energy conservation

Today's NYT has an excellent article on energy conservation.

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Caveats: Users of X-10 and Insteon know there's the additional cost of filters to factor in for CFLs and utility companies know that wind turbines have to be matched kW for kW with other generators to meet demand when the wind (less predictable than certain blowhards) doesn't blow.

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Reply to
Dave Houston
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Uh, yeah.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

"Dave Houston" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@nntp.fuse.net... when the

Doesn't apply to Florida,there is wind all year long in a part of it... ;-) or is it just some hot air?from a big Baboon ,oups meant big balloon

Reply to
Petem

The front page (below the fold) of this morning's NY Times has another, longer article on Walmart's commitment to selling 100 million compact fluorescent lamps that provides some insight into retailers' and manufacturers' perspective.

Nothing particularly new in the article that Dave cites (except for the bad 'rithmetic in the third to last paragraph).

The lead itself describes 3-month old activities:

Environmental Protection Agency kicked off Energy Awareness Month in October with the slogan ?change a light, change the world,? and encouraged Americans to buy compact fluorescent lights instead of conventional incandescent bulbs.

which is a recommendation that most everyone -- except consumers -- seems to agree with.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

There were some eye-openers in there for me:

"[A CFL] uses 75 percent less electricity, lasts 10 times longer, produces

450 pounds fewer greenhouse gases from power plants and saves consumers $30 over the life of each bulb. But it is eight times as expensive as a traditional bulb, gives off a harsher light and has a peculiar appearance. As a result, the bulbs have languished on store shelves for a quarter century; only 6 percent of households use the bulbs today."

That's far less penetration than I would have ever imagined.

"Wal-Mart sold only 40 million [CFL's] in 2005, compared with about 350 million incandescent bulbs"

Wal-Mart has apparently decided to go green and has indicated to its suppliers that they had better get in line. The article discusses their battle plan to save the environment. (-:

Maybe they can pull it off, although if they really wanted to make it happen, they'd make CFL's loss-leaders and sell them at cost or less with an X dollar purchase.

"Then there is the mercury inside the bulbs, a problem Wal-Mart is working with the federal government and environmental groups to resolve"

The devil is always in the details. There's also the issue of CFL's not lasting as long as the "payback formulas" claim, which the article did not touch upon. Wal-Mart convinced one vendor to change their name from "Marathon" to "energy saver." One can only wonder if that's because the returns department knew that lots of the bulbs weren't going the distance. They also didn't get into another, more serious reason for the low acceptance rate: people bought one or two and discovered they fit far fewer lamps than incandescent bulbs do. I'd say half the lamps in my house can't take an average CFL as bright as the 75 and 100W incandescent bulbs they now use. So the choice there is to either use smaller, dimmer, CFLs or to leave the incandescents in. Using dimmer bulbs has been unpopular here because they darken fairly quickly and therefore become harder to see with.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Jist so others are not too confused, this and your other quotes are not in the article that you cite.

Rather, they are from today's article that I cited previously in this tread, , namely :

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... Marc Marc_F_Hult
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Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

I have to laugh at the idea of the federal government (under George W Bush) doing *anything* about mercury in the environment. Between the infamous "Data Quality Act" and other attacks on environmental science by the Republican party and in particular by the Bush administration, environmental protection has taken a back seat to industry on every front. Bush has done everything he could to water down the EPA's rules on mercury.

As to Wal-Mart, I seriously doubt they give a rat's derrier about environmental issues. CFL lamps sell for a lot more than conventional bulbs.

True, they really don't last long enough to offer any payback. I use them anyway because I'd like to leave something to my grandchildren. As best I can tell, that's the only reason people should buy them. Perhaps if more people started using them, more lamp manufacturers would build compatible fixtures.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Gee, how nice, they sell your jobs down the river but they're sure help you buy cheap foreign made CF bulbs. What a bargain! Expect to see more of this bullshit over the coming year from Walmart as they've hired a new PR firm. They're still screwing factory workers but putting such a nicer spin on it.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

appearance.

Thanks for the correction! I'll have to remember to "tread" more lightly in the future and make sure when I'm cutting and pasting that I actually pick up the new item and not spit out what was previously cut. Why Windows didn't incorporate a multi-item clipboard with a selectable history list early on is a mystery to me. (-:

I'm hoping most folks here are bright enough to figure out what I was saying from the actual quotes themselves and the comments I appended thereafter. Any confusion appears minimal, particularly since you seem to be the only one who noticed! You weren't *really* confused by the switched URL, were you?

