It’s Official: US Stores Can No Longer Sell Most Incandescent Lights
It’s Official: US Stores Can No Longer Sell Most Incandescent Lights
New efficiency rules, more than a decade in the making, have taken effect, relegating Edison’s glowing orbs to the history books.
Main link is a gift link which bypasses the NYT paywall for two weeks.
Good riddance. I could always tell how inefficient those bulbs were, simply from trying to touch them to change the bulb. All that heat is wasted energy.
Plus there's a lot of neat things we can do with the new LED bulbs, including adding Wi-Fi circuits to make them smart bulbs. And the price of those LED bulbs is dropped so much, I don't even really worry about the price difference anymore.
5I just found out that my mother has 6 or 7 gigantic moving boxes full of incandescent bulbs in her self storage container.
She tells me they will be needed once the led bulb conspiracy fails. And that they will be worth a lot of money, enough to pay for her retirement.
I can't even
5Wow, I'm sorry. What are her thoughts on flatscreens?
4"Oh, is that so mom? In that case I'd be happy to take over that pesky 401k from you. It must be so annoying managing it anyways now that you have the bulbs, right?"
1Meanwhile, I occasionally see boxes of slightly used bulbs on the curb as people upgrade
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including adding Wi-Fi circuits to make them smart bulbs
That's how you can get your very own botnet, courtesy of some guy in China. Most of these shitty IoT crap never get any updates, and will probably serve most of their life as easy access points into your LAN.
2I quarantine my IoT stuff in their own VLAN. They should be treated as untrusted devices, because they are, same as any BYOD network. Hack away!
1I understand why smart home crap is the way it is, but can't we just re-wire houses so I can have all that stuff be peripherals to a central computer I can keep up to date or rip out and replace with one I trust? make powerline ethernet ones for currently existing homes and have data ports be a part of new electrical codes
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honestly I'd rather a sort of dumb bulb that has dynamically changeable RBG and color temp settings but no wireless features and receives marching orders form a central smart home computer, versus the currently available solutions. I mean there isn't an Ethernet port at every light socket but I don't just want to litter my home with cybersecurity nightmare, proprietary, not easily interoperable random IOT trash.
I'd rather the hardware scattered around be as dumb as possible to do the fun stuff and be only connected to one general purpose computer I can configure and control to my liking. I can keep one PC up to date versus dozens of light bulbs and whatnot, I can insist on fully FOSS so the NSA isn't spying on me through my fucking light bulbs, I can remotely control it with SSH, etc.
you'd have to make an open standard for home wiring to make it work (can we have ethernet in every room for general purpose usage too while we're at it?) but one could jerry rig something with ethernet over power line I'm sure
1Here we heat our homes 70% of the year, I wonder, does that mean the heat was not a energy loss during that time?
1Nope. Same with things like GPUs in winter. OTOH, if you are using AC to cool a place, then you should factor in the cost of cooling into the cost of running the bulbs.
2hypothetically, no. this assumes you were going to use electric resistive heating instead and the outside temperature when you used them was about when you used the bulbs. overall it's better to just get efficient bulbs anyways so you aren't wasting energy in the summer. I delayed replacing my last CFL because of this
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I'm assuming heat lamps for reptile enclosures are also exempt. It still kind of sucks because home incandescent bulbs were just as good for heat and a lot cheaper.
1Damn. There are no LED's that can be put into enclosures, right? I suppose that's a worthwhile sacrifice to avoid idiots from sticking to incandescents.
0I use all LEDs in my home and aside from the dollar store LEDs lasting less long in 2 bulb enclosures, all the ones in the ceiling boob lights are doing fine. I recently got better bulbs that as a nice bonus are a warm color temperature and I'll see how they do. the nicer LEDs have circuity that can reduce their output to reduce heat output if they detect they're being cooked from what I understand
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Won't matter when lightblub manufacturing companies all agreed upon limiting the lifespan of bulbs to increase turnover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Contrived_durability
There are incandescent bulbs that still work from over 100 years ago. Modern bulbs die with less than 10 years of use. Both incandescent and LED. But this new law will, of course, increase LED bulb sales. I'm sure no politicians have increases their GE shares before this.
0This decision is about the energy efficiency of the bulbs. Incandescent bulbs turn almost all the energy they consume into infrared light and heat. LEDs turn most of the energy they use into light.
1So far i have never replaced any LED bulbs, and the oldest ones i have are 15+ years old.
LED strips though, where a single dead led can bring down the whole strip, are absolutely a non sensical idea.
1IME, LED whining gets me to replace them before they actually die. For old people who can't hear it, they should last longer.
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