Light Bulb Fiasco

I went to my local Wal-Mart today and one of the things I had to get was light bulbs. It was not a pleasant surprise. The sticker shock of fluorescents that nobody wants. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen for a couple of years yet! I thought. I was fuming and thinking about this post so much that I even left behind a bag o' grub!

So let's talk about it a minute shall we. No this isn't going to be the usual gripe piece. Let's get into the real science about that fool light bulb law. This law has as a basis that the ordinary incandescent light bulb wastes energy. So let's discuss some elementary science briefly some of which some of you may already know.

First of all it is commonly accepted scientific fact that energy can neither be created nor destroyed true enough. Another lesser known fact is that all types of energy, no matter how, what, when or where always ultimately ends up as heat energy from combustion, friction and even noise. From this it can be stated that heat energy is one of the few things than can and is always produced with 100% efficiency! This is not to be confused with the concept of moving heat from one place to another which is a different matter entirely.

Now the incandescent light bulb more specifically. It is indeed a trait of the incandescent light bulb to produce more heat than light which is a result of having to heat a filament to such a high temperature before light emission occurs. It is this heat that some numbers person has arbitrarily labeled as "waste" and keeping in mind that heat production is directly proportional to the movement and quantity of electric current. Evidently this person hasn't considered the whole picture or is from Hawaii or some other perpetually warm place.

So now let's look at the rest of the picture. This gets really simple. Most light bulbs are found in buildings which of course must be heated in the winter time. It can indeed be stated with all gravity and truthfulness that an incandescent light bulb operating in a room that needs heating is without doubt operating at 100% EFFICIENCY!!!!

Consider the other most common form a heating in a building. These are usually heat pumps found in your yard. These not only produce heat but must also move it into a building. They have efficiency losses during their operation which can be described as heat carried away in the winter winds. When you remove the incandescent light bulb source of heat in such a building it is only going to increase the load on the heat pump. Nothing is gained.

This argument does get more difficult in the summer time but they invented daylight savings time didn't they. Problem solved. The only real way that energy can be saved with lighting is to reduce the use of daytime lighting in the summertime. If you really want to save energy then dry areas of the country should switch to evaporative cooling in the summertime instead of using a heat pump air conditioner. The savings are significant and more significant than a light bulb could ever be. It is in my case $5 verses about $100 a month not to forget that a new evaporative cooler usually costs about $500 verses more than $2000 for a heat pump. It's a no brainer.