bojangles wrote:Imagine in the province of Quebec.
Even with long cold and dark winters, Electricity is so cheap most people heat entirely with electricity. ($0.05/kWh)
My parents run a 30,000 watt furnace and several other room heaters. How are a dozen 60 watt bulbs going to waste energy? All they do is add to the heating. There is no waste.
In the summer the days are long, evenings are cool and lights are only on an hour or so a day.
The sillyness is in the overpriced electricity - and mismanaged power companies that have not planned production growth and spending properly. If there is anything political to rant about it is this.
Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it shouldn't be used conservatively. Fortunately, technology is keeping up with increased device use, and total electricity use is down on a per-household basis: http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268744/conten ... d=hg4218zx
Your attitude is a good example of a societal problem. People aren't conscientious enough to conserve for the sake of reducing consumption; they'll only do it to save money.
Also, regarding nuclear, the rate at which we'd need to build new reactors to fuel a broad switch to nuclear power is about 1 per day for 30 years, and in doing so, we'd run out of uranium. So that's not exactly a viable option.
Mike W. wrote:I've been using CFLs since the late 90s at home. Sometimes they last nearly forever, sometimes not, but I haven't had any really short lived ones. I've also installed hundreds if not thousands at work and pretty much the only complaints I've had is if they know its a CFL. OK, some people, particularly women don't like cool colors which are an option, but generally the issues are between the ears, not the eyes. I'm also surprised about people having problems in cold conditions, the only time I've had a problem with that was when they were in a walk in freezer, without a cover, with the evaporator fans blowing right on them. They can be slow to come up to full brightness, but quality of light with good ones is not a problem. Dimming sometimes works, but is a crapshoot.
LEDs on the other hand I'm not so enamoured with. They're great in the right application, I spent about 100K on them in the local jail, but they have their own issues and I have problems with a claimed, theoretical lifespan.
Maybe you can help me: why won't CFLs work in my garage door openers? The garage is cold at times, and the lights tend to have a shorter lifespan. Other than that I have no beef with CFLs.
Only thing I can guess is maybe if it gets used a lot it's the short on/off cycle. Lots of lamps, but especially Fluorescent, don't like to be turned on and off, the lifespan in hours goes down dramatically. Not a great answer, but I'd try a different brand. There are different grades, kind of a residential/commercial difference, with something of a price difference but not huge. Maxlite and TCP are both good brands and big players in the market. TCP used to make the ones for Home Depot but I'm not sure they still do. They were sneaky though, no name besides HD, but the telephone number for info was TCP.
