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11/30/09
LED FTW
11/30/09
11/30/09
Now that no one prints emails to read anymore, we are just groping around most of the time. It has led to some uncomfortable lectures around "harassment"...but we are getting off-topic.
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
I hate CFL bulbs - their form factor doesn't work on anything that counts on the shape of a light bulb (for example, lamps with a shade that clips to the bulb), the light is harsh, and does technically flicker - if your eyes are spasming from looking at computer screens under old fluorescent tubes all day, a CFL is all it takes to set them off again. What's worse is they usually buzz, resonate, or even whine due to the necessary cheap integrated power adapters (though if a fixture was built from the ground up with this in mind and all you had to plug in was the tube, this could be solved...)
I'm waiting for an LED solution, as colour temperature can be adjusted, and not every light has to give off the freaky blue-yellow white that is common in white LEDs (you can combine red, green, and blue for example for much nicer light - and then tune it to the colour you want.) There will still be the issue of cheap integrated power adapters though, and for that all I can say is... don't cheap out and get the cheapest alternative lighting you can, or you may well have something to complain about... hopefully there will be a line nice enough to actually use in a house, even if it may cost $60 per bulb... it also shouldn't cost that much as some scientists have found a way to grow the gallium nitride crystals on a substrate of silicon instead of the traditional sapphire.
11/30/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
Needless to say I have thrown a few flashlights in my day.
11/30/09
11/30/09
Let's say every watt-hour of power that you consume costs $x. That amount includes the cost to produce that energy plus 'some' profit that's held by the electric company. No where in that cost do you pay the $y that are required to suck the smog produced in producing that electricity. Neither do you pay any amount toward cleaning up the environment in still other important ways.
Thus, even if you can afford to pay the bill that you currently get, you probably couldn't afford to pay the TRUE cost for that energy.
I'll use an example to make my point clear. A couple years ago, back when gas was around $2/gallon (in the US) there was a study done. This study was done by economists with no real bias. They measured the external cost incurred by society for every gallon of gas burned at the time. They calculated that for every $2 gallon of gas burned it cost society $8 to clean up the resulting mess. You read that right. Back when gas cost $2/gallon, we should have been paying $10/gallon.
This analysis was for the US, but most countries of the world (if not all) don't clean up their environmental footprint and neither do they charge the appropriate fees.
Assuming the ratio 'works' for electricity (and it's very likely it does), could you afford to pay FOUR TIMES your current electric bill? If you can answer that with a straight face, then go ahead and continue down that path. But keep in mind that you'd have to keep three times your monthly electric bill in a savings bank for when you finally have to pay th . e piper
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
I was explaining the results of an academic article written by experts in the field of environmental economics. To discount the results found by researchers such as you have would set all of humanity back a hundred years. I'm completely serious about this. In no way is it appropriate to just outrightly discount the work of a whole discipline. To do so is like saying a clockmaker has no idea how to make a clock. It's simple lunacy.
Further, I'm not saying he can't buy whatever he wants with his money. That's the great thing of money. Once two people come to a price, so be it. The only problem is that some goods damage the environment in ways that society at some point must pay. We already 'pay' for increased smog levels with acid rain, lowered overall air quality, increased incidents of asthma, and so many other nasties. It's impossible to say that all of those factors are free to fix.
If you still believe that humankind is powerless over 'nature' consider the story of DDT. DDT was long used as a pesticide against mosquitoes to stop the spread of malaria. Well, that went on for a while until people (scientists) realized it was making the shells of bird eggs thin. The thin eggs lead to drastically decreasing bird populations. Had DDTs continued to be used we would have lost many bird species.
Of note, farmers used DDTs as a pesticide. To further establish my point, no doubt the cost of purchasing and distributing DDTs was included in the prices of those farmers' goods. What couldn't be included in the prices of those goods (because no farmer was charged) was the cost to society of the deaths of birds.
Look, what I'm not saying is that ye olde' light bulb is evil and should be outlawed. It shouldn't. But the market doesn't reward energy efficiency like it rewards economic efficiency. For that reason, correcting the market price for the added shadow costs of these older technologies SHOULD happen. If that were the case then society could use normal market processes to decide just how much environmental damage it will tolerate.
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
Congratulations, you've reached epic fail status.
12/01/09
x^a-1 * y^b-1 * (1-x-y)^c-1
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
At least, they aren't more natural. At best, they're an approximation of fire, man's most primitive artificial light source (artificial in the sense that we harnessed it and used it for light), but they are not any more or less artificial than LEDs. If you want to talk color temperature and lighting angles- If anything, LEDs will actually bring us closer to "natural" light. There's way more that can be done with LEDs in terms of fixtures and integration into our homes and workplaces that optimize the effect lighting has on our lives (and it IS a big effect)
11/30/09
11/30/09
Certainly LEDs aren't identical to the Sun's output in terms of range of color, but they provide far more of the range than tungsten bulbs do.
I think the problem here is that everyone thinks LED white is the same as fluorescent white. I don't have evidence to back this up, but I am assuming LED white-light has a broader color spectrum than fluorescent white. This would make everything look richer and more detailed, despite still being white light (though I agree, for the home I prefer warmer light temperatures, with cooler temperatures for work).
11/30/09
They can do better colour by mixing red, green, and blue - in which case you have three peaks - a very specific red, very specific green, and very specific blue, but it is a big improvement over blue-yellow.
So LEDs CAN, at best, provide a much nicer more usable spectrum than fluorescents (ultraviolet, fluoresced to "white"), but they do not (I won't say can not...) provide nearly the same spectral range as an incandescent.
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
This article has the graphs I'd been talking about and a lot more background information:
[en.wikipedia.org]
This one calls itself full spectrum, but is more like a bit of 4 bands mixed across the spectrum:
[www2.electronicproducts.com]
About 40% down, this article has a nice overlaid graph of the spectra of different light sources:
[www.olympusmicro.com]
As you can see incandescent is much more inclusive and smoother transitioning, but also contains far less blue, and leans heavily toward reds - it's not true white, but it has a bit of most (or all?) of the visible spectrum, and is generally the benchmark for home lighting, so even with a perfectly white light source most people would probably say it made their home look strange.
This page has a nice graph of a sample from a CFL bulb, though like LEDs, they may vary based on how they're made - they basically specifically target colours they want it to emit.
[motls.blogspot.com]
11/30/09
You get a heart-click for the time you took linking all this.
11/30/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
Sure it's expensive now, but it will be a lot cheaper in the near future.
11/26/09
11/26/09
11/26/09
11/26/09
11/26/09
11/10/09