Do you use low-energy bulbs that look like this?
 

Do you use low-energy bulbs that look like this? :
http://img02.picoodle.com/img/img02/...im_b722562.jpg

If so, did you know that these bulbs should not be disposed of like ordinary light bulbs? Fluorescent light bulbs, such as these low-energy bulbs, contain small amounts of mercury, which can then sink into the soil and pose a health risk to humans and animals if they are thrown out in your dumpster. These bulbs should either be sent back to the manufacturer, if they have a return program, or disposed of like electronic waste.

Speaking of which, do you throw out your old computers? Computer and television monitors contain large amounts of lead, along with other chemicals like cadmium and chromium, which would also be damaging if they entered a landfill (and, like the bulbs, they often do). Computers themselves contain trace amounts of lead, cadmium, and chromium. Thus, these items should be disposed of at an electronic or toxic waste disposal site.

It's also worth mentioning - a lot of the electronic recycling places that take your electronics for free simply ship them (for a profit) to China or another country, where they are harvested for their trace valuable metals, and the toxic stuff pollutes their land. Remember hearing about how a lot of products from China contain lead? A lot of this lead, and other chemicals, come from the hundreds of thousands of tons of electronic waste that we ship to them every year, through these so-called e-waste recyclers.

This is why I have electronic corpses piling up in my study.

Some city somewhere needs to take the lead on this and offer "electronics" disposal along with their regular garbage services...

Gadget Recycling Boosts Dioxins in Mothers' Milk

Exported E-waste Results in "Environmental Wasteland"

'Crush and Zap' Recycles Circuit Boards More Cleanly

I use such a lamp on my terrarium for my Pond slider. I didn't know that one shouldn't dispose of such lamps in usual way.
How should I dispose of this lamp when it is broken?

Halifax doesn't collect electronic waste from the curb, but does have a number of recycling centers scattered around that will take TVs, computers, fluorescents, CRTs, and old interface cards for recycling. I recently took 4 old CRTs and 4 old Mac corpses, and a box full of electronic bits and pieces there (having first drilled 3 holes each through all the hard drive platters -- I wanted to take them apart, but didn't have the tiny torx tools required).

I kept my old SE/30 and was amazed to find that when I hooked it up to my LAN (it has an ethernet card in it) it could still serve the websites it once served long ago (MacHTTP is the server, Sys 7.5.5 is running it). I kept an old PowerBook 3400c as well because it's small and still works running Sys 9.0.

Aren't LED lights more environmentally friendly, as well as more power efficient?
http://www.besthomeledlighting.com/
http://www.ledwaves.com/home.php?cat=103
http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/index.aspx

It seems to me that if governments really wanted to do something positive, they'd provide significant tax incentives to buy the most efficient/environmentally friendly lights while discouraging the use of the least efficient with higher taxes.

I think that the sales life of the double helix fluorescents is limited anyway.

• They are environmentally unfriendly. (Hg content)
• Their bases won't fit into standard 2-1/4" glass lampshades.
• They are unsuited to X-10 and other electronic lamp controls (resistive load only).
• They don't start well outdoors in cold weather.
• They dim significantly long before they burn out.
• Their inductance makes them less power factor friendly
• Their multi-year warranties are virtually useless -- where would you return it -- how would you prove its age?

When LED lamp prices come down enough (and they will) they'll be the obvious replacement.

I'm with NovaScotian on all points, including terrible color rendition.

I shun those horrible bulbs. I am waiting for them to come out with LED-based light bulbs.

Check out the links in my post above. They're already available, but they tend to cost more than compact florescent. That's why I think there need to be tax breaks on them. Throw in a tax increase on incandescent, and you would see a rapid switch over.

I have a bunch of those, mostly on the boat where power usage is critical. If you think colors look bad with CFL, you will certainly hate LED. You can get LEDs in the "warm white" range that mimic halogen, but they are much more expensive, give off less light, and are still limited in color spectrum.

Many of them work fine with X-10. I have the Ikea bulbs in several X-10 controlled lamps.

They've been working on the color. The last batch of CFLs I bought have excellent color. They are brighter than the incandescents they replaced, using much less wattage, and I was surprised that the light was quite pleasing.

That said, NovaScotian is right. Don't worry too much about CFLs as they are clearly a transitional technology and a few years from now we'll all be buying bulbs based on something like LEDs which will be better all around.

One of the factors for LEDs aside from their dreadful color rendition, even compared to a CFL, is that they are simply not bright enough.

One of the unfortunate consequences of aging is that the "ASA rating" of your retinas declines -- I read years ago that you lose the equivalent of one f-stop every 13 years (one f-stop is a factor of two in retinal sensitivity) which is why you could make movies in our kitchen and den and why your mother always thought you'd ruin your eyes reading in the dark. A secondary effect of aging is that you lose contrast sensitivity as well -- your ability to discern the edges of fuzzy images declines. Finally, as your ocular lens hardens with age, your focal range declines (assuming correction for normal presbyopia i.e., arms getting too short to read a phonebook), and bright lights stop your irises down for a better depth of field.

