- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- green@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- green@lemmy.ml
Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.
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Why are Republicans mad about it?!
When are they aren’t mad? LOL they can die mad for all I care.
Because they were born.
because they think we should be burning whale oil
Because imagining that someone might have a legitimate reason to want a product or service that a regulator might not have thought of is currently a “Republican” trait in the US.
Tradition
I wonder if this will have any effect on the film industry…
I would think they’ll be mostly over to LED by now.
I had always used incandescent bulbs in practicals but now there are LED bulbs made specifically for film sets. Household LED bulbs are usually a mess on camera with ugly color spikes and/or flickering.
I’ve been lighting almost exclusively with LED these days aside from some HMI’s, but even those are starting to get LED competition, at least for smaller ones.
Thanks for your response! If you light events with broadcast cameras, I am the annoying video engineer behind the camera controls asking about flicker and color balance. I hope they keep making y’all’s specialty bulbs. Looks like there’s a big list of exceptions!
Look at the Power Factor (PF) and Colot Reproduction Index (CRI) of the LED light bulb.
If the former is something like 50% then it means it has a cheap power rectifier inside (little more than a bunch of diodes) which doesn’t at all filter the power fluctuating nature of AC (basically all it does is make the negative side of the sinusoidal wave that’s AC become positve and leaves the whole voltage variance from 0 to max and back untouched) hence the flickering.
The latter quite literally tells you how good the colors look under that lighting. You want at least 90%, with more being better.
Mind you, nowadays CRI is usually not a problem, but the whole cheap power rectification inside the bulb generally is (because a basic power rectifier can cut 10% or more of the manufacturing price of a lightbulb).
Cri is a common specification I see, even if I suspect lots of lying. Where do you find PF information? I don’t remember ever seeing it on any bulb packaging before.
Yeah, that’s the problem: PF is not mandatory to be in the packaging so it’s not usually there.
If you buy online, sometimes you can find it in the product information section.
I’ve noticed that the “usual chinese sellers” will mention it if it’s good (say, 80%) but not when it’s the cheap-converter one (50%).
Alternativelly when looking for the bulbs not likely to flicker you might also look for the “dimmable” ones, as the abiloty for a light lamp to support an external dimmer requirex a better power converter inside the bulb.
The U.S. is pretty late with this, compared to the European Union. Only a few special bulbs are still sold here. Apart from that, the only allowed lighting technology is LED.
This applies to all the things, unfortunately. It must be nice to have a functional union. Even though I’m sure it’s not perfect, progress is made at a decent pace. Our country is hijacked by a cruel/angry/illiterate cult every 1-2 elections, it’s not ideal.
Tell that to the bar I was at last night in Palermo. They had a string of festoon lights going down the laneway and every one of them was incandescent. I noticed the same in Taormina. In fact, Italy seems pretty far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to environmental concerns…but that’s for another thread.
I think to update the string of lights you’d need to change transformer. Household bulbs have a driver in the bulb that converts the 230V to the ~12V the bulb uses. But for that string of lights, they’d need to get an electrician (or someone who knows what they’re doing)
While you may need to replace the whole strand, and can’t just swap in individual bulbs, the strand itself has the resistors needed to let the LEDs function, instead of the individual bulbs.
Are you sure they were incandescent bulbs and not just LED bulbs copying the incandescent style? They make a lot of decorative LED bulbs now with straight sections of LEDs to imitate the glowing wire of an incandescent.
Are you talking about an Edison bulb?
Having grown up in the era of incandescent bulbs I remember the fancy white bulbs made with frosted glass being more expensive than the totally transparent ones you could see the glowing filament inside, because the filament was irritating to look at and the frosted ones smoothed out the light for you.
I’m very amused that we’re now jumping through hoops to make skinny LEDs that can fake the look of the old filaments nobody wanted to look at back then, and those are now the fancy expensive ones.
This is one example of the LED bulbs I was describing, but there’s plenty of different styles of these being made
Definitely. I’m an electrician, so my eyes are usually drawn to these type of things. Light fittings, outlets, switches, etc.
They are not sold anymore, but whatever is left and working can still be used. Many people also bought a ton of incandescents before the selling stopped (tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)
tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)
narrator voice: “but it was not”
It generally is though. The look of incandescent and halogen is only rivaled by high end LEDs.
nah. in my experience, even cheaper LED bulbs from discounters can nicely replace old bulbs.
