Illegal IncandescentsA couple days ago I saw in the news that the legislatures in California and New Jersey are considering legislation designed to limit the use of incandescent lights, in favor of flourescents. The California proposal would ban incandescent bulbs. The spectra of flourescent and incandescent lights are not the same; Megan experimented with flourescents and then had to defend her decision to stick with incandescents. Some people would be significantly affected by a mandatory switch to flourescent lighting. In this case it isn't the technical advantages and disadvantages of different lighting systems that interest me; it's the political angle. Specifically, I'm worked up about the fact that this is a political issue at all. Lighting legislation is merely the latest symptom of the disease of using political power to control others. Driven by environmentalism, liberal politicians want to force everyone to use the "right" kind of lights. But there's no shelter available by turning to conservative politicians; they have their own agenda of control (for example, restricting gambling). I feel a longish essay coming on. I have many things to say about why it's wrong to try to control others' decisions. Even — especially — when you think they're making the wrong decisions.
© Kyle Markley
— Posted 2007-02-12 06:56:29 UTC —
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Comments: 4
Another thought I was thinking was that my oven, my laundry dryer, my microwave, my refrigerator, and other things I have use incandescents. They seem to be non-standard sizes that I have never seen compact-fluorescents for. I wonder how they are going to write the legislation so people having non-standard types of lights won't be penalized.
I use CFL's for my lamps and ceiling lights, but I don't expect others to. I moved to Nevada two months ago from California, and I hope they don't start legislating for crap like this. There needs to be at least one sane place left in this world where politicians don't have their heads up their butts and the people are able to just live their lives.
I agree completely. If compact fluorescents are such a great deal, they should sell themselves without needing to be forced upon us.
A better option (not one that I'd support at all, but it would suck less than banning a particular product) would be to cap per capita energy usage, then let individual users decide if they're willing to put up with crappy lights or save power elsewhere.
Every year or so, I buy a couple compact fluorescent bulbs to see if the technology has improved. It hasn't. They take a while to warm up, the light temperature is all wrong, and why would I complain about the excess heat from incandescents when any heat they put off is that much less heat that my HVAC system has to supply.
There are actually several technical reasons to NOT use Compact Fluorescent Lights.
CFLs use only part of the sine wave that we know as 110VAC power. (this is why the use less power) In order to do that they have some circuitry that essentially turns them on and off at a rather high frequency. This causes lots of noise to be reflected back onto the 110VAC poser line. Power lines that are shared through your house, and my house. These power lines are also used by AC motors in you Air Conditioning, refrigerator, washer, dryer, furnace and several other places in your home. AC motors like a nice clean sine wave in order to work efficiently. If there is lots of noise on your power lines cause by your lights, the motors will not work as efficiently and will have a shorter life span. Most of the power consumed in your home and everywhere is consumed by electric motors. Well over 50% of the power is consumed by electric motors, think big, like the AC units that cool your place of work. Making these motors less efficient is not a good idea.
If everyone was forced to switch all power lines would be very noisy. If you feed noisy power to your high tech electronics, computers, CD Player, radio, TV, they might not be able to handle it.
Clay,
While I don't know what the noise spectrum of CFLs might be, it would be unlikely in the extreme for them to cause a problem or even an inefficiency with powerline appliance motors. As long as the power line wiring is in good condition, the motors will see the same 60 HZ voltage no matter on what portions of the 60 HZ waveform the CFLs draw current. If there is a problem, it will lie in interference in the radio frequencies for sensitive devices.
I have seen external arc lighting produce 30 volt common mode 1MHZ + oscillatory spikes that required inline filtering on dialup modem telephone lines, but this is something different.
Regards, Don
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