Without bright lights, us older folks can't see worth a damn. We've got a number of CFLs, but my wife, whose vision isn't quite as good as mine, hates them.

@CAlvarez: the electronically controllable CFLs (capable of dimming) cost 2x what the already expensive CFLs cost here.

You know, this is the reason I don't use those lightbulbs. With the classic ones, trashing them will do. I have too many corpses of electronics lying around as it is.

Hold off on LEDs for a little bit...
 

LEDs are just starting to catch up to fluorescent bulbs. According to Energy Star, the average Energy Star certified CFL ranges in luminous efficiency between 45 to 75 lm/W. Split the difference and call it 60 lm/W for the average CFL. The Luxeon K2 high-power LED (one of the leaders for high efficiency, high power LEDs) has a luminous efficiency of 55 lm/W. Keep in mind that Lumileds is one of the leaders in high-efficiency LEDs, so this number is not the average, but on the high side. LEDs are definitely more efficient than incandescents though. In a year or two, LEDs should overtake CFLs.

I don't know enough about the end-of-life pollution that results from the disposal of LEDs vs fluorescents, but suffice to say that LEDs are not innocuous when it comes to pollution. FABs and packaging houses are pretty bad for the environment themselves. It would be pretty interesting to see what the total environmental footprint of LEDs vs CFLs is over the course of their respective useful lifetimes.

I don't think you're doing the environment too many favours by sticking with incandescents. They have terrible luminous efficiencies, ranging from 11 to 17 lm/W!

I heard the incandescents are going to be discontinued soon. Is this true?

Not if the shelves of local stores in Vancouver are any indication! They still outnumber fluorescent bulbs on the shelves 10-to-1! I haven't heard anything to this effect, but I don't imagine that fluorescent bulbs are currently produced in high enough quantity to phase out incandescents quite yet.

Some counterarguments:

60 lm/W represents BOL efficiency. EOL efficiency is quite a bit less, probably about a third or a quarter of that based on (admittedly unscientific) observation. This yields a mean efficiency of roughly 30 lm/W. Further, I have always had quality issues with CFLs: it seems that >10% of the ones I've brought home were either DOA or died within the first few hours of use. I have no idea if the ones that survive do have the claimed longer lifetimes, as I've had to replace them due to insufficient light output within shorter intervals than incandescent lifetimes even though they still "worked".

LED efficiency of 55 lm/W is over a range of wavelengths, a large fraction of which (again, unscientific observation) do not provide "comfortably useful" light (e.g., for reading). I don't know what the efficiency levels of LEDs is for the same wavelengths that incandescents produce, but it's gotta be significantly lower.

if one considers the purchase price, the actual useful lifetime, the usable light output, etc., from purely a consumer point of view, the important number is not expressed in lm/W but in $/(useful lm-hours).

Just based on personal experience, I believe that while CFLs and LEDs are undoubtedly a step in the right direction from an energy efficiency point of view, putting my own spin on what Styrafome wrote earlier, they are still "not there yet" as a a completely viable replacement for incandescents.

You must be buying the cheap ones. The ones that I use diminish by maybe 25% over the course of their useful lifetime - enough that I can tell when I put a new one in, but not so much that it feels like I'm living in a cave. I have only ever installed one DOA and mine tend to last a year or more before needing to be replaced. I have kids who turn the lights on and off quite a bit, so others might even get better mileage than me.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. "White light" is a range of wavelengths. That is the nature of light. You may be complaining about the white point of the light (where it is centered in the colour spectrum), but you can't talk about efficiency and white point at the same time - it doesn't make sense. Also, you can get fluorescent lights that have different white points (warmer = yellower, cooler = bluer).

I wish:(. Apparently, it isn't only in the computer arena where early adopters can get shafted.

I bought two dozen of them a few years ago at somewhat over 5 bucks apiece (sale price !!!), trying to do my bit for the environment. My thinking was that when the incandescents that were installed failed, I'd replace them with the CFLs. At the time, I had maybe a half dozen or so spare incandescent bulbs.

Long story short, I've used up all of those CFLs, but I still have two of the original spare incandescents left. Only when I used up all the CFLs, did I start back in on the original incandescent spares.

I've recently noticed that CFLs are now much cheaper than when I bought them a few years ago, so maybe I'll give them another shot, although I'm still leery. I hope that CFL technology has improved over the past couple of years.

A few years ago the good ones were going for $15 a piece, so I would call $5 cheap! That being said, even the best ones that I know of are below $10 now.

