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Now that you mention it, I have started to feel guilty about not providing health care coverage for the gentleman of questionable immigration status who mows my lawn.
I hear those bulbs give off a barely-audible hum that subliminally preaches the virtues of unions and encourages women to have abortions.
Now that you mention it, I have started to feel guilty about not providing health care coverage for the gentleman of questionable immigration status who mows my lawn.
And the coffee!
Presume it.
And a tall pitcher of fresh lemonade for the fellow cutting your lawn.
(Least you could do. It's beastly hot today)
Incandescents outlawed? That's crazy talk.
I see Darrin wants to make it an even two months of fail.
Talk to Slate
Read what you bolded.
echo in here?
Fail Fail Fail Fail
Pardon the repost...
---------------------------------------------
Just to get some hard facts:
Cost of a 100W incandescent equivalent (assume they are measuring lumens, the measurement of light): $47.89, life span 50,000 hours.
I found a cost comparison here:
http://eartheasy.com/live_led_bulbs_comparison.html
Given they have an obvious viewpoint, I decided to do some verification of their assumptions and found their 20 cents per kWh to be waaay too much.
But to be more realisitic I looked up the actual cost of electricity in San Antonio:
http://www.cpsenergy.com/files/Rate_...tric030110.pdf
6 cents plus a bit for peak usage. Call it 6.2 cents to be fair.
The cost comparison assumption of the price of electricity is the most critical assumption.
Re-running their analysis, using San Antonio rates means that running the same 50,000 hours of illumination gets the following costs for a 100w equivalent:
LED:Bulbs: $48
Electricity: $40.30
Total cost: $88.30
Florescent:
Bulbs: $20
Electricity: $62
Total cost: $82
Incandescant:
Bulbs: $52.08
Electricity: $310
Total cost: $362.08
(edit)
Incandescant - LED = $273.78
Most houses have more than one light bulb. Our little house has about 14, by my mental count.
If you have just ten in your house, then that is a total difference of some $2,737.80 over that time period.
(end)
Given electricity rates rise over time, that differential will certainly be more, making that figure somewhat conservative.
Currently Florescents seem to be cheapest by a smidge.
Halve the cost of an LED, and that edge disappears, especially given the fragility and mercury contents of the florescents.
Darrin has every right to keep spending 10 times the electricity on lighting his house.
Did I mention that the LED bulb only gives out 5% of the heat that incandescants do?
Any one bulb or even five probably don't put out that much heat, but when you are paying to cool your house most of the year, that extra heat isn't all that welcome from an efficiency standpoint. My gut says the difference probably isn't all that much money-wise, just to be fair. Still it is a minor consideration.
And don't forget, Barry reminds us to keep our tires well inflated
Well, he didn't post much after I actually looked up the real costs of using them, so I will have to assume that even he realized how dumb the OP was, and slinked off to find something else to post about.
Personally, I will be glad not to have to subsidize the jackasses who aren't smart enough to figure out that incandescents are eight to ten times more expensive.
If one multiplies the extra electricity required by incandescents by 100,000 households in any given city it starts to add up to the output of an entire power plant.
15 light bulbs times 80 watts a piece is 1200 watts each hour per household. Multiply that by 100,000 households that is 120Mw.
Why should my electricity bills be higher because of someone else's stupid choice of light bulbs?
Reading fail.
The Obama light bulb police ain't gonna break your door down because you still have older bulbs.
Mandating efficiency changes for manufacturers, while effectively outlawing older designs, does not mean that incandescents with improved efficiency will not be available.
Keep harping on that debunked idea.
The Slate article you referenced also noted that the LED light bulb they designed, in addition to being indistinguishable from incandescents in terms of quality/quan y of light, are also 1/2 the purchase cost of LEDs already on the market.
http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/
Given that even this will go down, the cost comparison that I gave above will only get more and more tilted to LEDs.
Bottom line:
1) no difference in the light,
2) the bulb will pay for itself in less than 4 years,
3) ends up costing less than 1/10th that of incandescents over its life span given the national average for electricity, and
4) given that fewer power plants need to be built, they lower the overall costs of electricity for the economy as a whole.
Not exactly the kind of "government overreach" that worries me, and the kind of nudge from government that free-markets occasionally need.
Still, be my guest and hoard all the old incandescents you want.
Here's the math on the cost comparison I did for the bulbs I bought. 60W incadescent vs. 60W LED equivalents
LED's (brand = Philips)
Cost = $40
Lifespan = 25,000 hrs
Power usage = 12W
Incadescents (also Philips)
Cost = $0.33
Lifespan = 1,000 hrs
Power usage = 60W
Electricity from Austin Energy = $0.0785/kWh
LED = $40 + (12W)x(25,000hrs)x($0.0785/kWh) / (1,000 W/kW) = $63.55 for 25,000 hrs of use
Incadescent = $0.33 + (60W)x(1,000hrs)x($0.0785/kWh) / (1,000 W/kW) = $5.04 for 1,000 hrs of use
Multiply the $5.04 times 25 for the number of incadescents I'd have to buy to last as long as the LED bulb and that's $126.00. Delta between that and the LED is $62.45.
Say you use your lights for 8 hours/day (that's being generous)
25,000 hrs / (8 hrs/day) = 3125 days = 8½ years
So, you'd save $126 in 8.5 years or $14/year.
So, I guess you get your return on investment in about 2.7 years.
I'll wait for them to get better and a bit cheaper. I've had an LED flashlight for years, it just doesn't have the same brightness as my regular Maglight.
Eyup.
Worth noting:
The big variable is the amount of light one wants. 60W incandescent is pretty dim for some applications, so as the wattage goes up, so does the pwnage.
On a somewhat related note, there are some other interesting technologies in the pike that offer some interesting potentialities for computer displays:
http://www.economist.com/node/18833511 ("uantum dots", the first real application of nano-tech that seems to be panning out well)
This is actually a decent point. I'd like to see the calculations take into account the time value of money.
No doubt they'll get cheaper over time. It certainly doesn't make sense to stock up on LED's right now. I'm going with the phase out approach. An incadescent burns out, pick up an LED the next time I pass by Home Depot or Lowes.
To be more technically accurate:
That assumes the price of electricity will remain the same, and that there is no inflation.
Given the Chinese/Indian appe e for coal and other fuels, I would be rather surprised if the rises in cost of electricity did not outpace that of inflation over the next 7 year period. But that is a whole other topic.
I'm generally not an early adopter of any technology. The one exception being some Apple products. I paid more for an iPod touch than I paid for my iPhone4.
I know they have been replacing traffic lights with LEDs for quite a while. One of the unintended consequences is that LEDs don't produce enough heat to melt snow, and have been responsible for some accidents as snow covers the lenses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/us...wt&twt=nytimes
As electricity increases in price, the LED's become a better deal yet. That is assuming they actually last 25,000 hours. I trust the LED's themselves will, but there is other circuitry involved, and power fluctuation are likely to affect this circuitry harsher than on incandescents.
Well, obviously. Sometimes you just need a "back of the napkin" calculation. No need to include the butterfly effect.
How well do they work in a dimmer circuit?
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