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.
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.
The US government will begin phasing out higher wattage incandescent bulbs in 2012. (Photo by Lester Graham)
One out of every five light bulbs sold in the U.S. is a compact fluorescent. That’s
according to new market data put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mark
Brush reports:
Transcript
One out of every five light bulbs sold in the U.S. is a compact fluorescent. That’s
according to new market data put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mark
Brush reports:
It appears the days are numbered for Thomas Edison’s most famous invention. That’s because fewer people are buying incandescent light bulbs. The EPA says that compact fluorescent light bulbs made up 20% of the overall light bulb
market last year. That’s more than double than the previous year.
Maria Vargas is with the EPA’s Energy Star Program. She says the compact fluorescent
bulbs – or CFLs – are more expensive to buy, but when you do the math, they’ll save
you money in the long run:
“A CFL lamp will save you about $30 or more in electricity costs over each bulb’s
lifetime. They use about 75% less energy and they last up to about ten times longer.”
The U.S. government will officially begin phasing out the higher wattage incandescent
bulbs in 2012.
George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. (White House photo by Chris Greenberg)
The energy bill signed by President Bush has a little bit of something to make almost
everyone happy. Lester Graham reports on some of the highlights:
Transcript
The energy bill signed by President Bush has a little bit of something to make almost
everyone happy. Lester Graham reports on some of the highlights:
The Energy Independence and Security Act is massive, but it can be boiled down to
just a few numbers. First, 35 miles per gallon by 2020… That’s when automakers
have to increase the fleet average by ten miles per gallon.
Second, 36 billion gallons by 2022. That’s when ethanol producers have to increase
production by a factor of five. And two-thirds has to come from sources other than
corn.
And these numbers – 100 watts, 60 watts – those kinds of incandescent lightbulbs
are to be phased out, replaced by more energy efficient lighting.
Most environmental groups can find something to like in the bill. Farmers like it for
the ethanol mandates. And big oil companies like the Act for what’s not in it:
billions of dollars of proposed taxes blocked by Republicans in the Senate.
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)
