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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S. (www.digitaljournal.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

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[–] 42 points 3 years ago (6 children)

What is not banned?

Surprisingly, there is a whole slew of exempt special-purpose bulbs that will continue to be manufactured, according to the Energy Department. Here’s what manufacturers can still build and stores can continue selling:

  • Appliance lamps, including fridge and oven lights
  • Black lights
  • Bug lamps
  • Colored lamps
  • Infrared lamps
  • Left-handed thread lamps
  • Plant lights
  • Floodlights
  • Reflector lamps
  • Showcase lamps
  • Traffic signals
  • Some other specialty lights, including marine lamps and some odd-sized bulbs

I mean, good for the effort, but that's still a lot of exceptions.

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  • [–] 48 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    If you still have a fridge or oven that takes incandescent bulbs, isn't it better to replace the bulb than the fridge? If the point is minimal environmental impact then I think that makes sense.

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  • [–] -5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    Well sure but you could just replace it with an LED bulb...

    Edit: missed the word oven. My question is just for fridges

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I don't think you can put an LED bulb in an oven, well I mean I guess you could try but good luck with that, I don't imagine it would last very long at all.

    You can put an LED bulb in a fridge though, I put LEDs in mine. I don't really need to worry that much about my oven though because it's a small oven and doesn't have a light in there to begin with.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I mean why would you force LEDs for ovens in the first place. The place they are in is supposed to get hot. And that's what the ineffeciency in incandescent light bulbs normally is. They get hot. Doesn't seam like an issue that they make the place that's supposed to get hot hot.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The enefficiency is that they take up nearly a magnitude more power and last a fraction of the time, meaning you have to manufacture 20x more of them.

    Having said that, I'm not sure if I support this change. People are already switching light bulbs naturally. It saves energy, doesn't heat up, and lasts longer. You don't really need much more incentive than that. I wonder if this will have any meaningful impact whatsoever. And if it doesn't, why are we banning items for no societal benefit?

    Apparently they do have a long list of exemptions, at least. I think legislative focus would be better spent on increasing renewable energy production. Solar, hydro, wind, nuclear.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I hate to break it to you, but the heating element in the oven uses a magnitude more energy than that little old incandescent light. And the energy otherwise lost from an incandescent light is lost to heat, which just so happens to be the entire purpose of an oven. So in the case of an oven, there's actually no more energy lost than the heat it's already designed to generate.

    Besides, have you ever tried putting electronics in an oven? LED's don't exactly like heat ya know...

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    ...Why not both? It makes sense for it to be illegal to sell a device that consumes more than 6x the power of the equivalent and dies significantly more frequently. I searched for statistics and it seems like 20-30% of bulbs sold are incandescent. That means well over half the energy consumption of light bulbs still comes from them. It's low hanging fruit that can have an almost immediate impact, even if it's not enough on its own.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Those 20~30% are likely either a) appliances like people are mentioning. Stoves, fridges, etc. Which have reasons for being incandescent for which the law gives exemptions and b) old bulbs that would have inevitably been changed to incandescent anyway

    I really think this law isn't going to make a significant difference in the % of incandescent bulbs over the next few decades. We're essentially going to transition at the same rate to a fully LED, whether the law existed or not.

    So my question is - what's the point? We waste political capital and time that could be better spent doing meaningful things. And we can do things that don't arbitrarily restrict the choices of our citizens.

    It's paying lip service without actually doing anything. Theatre.

    Make our energy production 100% renewable and it doesn't matter in terms of carbon emissions if your bulb uses 4x more energy (of course ignoring production emissions, but just for the sake of rhetoric)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I highly doubt 20% of light bulbs purchases are going to appliances. Refrigerators have been using LEDs for over a decade now, and even when they weren't, they lasted significantly longer due to being operated at colder temperatures and for significantly less time. Oven lights also last a long time because they are off almost all of the time.

    I think your original questioning of what's the point was valid, but now with more data presented to you you're being dismissive and not bothering to research why they did it. Reducing energy consumption still matters even if we were to get to 100% renewable overnight (not possible) because constructing the renewables still costs carbon at the moment. We need to be doing everything we can, and this decision isn't taking resources away from other decisions, that's a fallacy.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    They said 20-30% of bulbs sold, not of bulbs currently installed. There's a lot of people who are replacing incandescent with incandescent where an LED would work just fine. I highly doubt oven bulbs and such are that significant a portion of household bulbs sold. (I also don't know where this data is from, so feel free to correct me)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I don't know about the energy efficiency, but the life time of the bulb is a variable that they intentionally designed that way. They know how to make an incandescent light bulb that will last indefinitely. The industry colluded with each other to manufacture bulbs that have to be replaced frequently.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    This article is dogshit, and those are not the current exemptions. DOE revised the definition of a general service lamp on 2022 to include the majority of reflectors. The rest have miniscule sales and have technical limitations that make LED replacements difficult. It's not a lot of exemptions. When was the last time you bought a left hand thread or a colored incandescent lamp?

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  • [+] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Some of these bulbs might be difficult to find in LED and there might be other considerations like shape, heat, dimmer compatibility, etc.. Replacing fixtures could represent a significant burden in these cases and thought there are many exceptions listed they likely represent a small percentage of overall usage.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I've seen dimmer compatible LEDs and, even better, LED bulbs that have built in control of light intensity and even color. I've even seen bulbs capable of playing music through bluetooth!

