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The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

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Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

khedoros wrote: post #31
TeMPOraL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were true: - close-to-perfect recycling infrastructure; i.e. all the stuff that breaks down and is thrown away actually gets reused to create a new generation of stuff, with minimum additional input of energy and material - civilization was a stable thing; making things throwaway depends on ensuring there's always a replacement to buy - which will…

> Honestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were true: If you're talking about technology being expected to break down and be cheaply replaced on the scale of single-digit years, it sounds like a never-ending nightmare. I'd need to add two more points, at least. - Strict upgrades (that is, there must be nothing about a new version of a product that's worse than the one before it); if one…

I was thinking primarily about appliances - lightbulbs (dumb or smart), washing machines, cars, cellphones / smartphones, etc. Those two points you added don't apply to most of them.

That said, I'm not sure if I agree with the first one. At least not completely. I'd like to have some ability to recover old/special features but I wouldn't mind if it required some extra work (like tracking down that motherboard model that still has parallel port on it). In the reality where all technology is being obsoleted fast and my two points hold, whatever you want to program over parallel has probably broke down already anyway.

As for the second one - we don't have anything like that even today in wide use, and we cope :). On Unix you end up moving your dotfiles; on Windows I used to spend an hour or three for setting things up "my way". Personally I don't expect a new machine to immediately feel like the old one - but I do expect to be able to make it so.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#52

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

barking wrote: post #45
stuaxo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The light is better, but the heat is usually not where you want it.

Won't it amount to the same thing as a heat source anywhere else in a room, with convection and radiation?

Modern heat pumps are three to four times more efficient in their use of electric power than simple electrical resistance heaters.[1]

I have a 7.1kW heat pump, it uses a little over 1.79kW of power generate that heat, so a thermal efficiency of 3.96:1. Any light bulb, whether it's incandescent or CFL or LED produces heat a 1:1 thermal efficiency.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#53

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

alex_duf wrote: post #50

I can't believe an LED that adapts the colour temperature to the time of the day like F.lux does isn't a standard yet. LEDs are great but boy are they agressive to the eyes. (Yes that's a bit unrelated, I figured I'd rant and hope some poeple starts mass proucing it thanks to my message)

I have no trouble getting hold of 2700K LED bulbs here in Australia.

I agree though, the cold white 4500K or higher bulbs are really only suitable during the day. Every bulb in my house, CFL or LED, is 2700K.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#54

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

Symbiote wrote: post #46
afarrell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some US states whithout an IKEA, such as Maine. Incidentally, in Maine, incandescent light bulbs are almost 100% efficient for much of the year as they produce both light and heat.

When using electricity for heating, a heat pump is more than 100% efficient. I live in Denmark, where regulations mean new buildings can't have simple electric heaters installed.

Yep, modern heat pumps are up to and above 4:1 thermal efficiency. References in my other comment.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#55

Post by lucaspiller »

alex_duf wrote: post #50

I can't believe an LED that adapts the colour temperature to the time of the day like F.lux does isn't a standard yet. LEDs are great but boy are they agressive to the eyes. (Yes that's a bit unrelated, I figured I'd rant and hope some poeple starts mass proucing it thanks to my message)

I just ordered a some from Osram Lightify that you can control the colour temperature and brightness. I'm going to set them up with Home Assistant to do exactly this, and at €20/bulb (for GU10) they aren't too bad (compared to the coloured Philips Hue which are €60/bulb). However as you say, it would be great if the bulbs would just do this themselves.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#56

Post by CalRobert »

afarrell wrote: post #35
Symbiote wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to Ikea. They have about four bulbs for each socket (pear and candle, dim and bright), and the ones I bought a year ago are very good. I think they have more incentive to sell good quality bulbs than the average store, since they sell the fitting and market being environmentally friendly. Of the ones I bought, some were made in China and some in Germany.

There are some US states whithout an IKEA, such as Maine. Incidentally, in Maine, incandescent light bulbs are almost 100% efficient for much of the year as they produce both light and heat.