It’s true that what “el-cheapo product” once was done by simply reducing lifetime is currently done with looks.
It can be. Cheap LED lights with low quality AC rectifiers are awful. If those are your point of comparison then yes, incandescent light is better (more steady).
Of course that difference goes away if you just get a better LED light.
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Even the “cheap” LED bulbs are still many times more expensive than incandescent, and incandescent will give much better light than poor quality LED.
The LED bulbs have a higher up front cost, but ive not come across a single instance where an incandescent was cheaper when factoring electricity costs.
yeah, i was referring to current tech. First LED or those mercury vapor bulbs were basically useless.
You can definitely get “current” LED bulbs with bad hardware inside still today. See: Everything made by NOMA.
You could also get ultra cheap crappy incendescant bulbs in the past.
Some also have terrible CRI. Nothing like giving everything a subtle green or purple tint.
Maybe they still run on “new old stock” bulbs until they are used up. But even if they do, they clearly didn’t do the math. I’ve upgraded all my lighting to LED and binned all my incandescent stock.
I’m sitting inside a house where, presently, all lights turned on at the same time will require 30w. Before we went through all the lights, a single lightbulb would use 45w.
Just by replacing the old light bulbs, we reduced energy consumption and the number of lights required to light a room.
Specialty lights are still being sold. Plenty of British pubs have special incandescent lights. They are usually quite dim.
how long until there’s a right wing black market for incandescent bulbs like gas stoves prob…
My right wing dad already stocked up
“F*ck efficiency!”
Actually very on brand. hmm…
Let’s be real here, people have switched to LEDs a long time before this ban happened. But that’s a good thing, and kind of the whole point of the timeline of this ban.
You want the market to decide on its own that LEDs are superior and then give it time to slowly switch over. Setting a ban and then forcing people to switch in 3 months to some new lighting technology is only going to build resentment from certain groups. Setting a ban that is 5, 10, 15 years out is the smart way of doing it. The thinking is that by then, the superior product will have already taken over the older tech and people won’t be up-in-arms over the big bag gob’ment telling them what to do.
Every chunk of positive social progress has “built resentment from certain groups.” Those people eventually either get over themselves and join modern society in doing the thing properly, or die mad. The rest of us are fine either way.
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Doors anyone have a recommendation for LEDs that don’t constantly flicker and can dim without going out whenever my AC kicks on?
Once they got the white light spectrum figured out I was fine with switching to leds. Less power, don’t get hot, last longer.
Well… only 11 yrs after EU… That’s not so bad.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_08_1909
for real though… as an American I would love if we were 11 years behind the EU in lots of other areas
You’re 11 years behind us in energy prices as well, so make the most of it.
Yep. Even Canada banned most common incandescent bulbs in 2014 and 2015.
Where do we get light bulbs now for our ovens and other specialty locations that require the old incandescent light bulb?
I live in the UK where they’ve been banned as part of the EU directive since 2016. What I can tell you is that you can still get incandescent light bulbs for an oven. I bought one probably a year ago for mine.
There is likely an exception in the law for this.
RTFA. There are a whole list of exceptions, and appliance bulbs are the first bullet point.
Specialty bulbs are still produced but even those are shrinking.
I recently bought a very low power/low lumen LED light bulb and it was rated for refrigerator and other low temperature use.
Hoven lamps will eventually suffer the same fate.
Incandescent oven bulbs will probably not be replaced, simply because there is no reason for it. The “wasted” energy from an incandescent bulb is expelled as heat, and extra heat in an oven is not a problem. You can describe the bulb in an oven as a tiny heater that just happens to give off a bit of light.
In fact, I use my oven as a proofing chamber for bread making in the winter. Turn on the oven light and leave your dough in there to proof, keeps it at a nice ~25 C.
I would recommend you to buy a dedicated proofer. It provides not only accurate temperature control, but also humidity control. It’s the best investment if you’re serious about bread making.
I tend not to collect single purpose devices as they take up too much space in my limited storage, and a warm cabinet made by my oven light is good enough for some homemade sourdough which we make about once a week.
Well, my proofer is not a single use device. It allows me to ferment multitude of foods, slow cook things and also works as a sous vide. But yeah, if you bake just for fun and not very serious about it, then you don’t need it.
