For those of you who have not yet visited the highly amusing and energy obsessed site Unscrew America I highly recommend it. The site design and programing alone make it worth visiting. The message is pretty simple; Change your bulbs! I found the videos to be not only a waste of time but totally disappointing. The hidden treasure on the site comes when you go turn off the catchy music that plays without break while on the site.
Unscrew America is brought to you by the Gore group who’s hearts are in the right place. They are not here to push the envelope or convince us to make serious changes in the way we live. They know that we can at least slow down the rapidly deteriorating state of things.
I heard it said best at a conference I attended a while back; You are driving along at night and you hear on the radio that the bridge is out ahead. Concerned, you slow from 65mph to 30 mph.
The problem folks is that the bridge is still out. Slowing down just means that you end up in the same place a little later. What we need to do is either turn this bus around, stop and help re-build the bridge, or find a new direction to travel.
total life-cycle cost is important too…
I’d like to see some numbers on this. In order to save energy with new bulbs, you have to throw away perfectly functional bulbs… which — you guessed it — required energy to make.
At what point does it make sense to KEEP your old bulbs?
Also, even though a light bulb is an inefficient light source, its a pretty darn efficient heater. Getting rid of incandescent bulbs means HIGHER HEAT COSTS IN WINTER.
In my opinion, a hybrid approach is best. Use fluorescent or LED bulbs in the summer, but switch to incandescent in the winter… until all your incandescent bulbs burn out.
True and total LCA is the golden grail of Resource efficiency. It is the twisted and complex maze of elements that touch each other along the way. Giving and receiving. Polluting and sequestering.
The lightbulb debate is one that is pretty well thought through though. The amount of mercury and Carbon released through the production of electricity, the amount of water consumed through the production of electricity, and the life of the lightbulb (number of times it needs to be manufactured) make an overwhelmingly strong case for the immediate replacement of incandescent bulbs.
What we need to do is remove the choice. Incandescent bulbs should not be an option. They should be illegal to produce and sell. Australia banned incandescent bulbs. We should to.
As for a heating source, the incandescent bulb is far to inefficient a device for heating. Consider that it takes between 3,000 and 6,000 gallons of water (depends on fuel source) to produce the energy needed to keep a 60 watt bulb lit for 12 hours. Then there is the carbon released for which you assume there is roughly 700-900lbs more with the 60 watt bulb over a 13 watt CFL. Then you have to consider the mercury that is released in the burning of the coal, the trucking of the coal, the mining of the coal, and the roughly 70% loss in transmission that occurs.
Manufacturing on the hand tends to be as efficient as it possibly can from a strictly economic perspective. It would be difficult for the manufacture of the bulb to equal the damage that the existing bulb is doing.
Good question!