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Hi Bobby,

I haven't used the newsreader that you use (Outlook Express) in many years, but last I knew, it didn't actually show the threaded nature of usenet posts. Like AOL, it destroyed the structure and really made it harder for folks to follow and post to threads. I note this because you may not have noticed/be able to see that you didn't actually post a response to the thread that had the correct url in it. So once your fingers chose which post to respond to, there was no way to cut/paste it correctly ands preserve the thread structure unless you manually modified the header and posted with a different newsreader. The post you wanted to respond to was

which you will notice is not in the list of messages above and not in the header of your response. (By now folks without threaded newsreaders will find my comments abstruse/daft; Folks that remember tin and pine may also remember elaborate threads the sole purpose of which was to create a design by 'painting' a picture on the screen with the structure of the thread -- a sort of ASCII art that was done collaboratively and in which the thread structure and repeated message Subject were themselves the object d'art. }

Only momentarily, but I knew that there were two articles. And when I clicked on it to bring it up, it didn't bring up the article you were commenting on. To do that, I had to find my post and click on the url in that. I suppose that most the seven people who actually read this thread didn't realize that it was a response to a completely different article. Your comments still made sense, but made even more with reference to the article you were actually commenting on.

HTH... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

It's hard to get trustworthy data. I've seen a 0.9% figure for CFL penetration but it wasn't clear whether that was just the US or covered a wider realm.

The problem is that residential lighting represents a small part of total energy use. HVAC and hot water represent more than 80% of the energy used in the typical home. That leaves lights and appliances to share less than 20% and I suspect appliances use the majority share of that. Transportation and retail shops use a far, far larger share of the total. So, even if everyone switched to CFLs it would make almost no difference overall. A few flights to Europe or South America will dwarf the energy saved by the folks touting CFLs.

Using glow-in-the-dark pigs for lighting makes more sense than CFLs. At least, when the price of corn gets too high (from subsidized ethanol demand), you can convert the pigs to bacon.

Read George Monbiot's "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" if you want to get an idea of how much trouble is coming - soon.

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Reply to
Dave Houston

I've seen a variety of figures for "penetration" and $ savings. X-10 modules may shorten the life of CFLs or there may be other factors in my environment but I experience far shorter bulb life than any figures suggest. The penetration figures could easily not be the same loyal individuals each year, but a rolling wave of people trying them, disliking them and returning to regular bulbs. There's lots not to like about CFL's.

From the things I've read about how clear the air became (briefly) after

9/11 (because of the subsequent 3-day suspension of nearly all air traffic) I believe flying will someday be restricted to military use only. There are some other nasty issues dogging air travel, too, like terrorism vulnerabilities and the ability of jumbo passenger jets to spread epidemics across huge areas in a very short time frame.

But Dave, you're forgetting that aside from the excellent compatibility that every CFL offers for every electronic switch, you get a chance to dump some mercury into the environment when you're through enjoying the wonderful effects of an aging CFL bulb. Thrill to the flicker, bask in the steadily diminishing light output and steadily increasing warm up times, revel in the slight buzzing sound from the base. Then there's the excitement of the gamble: will the new bulb be an X-10 signal sucker, noise generator, both or neither? Who doesn't love a CFL? (/sarcasm off!)

My utility bills confirm it. The 1963 World's Fair "Futurama" exhibit was very optimistic indeed when it predicted "a world powered by nearly free nuclear energy!"

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

This page has CFL data based on hands-on tests (with links to similar pages by others) but doesn't get into X-10/Insteon friendliness.

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Reply to
Dave Houston

Yes, it *is* hard to get trustworthy data from some folks ... Perhaps Dave saw "a 0.9% figure" in 1887 -- this would at least be consistent with his curmudgeonly claim in this newsgroup that nothing had changed with CFLs in

20 years ;-)

How is this a problem? On the contrary, it is good news if the objective is to reduce overall consumption.

See below.

ROTFL. And if everybody driving Humvees "switched to [walking] it would make almost no difference overall". And if I throw my dollars away one at a time, "it would make almost no difference overall". Them's Houstonian economics worthy of thet thar Houston energy-voodoo jailbait crowd.

No single substitution or reduction can provide a quick fix. Panglosses and curmudgeons that think otherwise aren't very informed, or very bright or painted themselves into a corner years ago.

the >folks touting CFLs.

LOL My first two Atlantic crossings were by ocean liner. So it wasn't until the third -- on a Super Constellation, also more than 50 years ago

-- that the future of the world was doomed ?

This statement epitomizes the quality of the OP's contributions to this topic.

Monbiot repeats the goal of 90% reduction by 2030. Folks, who -- unlike like the OP -- have not proven themselves numerically illiterate by making false claims or by the repeated inability to rebut measured quantitative data other than by trashing all PhD's and researchers, might consider this:

If one somehow eliminates (reduces to 0 percent) the 80% that Dave ascribes to non-lighting household energy use, one *still* has to cut in half the

20% that is lighting and electronic to meet the goal in the pop article that Dave urges us to read. So think of it this way: each fluorescent lamp (compact or otherwise) that replaces an incandescent lamp of equal light output meets the (whatever you may think of it) "90% reduction by 2030 goal" TODAY.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

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