The great EU lightbulb ban, 10 years on

innonimatu

the resident Cassandra
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This thread was prompted by a comment on the brexit thread. To start with,I should note that this was not just an EU thing, the USA had already approved the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 with provisions to impose minimum efficiency requirements for lamps.

Someone told them incandescent lights were banned by the EU, and thus they feel deeply that incandescent lights must be good and something they wish to support.

The allegation was that incandescents were inefficient and wasted energy, therefore should be banned. The actual law set efficiency requirements for lighting, meaning that incandescent lights should still be available for sale for other purposes, but governments cracked down on people trying to sell them as heaters.
The reality is that if you are heating the space you're illumination then a "wasteful" lamp will just replace part of the energy you'd have spent on heating. Unless electrical heaters are banned too there is little point in banning incandescent lamps in cool climates. If you have plenty of electrical power from renewable sources, why ban lamps that also heat? And it's arguable whether the alternatives to incandescent lamps were actually less wasteful. They are certainly less recyclable and more polluting as garbage.

I see people actively replacing LED lights in place of working lighting fixtures, mostly fluorescent and CFL, that previous replacement that was forcefully pushed on people and turned out to not be pointless. They do it because they think it makes sense, where they think it makes sense. No ban was necessary for that. The real reason for those ban, I suspect, was corporate lobbying by companies that could not milk old technology that seemed to have nothing left to improve and patent. The EU pretended the new regulations would allow consumers to save on new lights:

Five to ten billion euros per year are expected to be reinjected into the EU economy.

This would refer to electricity costs, but a more realistic value would be about 4 billion euros. A newer, post-ban report puts the total consumer expense for lighting in 2013 at 65 billion euros. An order of magnitude larger. And the graphic here shows increasing costs even as LED lights take over.
It would appear then that consumer spending on energy for the lights is far below consumer spending for the actual lights, and forcing people to buy new lights (and often fixtures, as CFL did not live long when they couldn't dissipate heat) does not save them money. Consumers should be allowed to replace them when it makes sense for the specific cases, not by withdrawing options from the market. The electronics on the newer lights are sensitive to on-off cycles and tend to have lower lifetimes in certain environments.

Worse, the projected savings on electrical consumption that were used to justify the ban were based on reports commissioned to justify the ban (projections, aka what are you paying us to say?), and facts have disproved them. The claim back in 2009:

The EU-27 electricity consumption in 2007 of non-directional light sources in all sectors is about 112.5 TWh (VITO 2009). This is approximately 4 % of the EU-27 total electricity consumption with 2.95% being used by the domestic sector and 1.05% in the non-domestic sector.

And the EU 's own admission in 2019:
The share of the residential sector [in 2013] is 93 TWh/a (24%)
In 2013 CFL lights had successfully been pushed to displace the old incandescent ones. Yet the domestic consumption of energy had not been reduced, it went from 84 TWh to 93TWh, with only one small territory (Croatia) added. CFL were a total disaster as a strategy, projections that they would "take over" were superseded by the new focus on LEDs barely two years after they were made, and the industry has given up on them. But they certainly made a tidy profit selling that crap for a few years thanks to the ban. In a rather ironic twist, the same EU that pushed CFL lamps with the argument (among others) that it was worth the investment of converting because they'd be more efficient and long-lasting is now also going to ban them in the revise Ecodesign regulations. There should be a special place in hell for researchers who take grants for producing reports ordered to justify bad policies.

Now we have LED lights, so do they make better sense? Probably, and more people now seem to believe so. LED lights are better that the CFL ones, but they're not better everywhere, and users should be able to choose. They continue to contain more hazardous waste that the glass, tungsten, aluminum, ceramics and brass the old incandescent ones required. Many of the LED lights in the market now have awfully bad driving circuits, in terms of radiofrequency noise generated. Manufacturers won't be able to produce them cheap if they have to include proper, shielded circuits. And these cheap circuits still tend to fail very early under certain conditions such as high on/off cycling.

What have been your actual experiences with lighting in the past 10 years? Were you happy with CFL over the older filament lamps? Are you happy with LEDs? And agree with baning older technologies? Personally, I object to such bans when no objective harm is directly attached to a technology. In this case it is arguable wether wasting energy justifies a ban, it could be argued that energy is wasted on all sorts of things that are not banned. But I'm actually more worried about the electronic waste in the new lights used, most of which will not be recycled, than the energy waste of the old lights.
 
You know, you gotta hate it when these types of centrally planned big government programs are thrust on everyone and ignore a market system that would cure the problem naturally...:p
 
You know, you gotta hate it when these types of centrally planned big government programs are thrust on everyone and ignore a market system that would cure the problem naturally...:p

:lol:
I'm pro-maket where I believe that markets work and produce good outcomes
 
Ironically, those are not banned: they do not consume electricity! They just ceased being used because there was a superior technology available. If you get the point...