100% is a bit of a deceptive claim, since 1) we can exceed 100% with heat pumps, and 2) pretty much _every_ electrical appliance in an enclosed space is 100% efficient at converting energy to heat. 3) For the most part, the electricity being used to power those incandescents is produced with 25-50% efficiency. Burning gas to make heat to run a turbine to produce electricity to transmit it to your home to heat a coil to make light is not very efficient. Ideally it's combined-cycle (waste heat boils water to spin another turbine) but it's still not as good as just burning that gas in your furnace.

My apartment, lovely as it is, has vile, ancient, horrible resistive electric storage heaters. I live in a somewhat cold climate. I suck it up and pay for renewably-sourced electricity to assuage the guilt because there's no way I'm going to win in a fight to install heat pumps or gas-fired heating with my landlord.

In this limited scenario, incandescents make sense. If I owned this place those hunk-of-crap heaters would be in the skip tomorrow and all the incandescent bulbs with them.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#57

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #29
userbinator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions CFLs and LED lamps, which are definitely subject to the same engineering pressures: This would result in increases of candlepower of 11 and 16 percent respectively.” That boost in illumination, he suggested, “would be acceptable to all flashlight users” despite the fact that the higher current would shorten not just the bulb’s life but also the battery’s. The cartel’s justification for these chan…

Not saying you're speeding FUD, but do you have any sources discussing CPUs (or GPUs) lasting only a few years? In my experience, desktop, server, and mobile CPUs work fine after 10 years, and I'd expect the same of current tech.

No FUD, just physics. The parent comment mentioned electromigration[1].

From the Wikipedia article:

Electromigration is the transport of material caused by the gradual movement of the ions in a conductor due to the momentum transfer between conducting electrons and diffusing metal atoms. The effect is important in applications where high direct current densities are used, such as in microelectronics and related structures. As the structure size in electronics such as integrated circuits (ICs) decreases, the practical significance of this effect increases.

It remains to be seen how long modern CPUs (ICs in general) last. My i5 laptop is still running at 3 years, so there's that.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

frik wrote: post #28

Removing light bulbs from retail market and enforcing mercury based CFLs - that was the latest act of such a cartel. Good the the paradigm shift to LED was quicker and different then they hoped. Now Philips, GE and OSRAM are a shadow of its former self, and little players in the LED industry. And Asian build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer. (well probably all LEDs are built there anyway, even t…

> And Asian build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer.

I'd like to believe that. I got burned by so many cheap Chinese LEDs (quite literally, too - some common failure modes of LED bulbs have them getting almost as hot as incandescent ones) that now I'm willing to pay premium to be sure the bulb won't turn into disco stroboscope after two days of usage.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

alex_duf wrote: post #50

I can't believe an LED that adapts the colour temperature to the time of the day like F.lux does isn't a standard yet. LEDs are great but boy are they agressive to the eyes. (Yes that's a bit unrelated, I figured I'd rant and hope some poeple starts mass proucing it thanks to my message)

I changed my apartment recently and replaced all bulbs with Hue. Thanks for another idea to my list of hacks I'm trying to implement on them. Hue has a nice RESTful API that works over local network - I so far managed to get Tasker on Android to talk into it, and I'm moving to build a more advanced control centre on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)

#60

Post by randallsquared »

svantana wrote: post #49

Related: I have noted over the years that incandescents with dimmer switches basically never burn out, and those with normal switches tend to break during the first second of being switched on. That's led me to the following thought: would it be possible to build a bulb with a built-in fade-in, either via bandpass/lowpass filtering or some sort of fading mechanism?

I promise you that bulbs on dimmer switches do burn out. I just bought a house and the kitchen light on a dimmer switch burned out within a week of my moving in. No idea about the age of the bulb, so it's not very good data, but... Sadly, it's apparently still a crapshoot whether any given LED bulb works without flicker on any given dimmer of unknown design; I have only found those with flicker so far.
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