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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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[–] 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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