Is it just like a temp controlled cabinet?
Specialty bulbs are still produced but even those are shrinking.
I recently bought a very low power/low lumen LED light bulb and it was rated for refrigerator and other low temperature use.
Hoven lamps will eventually suffer the same fate.
LED bulbs for refrigerators and freezers are pretty easy to design since the lower temperatures will let the LEDs run more efficiently. Oven lamps might never get LEDs because normal solder starts to melt around 350F and will soften around 200F so unless they start making the bulbs with exotic and expensive solder we will never see LEDs in the oven.
They don’t need to put the light inside the oven. Light pipes are a thing. It’s obvious that it would cost less to put the fixture inside the oven, so that’s probably why we have to put up with incandescent bulbs inside the oven, instead of a better solution that would probably last the life of the oven.
You mean appliance bulbs? They’re a different thing all together
…please don’t tell me you’ve been putting regular incandescent bulbs in places that need appliance bulbs
Incandescent bulbs were banned in the eu loooong time ago, I simply go to store and buy a new oven bulb when it pops. Yes they are still incandescent, because there are exceptions in the law.
There are exceptions, like in the European Union.
This was my first thought.
can we ban standard time and permanently switch to DST now too?
i thought we did?
oh fuck me we didn’t
Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent, although several senators stated later that they would have objected if they had known that the bill could pass. No iteration of the bill has passed the House.
WTF? Why the heck would those people have wanted it to fail and why would they vote for it if they did?
And since it got unanimous consent in the Senate, why the heck didn’t it go to the house? It’s the rare case of a bill that I think everyone likes.
To appease voters
Tell me your government is fundamentally broken without telling me…
Ha, do you live in Arizona?
DST is the best thing ever. Who doesn’t want more daylight after work?
Oh yay it’s bright at 4am in the morning when I’m asleep.
What about 4am in the evening?
Just pick a time and stick with it
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I took a look at the article and I came out with two points:
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finally! Congratulations! Join the rest of the world where changing a freaking lightbulb costs you no mental pain.
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left handed light bulbs? Are these a thing? Are these purpose built for specific applications, like counter clock wise screws?
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Light bulb stealing whores
Never crossed my mind to look for such kind of bulb but I’d risk I won’t be able to find it in the local market.
If safety/security is a concern, lights are simply placed at hard to reach locations or are bought with safety housings, which are fairly cheap. In extremis, instead of common voltage bulbs, high voltage are used, thus incompatible with household voltage.
And specific purpose lamps… I may be the odd one but there are other sockets available in the market. Why opt for the basis threaded one?
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What is not banned?
Surprisingly, there is a whole slew of exempt special-purpose bulbs that will continue to be manufactured, according to the Energy Department. Here’s what manufacturers can still build and stores can continue selling:
- Appliance lamps, including fridge and oven lights
- Black lights
- Bug lamps
- Colored lamps
- Infrared lamps
- Left-handed thread lamps
- Plant lights
- Floodlights
- Reflector lamps
- Showcase lamps
- Traffic signals
- Some other specialty lights, including marine lamps and some odd-sized bulbs
I mean, good for the effort, but that’s still a lot of exceptions.
If you still have a fridge or oven that takes incandescent bulbs, isn’t it better to replace the bulb than the fridge? If the point is minimal environmental impact then I think that makes sense.
That’s true, but that’s also still a lot of incandescent light bulbs. I guess you have to compromise somewhere, for now at least.
Well sure but you could just replace it with an LED bulb…
Edit: missed the word oven. My question is just for fridges
I don’t think you can put an LED bulb in an oven, well I mean I guess you could try but good luck with that, I don’t imagine it would last very long at all.
You can put an LED bulb in a fridge though, I put LEDs in mine. I don’t really need to worry that much about my oven though because it’s a small oven and doesn’t have a light in there to begin with.
I mean why would you force LEDs for ovens in the first place. The place they are in is supposed to get hot. And that’s what the ineffeciency in incandescent light bulbs normally is. They get hot. Doesn’t seam like an issue that they make the place that’s supposed to get hot hot.
The enefficiency is that they take up nearly a magnitude more power and last a fraction of the time, meaning you have to manufacture 20x more of them.
