The 60 watt incandescent bulb will have more competition once new LED lights make it to store shelves this fall. (Photo courtesy of Darren Hester)
Buying a light bulb used to be a simple job. But in recent years with the explosion of choices of types, wattages and colors, it’s gotten confusing. Lester Graham reports it’s about to get more complicated.
Transcript
Buying a light bulb used to be a simple job. But in recent years with the explosion of choices of types, wattages and colors, it’s gotten confusing. Lester Graham reports it’s about to get more complicated.
Philips, is introducing an energy-efficient replacement for the 60 watt incandescent bulb, but it’s not a compact flourescent. The industry has been whispering about an LED bulb that would light up a room like a warm incadescent, use less energy like a compact flourescent and last much longer.
Philips says it’ll start selling that bulb in retail stores early next year. The price? Somewhere around 60-dollars a bulb.
Ed Crawford is the CEO of Philips Lighting, North America. He says yeah, that’s a lot for a bulb, but –
“It’s going to last in your home or business for 25 years –certainly 20-25 years depending on how often you use it. That’s a real break through, but it’s a different kind of product.”
And unlike a compact flourescent, the LED does not contain mercury and will work with dimmer switches.
Each compact fluorescent light bulb has a small amount of mercury in it
(Source: Yann at Wikimedia Commons)
Old incandescent light bulbs
are getting pushed out of the
way by the more efficient compact
fluorescent light bulbs. But
the bulbs contain a small amount
of a toxic chemical. Mark Brush
reports, that has some regulators
concerned:
Transcript
Old incandescent light bulbs
are getting pushed out of the
way by the more efficient compact
fluorescent light bulbs. But
the bulbs contain a small amount
of a toxic chemical. Mark Brush
reports, that has some regulators
concerned:
Each one of these CFL bulbs contains a tiny amount of mercury.
It’s not a big a concern. If a bulb breaks in your home, you’re supposed to vent the room for 15 minutes before you clean it up.
But regulators are concerned about large volumes of bulbs.
The state of New York decided to crack down on CBS after the Late Show with Dave Letterman threw bulbs off a rooftop.
Letterman: “You have some incandescent light bulbs and you have some fluorescent light bulbs. How many do you think you have there?”
Assistant: “Uh, a couple of hundred.”
Letterman: “A couple hundred”
(sound of bulbs crashing on ground)
The little cloud of dust that rose as the bulbs broke caused people from around the country to call the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. And CBS reached a settlement with the state.
Most home owners don’t need to worry about state regulators knocking on their doors. It’s not illegal to put them in your trash in most states.
But officials encourage home owners to find a bulb take-back program like the ones listed on EPA’s website.
imothy D. Sands, at left, director of Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park, and graduate student Mark Oliver, operate a "reactor" in work aimed at perfecting solid-state lighting, a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. Purdue researchers have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of the lighting technology, called light-emitting diodes. (Photo by David Umberger, courtesy of Purdue News Service)
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Transcript
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Plain-old incandescent lightbulbs are not efficient. That’s
old news.
And fluorescents? The color is funny and they have toxic
mercury in them.
So, what option is left?
LED lights. They’re as efficient as compact flourescents
minus the mercury.
The problem? They’re one-hundred-dollars-a-bulb
expensive.
But scientists at Purdue have been working on a way to
cut that cost.
Researcher Timothy Sands says in about 5 years, LEDs could
cost the same as the other bulbs.
“So, the nice thing about it is you can save energy, and
actually save money over the long haul – even though the
initial cost is very high right now, without changing what
you’re used to, or without lowering your standards for
lighting.”
And Sands says another big advantage of LEDs is you’d only
have to change the bulbs every 15 years.
For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.
Photograph of illuminated incandescent-replacement fluorescent bulb. (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs are one of
those classic environmental dilemmas. They’re very
efficient – they use as little as one fourth of the
energy a traditional lightbulb uses. But there’s
a twist: they have a small amount of the toxic chemical
mercury in them. Rebecca Williams takes a look at
what to do if a lightbulb breaks in your home:
Transcript
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs are one of
those classic environmental dilemmas. They’re very
efficient – they use as little as one fourth of the
energy a traditional lightbulb uses. But there’s
a twist: they have a small amount of the toxic chemical
mercury in them. Rebecca Williams takes a look at
what to do if a lightbulb breaks in your home:
You can’t get around it – right now there has to be mercury in compact
fluorescent lamps, or what the experts call CFLs. The bulbs can’t produce
light without it. But mercury is toxic. It can cause brain damage and
developmental problems in fetuses and young children. And that worries
people.
The good news is: the amount of mercury in compact fluorescents is very
small. On average there are about 5 milligrams of mercury in a CFL.
That’s about what would fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen.
Jeff Krcmarik is an expert on household hazardous waste.
“There’s 100 times more mercury in a thermometer than in one CFL.”
Krcmarik says there’s absolutely no reason to panic if a bulb breaks in your
house. You just need to be careful cleaning it up.
So, let’s have the experts walk us through it. First, we’re going to have to
smash a light bulb.
“Well we have a compact fluorescent light bulb here and what we’re going to
do is break it and then bring over our methylmercury gas vapor detector to
show what exactly the exposure issue is with a broken CFL.”
Okay, here we go. And kids – don’t try this at home.
(sound of lightbulb breaking)
(high pitched whining sound of vapor detector)
“This is what we use to identify hot spots in mercury spills. Dan’s going
to wand over it.”
Dan is Dan Moody. He’s the guy with the vapor detector.
