do understand the tech will improve, probably already has improved, and may some day revisit the option. For now, most of the bulb replacements are LEDs bought on line at EBay.

Personally, what's most important to me is the utility and quality of light. I use halogen bulbs for most general lighting. For close work, I use fluorescent ring magnifier lights. For reading and other intermediate/close work I use LED lights (typically converted from incandescent). I have a few incandescent lights that rarely get used (the light kits on ceiling fans). I have two incandescents in the kitchen, and incandescents in the bathrooms (where the failed CFLs reside) but plan to replace them with halogen/LED at some point. I'm in no hurry. For outside lights, I use halogen and incandescent spot lights. And no one had to twist my arm to go with any of those. The LEDs, and fluorescents especially are welcome because of the low levels of heat they produce, which is important when you're working close to the light. The halogens produce the best quality of light.

Most dimming circuits just control a triac to delay the "on" current to the bulb.Imagine a sine wave where the current doesn't flow until late in the wave (i.e., the sine wave is "flattened" to zero until some point in the wave, then allowed to rise to the sine wave's value at that point). The current delivered to the bulb is proportional to the area under the (modified) sine wave.

Incidentally, dimmed halogens reportedly burn out sooner than those operating at full power. Don't know why that's.

Of course, dimmers make "dirty electricity". (Actually, turning lights on/off do too.) Not that it's usually a problem.

You're not listening.

But then again… that's not new.

Such as?

Nope. They put out lots of light way less expensive so you don't need to add more bulbs.

Hey, there's a thought.

I don't know if it's a law or not (I'll have to look it up)... but I've got these two old halogen torichiers I mentioned. They use halogen bulbs, and full rheostats, not the 3-click things which are all you can get nowadays.

I wonder if I could make some sort of lamp-kit people could buy to build themselves halogen lights with the ability to set the light level to whatever suits them at the moment. Without violating the Green church doctrine (aka, "gov't regulations").

It's more than there is in incandescents.

Have you looked into the process for extracting mercury? The process releases sulfur dioxide.

So maybe the global warming on Venus was really caused by people making CFL bulbs and releasing all that S2O4 into the atmosphere...

Yes it is.

"Reducing that usage by half reduces overall domestic energy usage by 5-10%."

My personal energy usage is not 5-10% of overall domestic energy usage.
I will use... and waste... however much energy I can afford to acquire, and from that however much energy I choose.

My energy usage is mine, not the nations.

It's like those productivity measures that declare how much productivity is "wasted" by people not working 24/7/365.
None of my productivity is wasted if I choose not to produce for a period. My productivity belongs to me, and I sell it to whomever I choose, it does not belong to the collective.

If you want to cut down on energy waste...
figure out how to shut down the sun.

Or surround it with solar panels.


I need no more reason to use incandescent bulbs than that I *want* to use them.

No one who lives in a house in the U.S. should ever whine about "efficiency".

In "Fallen Angels", the fen rescuing the angels are crossing the glacier just north of Minnesota, and as the temperature falls at night, they're in danger of freezing to death. So, they radio up to the habitats, who redirects one of the microwave transmitters from providing power for Winnipeg, to follow their course across the ice. The power was set a little to high, so they end up at one point having a snowball fight in the nude.

http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/06717...

In Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky", as I recall, the farms had power microwaved to them from the central power plant...

Gee, the future sure used to be a neat place.

How many progressives does it take to change a lightbulb?

Ask the lightbulb changing union.

How many yankees does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. They're standing in line waiting for Apple to invent the iBulb.

How many Marxists does it take to change a lightbulb?
ans: 5... because we said so!