Having said that, I’m not sure if I support this change. People are already switching light bulbs naturally. It saves energy, doesn’t heat up, and lasts longer. You don’t really need much more incentive than that. I wonder if this will have any meaningful impact whatsoever. And if it doesn’t, why are we banning items for no societal benefit?
Apparently they do have a long list of exemptions, at least. I think legislative focus would be better spent on increasing renewable energy production. Solar, hydro, wind, nuclear.
I don’t know about the energy efficiency, but the life time of the bulb is a variable that they intentionally designed that way. They know how to make an incandescent light bulb that will last indefinitely. The industry colluded with each other to manufacture bulbs that have to be replaced frequently.
…Why not both? It makes sense for it to be illegal to sell a device that consumes more than 6x the power of the equivalent and dies significantly more frequently. I searched for statistics and it seems like 20-30% of bulbs sold are incandescent. That means well over half the energy consumption of light bulbs still comes from them. It’s low hanging fruit that can have an almost immediate impact, even if it’s not enough on its own.
Those 20~30% are likely either a) appliances like people are mentioning. Stoves, fridges, etc. Which have reasons for being incandescent for which the law gives exemptions and b) old bulbs that would have inevitably been changed to incandescent anyway
I really think this law isn’t going to make a significant difference in the % of incandescent bulbs over the next few decades. We’re essentially going to transition at the same rate to a fully LED, whether the law existed or not.
So my question is - what’s the point? We waste political capital and time that could be better spent doing meaningful things. And we can do things that don’t arbitrarily restrict the choices of our citizens.
It’s paying lip service without actually doing anything. Theatre.
Make our energy production 100% renewable and it doesn’t matter in terms of carbon emissions if your bulb uses 4x more energy (of course ignoring production emissions, but just for the sake of rhetoric)
I hate to break it to you, but the heating element in the oven uses a magnitude more energy than that little old incandescent light. And the energy otherwise lost from an incandescent light is lost to heat, which just so happens to be the entire purpose of an oven. So in the case of an oven, there’s actually no more energy lost than the heat it’s already designed to generate.
Besides, have you ever tried putting electronics in an oven? LED’s don’t exactly like heat ya know…
Several of these exceptions are unexpected. Oven light, sure: LEDs can’t survive the heat. That makes sense. Plant lights because you probably need full spectrum. And traffic signals because they’re odd shape and fixtures probably last decades, but the rest?
Bug lights? A regular LED attracts fewer bugs than an incandescent bug light …. Unless they mean an attractant like fora bug zapper
Flood lights? Reflector lights? Fridge lights? Colored lights? Why aren’t these all LED?
Plants don’t need much, if any, green light (they reflect it). LEDs can be made to be full spectrum. I can think of no reason why anyone would want incandescent lights for plants. Even before cheap high power LEDs were a thing, people usually used high pressure sodium lights.
OPs list is wrong, that’s why. DOE revised the definition of a general service lamp in 2022 to include the vast majority of reflector lamps. Bug/appliance/left hand thread/etc are all sold im tiny numbers and therefore exempt.
I was just quoting the article. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the writer knew what they were talking about, which I guess was wrong of me.
That’s totally fair. I happen to know a lot about this topic and didn’t read the article at first, and I also meant OP as in whoever posted the article, not you. I could have been more helpful here, sorry.
Some of these bulbs might be difficult to find in LED and there might be other considerations like shape, heat, dimmer compatibility, etc… Replacing fixtures could represent a significant burden in these cases and thought there are many exceptions listed they likely represent a small percentage of overall usage.
I’ve seen dimmer compatible LEDs and, even better, LED bulbs that have built in control of light intensity and even color. I’ve even seen bulbs capable of playing music through bluetooth!
Shape I don’t really see as a concern, as any shape an incandescent bulb can be produced in, a LED bulb can also be. And then some, as the LEDs can be set up, twisted and bent into some very imaginative shapes and angles.
And heat is not ready a concern. You can touch most LED bulbs with your bare hands with no risk of severe burn. Unless very high wattage is in play, at most, a LED bulb will be warm to the touch.
Try not to dismiss everything so quickly. I came up with those in 5 minutes but a committee of experts could find many more. When the exceptions were written they had a reason. A few examples:
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In a traffic fixture, the heat that the incandescent bulb generates often serves to melt ice, and early traffic fixtures with LEDs did have icing problems. Replacing the fixtures would represent a significant burden.