“Right now we’re showing about 936 nanograms. We like to see below
300 to 400 nanograms for mercury in the environment, particularly in a residential setting or anywhere children
would be spending time.”
Very quickly, the reading’s dropped to 304 nanograms. That’s because we’ve
got the door open and the room is vented. Moody says that level’s not
something to worry about for your average adult.
The problem is the mercury can linger in your house if you don’t clean it up
the right way.
Most importantly the experts say never, ever use a vacuum. Vacuums can
spread mercury vapor through your house.
Deb Stahler is a researcher with the Maine Department of Environmental
Protection. She recently tested the best ways to clean up broken
fluorescent bulbs.
So, when you break a bulb:
“Make sure that your pets and children and other extraneous people are out of the
room. Open a window and leave the room yourself for a little while.”
Wait about 15 minutes to let the room air out before you clean up the broken
bulb.
“So when you go back in the room then I’d recommend having stiff paper, like
index cards or even just a deck of cards, to pick up the bigger pieces.”
Here’s where good ol’ duct tape comes in. You can use it to get the last
little shards of glass off the floor. Then, put all your materials into a
glass jar with a lid, seal it up, and take it out of the house.
Although some states don’t allow it, in most states, it is legal to throw
the broken lightbulbs in the trash.
And when you go to the store to replace those lightbulbs, you do have some
choices.
Alicia Culver is with the National Green Lighting Campaign. She says
manufacturers are trying to find alternatives to mercury in fluorescent
bulbs. But for now, the best you can do is try to buy ones with lower
mercury levels.
“We’re encouraging consumers to not just buy the cheapest CFL but to look
for ones that are Energy Star rated. And Energy Star is starting to put a
mercury limit on lightbulbs that they’ll qualify and rate.”
So, the bottom line? Culver says compact fluorescents are still the best
lightbulbs to buy.
Because they’re so much more efficient, compact fluorescents cut back on
electricity use. And that reduces demand on coal-burning power plants: by
far the biggest source of mercury we’re adding to our world.
Most of us are using 125-year-old technology to light our homes. 95-percent of the energy used by a light bulb is heat. Only five-percent actually is used to produce light. (Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History, gift of the Department of Engineering, Princeton University, 1961)
Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient… and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy… not less. As part of the series, “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs… and starts at the beginning:
Transcript
Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient, and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy, not less. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs and starts at the beginning:
We’re getting a behind the scenes look at a pretty significant historical artifact. Marc Gruether is pulling back a plastic tarpaulin that covers a row of file cabinets.
Gruether: “We are in one of the storage areas in the Henry Ford Museum. And drawer eleven has this light bulb in it which I will very carefully remove. It’s certainly one of the oldest Edison light bulbs that’s in existence. This is one of the lamps that was used in the December 1879 demonstration at Menlo Park.”
Graham: “Now, looking at it, I can see that it’s got that kind of bulbous shape, I can see the filament, I mean, I would recognize this easily as a light bulb.”
Gruether: ““Absolutely. It’s a recognizable light bulb. You’re exactly right. That all looks forward to the kind of lamp forms that became common and that we’d recognize today.”
And that’s not all that’s the same. Just like the first light bulbs, the incandescent bulbs most of us use in our homes today, waste energy. 95% of the energy used is expended in heat. Only five-percent actually makes light. That means everytime you switch on the light – if it’s an incadescent bulb – you’re wasting 95% of the electricity your paying for. In our homes, not much has changed in the last hundred years or so. But in commercial buildings, things have changed a lot.
Commercial builders and industrial architects learned a long time ago that energy efficiency is important. Most of the new office building and factories built today use passive sunlight and high-efficiency lighting that not only saves energy but uses the right spectrum of light to get the best output from their employees.
Moji Navvab teaches about light in architecture at the University of Michigan. He says you can learn a lot about good energy efficient light too. He says with the wide variety of fluorescent, LED, and spot lighting, you can get the right kind of light for whatever you’re doing and use a lot less electricity compared to a house lit only by traditional incandescent bulbs. It’s about using the right light for the right place. Navvab says, really, it’s pretty simple and you can get a lot of information about proper lighting on the Internet.
“If you really are focusing on healthy lighting or you want to save energy, if you go search on the web right away, you can get the information and then you can go to your local stores and they can match it for you.”
But at the local store, most of the time buyers are not very well-informed at all.
Beverly Slack is a salesperson at Kendall Lighting in Okemos, Michigan. She says unless they ask, she doesn’t push energy efficient lighting. And when she does mention fluorescent lighting, which uses about one-fourth the energy that incadescent bulbs use, customers grimace.
“Right. But, they don’t realize the difference in the fluorescent lamps, how they’ve changed, how the different colors have changed in the fluorescents. They’re still thinking of the old standard cool white so, people don’t want them because of that fact.”
Slack says what customers really want is dramatic lighting, and lots of it. They want trendy, recessed lights and track lights that often use extremely hot burning bulbs in a way that’s interesting, but not often very useful.
“They want decorative, decorative, decorative. I mean, it’s amazing. Because I can just see their light bills going sky high.”
Slack says the trend in home lighting in recent years has been just the opposite of commercial lighting. At home, people are using more light, more fixtures, and less energy efficient bulbs. With the trend in new houses being larger, requiring more lights, and homeowners wanting decorative lighting to show off their big new houses, conservation at home is often just being ignored.
It’s no longer about turning off the light when you leave the room, it’s about lighting up the showplace. And as long as the power bill is lower than the mortgage, it’ll probably stay that way.
The 60 watt incandescent bulb will have more competition once new LED lights make it to store shelves this fall. (Photo courtesy of Darren Hester)