    Shape I don't really see as a concern, as any shape an incandescent bulb can be produced in, a LED bulb can also be. And then some, as the LEDs can be set up, twisted and bent into some very imaginative shapes and angles.

    And heat is not ready a concern. You can touch most LED bulbs with your bare hands with no risk of severe burn. Unless very high wattage is in play, at most, a LED bulb will be warm to the touch.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    Try not to dismiss everything so quickly. I came up with those in 5 minutes but a committee of experts could find many more. When the exceptions were written they had a reason. A few examples:

    • In a traffic fixture, the heat that the incandescent bulb generates often serves to melt ice, and early traffic fixtures with LEDs did have icing problems. Replacing the fixtures would represent a significant burden.

    • An LED wouldn't survive in an oven and oven lights aren't on for very long either so what would it matter?

    • A bulb in a refrigerator could be exposed to condensation.

    • Dimmer compatible LEDs require pulse width modulated dimmers. Incandescent dimmers are often resistance dimmers.

    The exception are there to make sure that a $1 part doesn't render a $1000 appliance inoperable. Replacing the appliance would undoubtedly generate a ton more carbon than using an incandescent and the rule doesn't say that LED bulbs are prohibited just that incandescent bulbs for those uses are not yet banned.

    I'll also point out that LEDs are made of plastic and essentially become ewaste at the end of their life so there is a trade off to consider too.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    LED refrigerator bulbs are already a thing; bought one recently by accident, when looking for a very low power/low brightness for a bed side table.

    Those, apparently, are no longer a concern.

    Screw in LED bulbs with built in brightness and color control, that you can command from a phone application or through a conventional remote control, are already common, thus rendering conventional dimmers obsolete.

    Why keep those? To my very limited knowledge, dimmers can require expensive and extensive installation.

    I have seen LED traffic lights with built in anti frost measures and the expenditure to have those replaced is not a good argument to keep that particular use of incandescent lamps around.

    LED low power requirements, paired with their long service life, enables traffic lights to be independent from the power grid, through the use of solar panels and batteries, keeping it working even when severe weather disrupts energy distribution. LEDs are also brighter and easier to see from afar.

    There may be very particular cases where incandescent bulbs still do not have an alternative but to say they are irreplaceable is a disservice.

    I'm not trying to be dismissive, I'm trying to be demanding.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I have a garage door opener and I guess it's just not shielded well enough because LED light bulbs interfere with the signal from my remote, just one example. I would much rather buy new incandescent bulbs every few years than replace the opener outright.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    And heat is not ready a concern. You can touch most LED bulbs with your bare hands with no risk of severe burn.

    This very clearly indicates that you haven't seriously considered this issue at all, and are just supporting your political faction with no reflection on what the unintended consequences might be.

    A common application of incandescent bulbs is to produce heat, for a variety of use cases. The typical example is an improvised chicken incubator.

    Consider very carefully why there's an exception for traffic signals.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    This is exactly what I was getting at. There are so many considerations and they clearly put some thought into the exception list even though the reasons may not be readily apparent. The order is not a small step in the right direction it's a significant step in the right direction and the impact on actual electricity usage is going to be massive.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    the impact on actual electricity usage is going to be massive.

    Is it?

    How many people are still installing new incandescent bulbs in 2023?

    Is there an actual study showing the expected costs and benefits of this rule, or is it purely political posturing?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    The article had an estimate from the DoE. Idk, be mad about it if you want. LED bulbs aren't perfect but what is.

    "As the rules reinforce existing market changes, the Energy Department believes that U.S. consumers can save almost $3 billion annually on their utility bills. Similarly, it projects that the rules could cut carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next 30 years."

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I can't find such a study, and it seems extremely unlikely to me that any such study was performed recently. The original law was passed in 2007, and then the regulations were in political limbo for more than a decade.

    My base hypotheses here, subject to easy refutation by any real evidence, are that:

    • The DOE has looked at no study from after 2007 to justify their current policies.
    • This regulation is going into effect now simply because it was on the list of stuff Trump did that the Biden admin reversed.
    • The effect on consumer electricity costs and carbon emissions are negligible, since LED bulbs are a decade cheaper and better and almost everyone voluntarily buys them.
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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Several of these exceptions are unexpected. Oven light, sure: LEDs can’t survive the heat. That makes sense. Plant lights because you probably need full spectrum. And traffic signals because they’re odd shape and fixtures probably last decades, but the rest?

    Bug lights? A regular LED attracts fewer bugs than an incandescent bug light …. Unless they mean an attractant like fora bug zapper

    Flood lights? Reflector lights? Fridge lights? Colored lights? Why aren’t these all LED?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    OPs list is wrong, that's why. DOE revised the definition of a general service lamp in 2022 to include the vast majority of reflector lamps. Bug/appliance/left hand thread/etc are all sold im tiny numbers and therefore exempt.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I was just quoting the article. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the writer knew what they were talking about, which I guess was wrong of me.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    That's totally fair. I happen to know a lot about this topic and didn't read the article at first, and I also meant OP as in whoever posted the article, not you. I could have been more helpful here, sorry.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Plants don't need much, if any, green light (they reflect it). LEDs can be made to be full spectrum. I can think of no reason why anyone would want incandescent lights for plants. Even before cheap high power LEDs were a thing, people usually used high pressure sodium lights.

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