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An LED wouldn’t survive in an oven and oven lights aren’t on for very long either so what would it matter?
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A bulb in a refrigerator could be exposed to condensation.
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Dimmer compatible LEDs require pulse width modulated dimmers. Incandescent dimmers are often resistance dimmers.
The exception are there to make sure that a $1 part doesn’t render a $1000 appliance inoperable. Replacing the appliance would undoubtedly generate a ton more carbon than using an incandescent and the rule doesn’t say that LED bulbs are prohibited just that incandescent bulbs for those uses are not yet banned.
I’ll also point out that LEDs are made of plastic and essentially become ewaste at the end of their life so there is a trade off to consider too.
LED refrigerator bulbs are already a thing; bought one recently by accident, when looking for a very low power/low brightness for a bed side table.
Those, apparently, are no longer a concern.
Screw in LED bulbs with built in brightness and color control, that you can command from a phone application or through a conventional remote control, are already common, thus rendering conventional dimmers obsolete.
Why keep those? To my very limited knowledge, dimmers can require expensive and extensive installation.
I have seen LED traffic lights with built in anti frost measures and the expenditure to have those replaced is not a good argument to keep that particular use of incandescent lamps around.
LED low power requirements, paired with their long service life, enables traffic lights to be independent from the power grid, through the use of solar panels and batteries, keeping it working even when severe weather disrupts energy distribution. LEDs are also brighter and easier to see from afar.
There may be very particular cases where incandescent bulbs still do not have an alternative but to say they are irreplaceable is a disservice.
I’m not trying to be dismissive, I’m trying to be demanding.
I have a garage door opener and I guess it’s just not shielded well enough because LED light bulbs interfere with the signal from my remote, just one example. I would much rather buy new incandescent bulbs every few years than replace the opener outright.
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And heat is not ready a concern. You can touch most LED bulbs with your bare hands with no risk of severe burn.
This very clearly indicates that you haven’t seriously considered this issue at all, and are just supporting your political faction with no reflection on what the unintended consequences might be.
A common application of incandescent bulbs is to produce heat, for a variety of use cases. The typical example is an improvised chicken incubator.
Consider very carefully why there’s an exception for traffic signals.
This is exactly what I was getting at. There are so many considerations and they clearly put some thought into the exception list even though the reasons may not be readily apparent. The order is not a small step in the right direction it’s a significant step in the right direction and the impact on actual electricity usage is going to be massive.
the impact on actual electricity usage is going to be massive.
Is it?
How many people are still installing new incandescent bulbs in 2023?
Is there an actual study showing the expected costs and benefits of this rule, or is it purely political posturing?
The article had an estimate from the DoE. Idk, be mad about it if you want. LED bulbs aren’t perfect but what is.
“As the rules reinforce existing market changes, the Energy Department believes that U.S. consumers can save almost $3 billion annually on their utility bills. Similarly, it projects that the rules could cut carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next 30 years.”
I can’t find such a study, and it seems extremely unlikely to me that any such study was performed recently. The original law was passed in 2007, and then the regulations were in political limbo for more than a decade.
My base hypotheses here, subject to easy refutation by any real evidence, are that:
- The DOE has looked at no study from after 2007 to justify their current policies.
- This regulation is going into effect now simply because it was on the list of stuff Trump did that the Biden admin reversed.
- The effect on consumer electricity costs and carbon emissions are negligible, since LED bulbs are a decade cheaper and better and almost everyone voluntarily buys them.
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Black lights
Nice.
They’re lights that emit in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum for the purpose of making fluorescent materials light up. To the human eye they don’t look quite black, but more like a darkish purple.
But yeah, I too always found the name deliciously ironic.
This article is dogshit, and those are not the current exemptions. DOE revised the definition of a general service lamp on 2022 to include the majority of reflectors. The rest have miniscule sales and have technical limitations that make LED replacements difficult. It’s not a lot of exemptions. When was the last time you bought a left hand thread or a colored incandescent lamp?
I don’t get the exception for colored incandescent. LEDs come in whatever color you want, or get a smart bulb to change it at will
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You need a history expert for this one. I want to say theft deterrent, and possibly different voltages for niche applications. Also Need Flanders Leftorium.