Something to consider regarding computer and electronic waste recycling (mentioned in a couple posts above) - where and how is this recycling done? Take a look at some of these pictures and read this article from National Geographic. Makes you pause and scratch your head a little - especially the picture that shows an Indian man melting lead in the same dish that he uses to cook supper because he can't afford the equipment necessary to do the job properly!

What I mean is that the light output of LED lamps that I have tried is extremely uncomfortable for me to read by. Although the illumination is bright, I don't consider it "useful" for certain activities.

I'm not certain it's a white point issue per se; it is related to the variation of light intensity over the entire visible range. To the best of my understanding, the problem with LEDs is that there is a high peak and a much steeper fall off which results in a much larger intensity gradient over the visible range than what exists for incandescents. (may not be quite right, memory gets fuzzy:()

You're correct about the efficiency in terms of total output, but I consider "useful efficiency" (a subjective, non-scientific measure) to be more applicable when considering value. For example, if I find it difficult to read with LED light, the efficiency in terms of lm/W is of zero value to me; if I'd use the LED for outside area illumination, then the lm/W is important.

In my old flat (UK), the incandescent bulbs I used to use, would blow all too soon.
I now use florescent.

They last forever.. well close to.
They are not as bright as the incandescent bulbs, but do the job.
I had heard about the Mercury in them, I vaguely remember the advice was councils where supposed to take them if put in your recycle box.
So I put a couple of dead ones in my recycle box.

If the council could not recycle them, they would have left them and taken everything else. The where taken, all that was left was a box made of plastic, which was the wrong type of plastic it turns out...

Also over here I think that incandescent bulbs will be phased out in a few years by law.

We've got them all over the house. I hate the stinkin' things. They do not put out as much light as advertised... hard to read by. They tend to last a little longer, but no where near the time printed on the box. They seem to have a high defect rate... crackling sound if you screw one in all the way, one that continuously goes on and off every 10 minutes (too lazy to replace). Noticed no change in the elec bill once I put them in everywhere. The things are expensive!

Can't put them in the trash, and city has no place to recycle. My garage is filling up with crap I can't get rid of easily.... paint, old batteries, flourescent lights and on and on.

So, of course, we must make these things mandatory. It is the socially responsible thing to do!

Rereading this thread, I'd say that the consensus is this:

• Using more efficient lighting is the "right" thing to do for the environment.
• Most of us have yet to find an alternative to incandescent lamps that provides enough light in wavelengths we prefer to read by.
• The manufacturers of CFD's lie through their teeth about life, reliability, recyclability, and color (warm isn't).
• All forms of "efficient" lighting are waay more expensive than incandescent bulbs and at this point, don't meet their lifetime guarantees.

I have a bunch of them in the basement (my office and my workshop) because those lights tend to get left on. We use a mixture in the den, but have to replace the CFDs long before their life is over to restore brightness. We don't use them anywhere else, and probably won't.

I think it would be good to remember that incandescent bulbs weren't very bright or reliable for decades after they were first developed. Even today, they're not nearly as reliable as we'd like.

I see buying CFs and LEDs as an investment that we all need to make so that they can be developed as quickly as possible.

I agree, and in 12 places where they work for me, I have installed CFs and quite a few tube-type fluorescent lights. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of of other lights and lamps in my home where available CF's just don't work -- in a size that gives off enough light they won't fit where an incandescent will (and does), or they show above the top of a glass shade because they're too tall, or the light isn't nearly warm enough for comfortable reading or shaving, or you can't sort socks because the color is all wrong --- etc.

The problem for someone like me is that I grew up under incandescent lights in homes with big windows -- I have expectations of what things should look like (including my face). I own antique table and standing lamps, ceiling fixtures, chandeliers, and wall sconces that won't receive a CFD because its base is too fat (and they're way too ugly). I'm certainly not going to redecorate my home to accommodate a lamp style that probably won't last anyway.

I have a couple of warm white ring-shaped fluorescent lights for which replacement bulbs are no longer available so when they burn out (and they're getting dark spots at the electrodes), I'll have to replace them with incandescent lights -- the double-helix type CF won't fit because when I installed them in the first place, I had to modify the lamps a bit -- I've had to modify a few others to receive CFs by moving their sockets up, but that's not always possible.

Until CFs or LEDs meet two standards, they aren't going to be as widely used as incandescent bulbs: they have to fit where the bulb they replace was, and they have to come in true broad spectrum warm white frosted envelopes.

By "coming out" with LED lamps, I meant to say "perfect", that is, make it cost efficient through mass production, lumen output per bulb, and color rendition.

I was able to purchase a package of LED night lamps which I have been pretty happy with. I found the intense blue tint a bit too much, so I wrapped a sunlight filter gel around it and now it is a bit nicer on the eyes.

Those were the cheap ones. Good ones were three times that, and are just now getting to be under $10.