CFL lights are also disappearing before the EU managed to ban them, because there is a better alternative available. And they probably took their time to ban them because it would be... embarrassing to ban something that had been pushed so strongly just a few years before.
 
Never thought about it, but now I checked almost all lights in my apartment. I have a mix of old and new. I have more than a dozen spotlights in the ceiling. Most are old and one is led. I can touch the new one even though it has been on for hours, the old ones no chance. They seem to be just as strong but the led is slightly whiter(the old are more yellow). The old one broke at at an irritating rate, but perhaps leds will last longer. I don't know. Hope so.
 
I use what's comfortable for my eyes. At night that means traditional light bulbs in the lamps and during the day it means using natural sunlight as much as possible.
 
I use what's comfortable for my eyes. At night that means traditional light bulbs in the lamps and during the day it means using natural sunlight as much as possible.

Are you still allowed to find for sale traditional light bulbs in Canada?
 
Are you still allowed to find for sale traditional light bulbs in Canada?
The only places i've seen them are at small corner stores. I'm pretty sure the one i saw at a corner store has been sitting on the same shelf for over 15 years........
 
The allegation was that incandescents were inefficient and wasted energy, therefore should be banned. The actual law set efficiency requirements for lighting, meaning that incandescent lights should still be available for sale for other purposes, but governments cracked down on people trying to sell them as heaters.
The reality is that if you are heating the space you're illumination then a "wasteful" lamp will just replace part of the energy you'd have spent on heating. Unless electrical heaters are banned too there is little point in banning incandescent lamps in cool climates. If you have plenty of electrical power from renewable sources, why ban lamps that also heat? And it's arguable whether the alternatives to incandescent lamps were actually less wasteful. They are certainly less recyclable and more polluting as garbage.

Has anyone ever bought an incandescent light bulb for the purpose of heating? People were just using the "heater" description to try to circumvent the ban and use them as light source instead. Why ban lamps that also produce heat:
- It even heats when you actually don't want heat (even in cool climates you have this thing called "summer")
- It is even worse, when you have air conditioning installed, because the A/C needs extra energy to transfer the heat away, so you waste energy twice
- Heating with light bulbs is slightly more inefficient than heating with an electrical heater, because it emits light and usually isn't placed where you would want to place a heater.
- Heating with electrical energy produced with fossil fuels is inefficient.
- "If you have plenty of electrical power from renewable sources" is hypothetical for any EU country and thus irrelevant for the discussion.

Many of the LED lights in the market now have awfully bad driving circuits, in terms of radiofrequency noise generated. Manufacturers won't be able to produce them cheap if they have to include proper, shielded circuits. [...]
But I'm actually more worried about the electronic waste in the new lights used, most of which will not be recycled, than the energy waste of the old lights.

Complaining about RF noise emitted by retrofit LEDs and the associated electronic waste is kind of pointless given the vast increase of home electronics with switching power supplies. This is a a problem on its own and isn't really connected to lighting. And it certainly won't be resolved by marked forces.

What have been your actual experiences with lighting in the past 10 years?

I installed an LED and a CFL in my main lamp seven years ago. The LED has long since failed, but the CFL still works fine.
 
- Heating with light bulbs is slightly more inefficient than heating with an electrical heater, because it emits light and usually isn't placed where you would want to place a heater.
It may be inefficient, but it's better than nothing. There were times in February when it was so cold here that I sometimes held my hands over a lamp to warm them up a bit (on the days when it wasn't my turn to have a heater).
 
We have a stash of incandescent we use in my dad's well pit. We hang it just over a joint that freezes when it is cold without an insulating cover of snow. Heating tape burns out faster and uses more juice, a space heater is overkill and bad to have in a wet well pit. The new heat lamps we will have to buy to update are way the hell more expensive to buy and operate than quarter lightbulb was.

Somebody knew a friend that owned a nulightbulb company. Law explained.
 
Incandescent lights are superior when you're trying to see just how far into the IR human eyes really can see, looking for phenomena that happen at the far edges of visual perception.

I made crude near-IR goggles by taking a pair of cheap welding goggles and taping a couple of layers each of two different theater lighting gels that cut out the entire spectrum from 400-720 nm but pass light above 720. If you go outside on a brilliantly sunny day with these on, or use a very bright incandescent light inside, your eyes will adjust and you see the world in a beautiful dim red light, as far away from ordinary red as green is from red. Plants are especially cool - they absorb red but reflect NIR brilliantly. The sun and incandescent filaments are a rich ruby red - you have to make yourself not stare at them for more than a few seconds at a time. Some currency is printed in ink that is transparent to NIR, as well, so e.g. the US $5 bill looks like it has pieces that are blank if you shine an incandescent light on it and take a look.

But big government librul types want to stop people from using light sources that give us the whole spectrum. They claim we shouldn't want an abundant source of NIR light. That we should only stick to where our eyes are good, unless the sun is shining. Don't look around indoors with a 300 W incandescent floodlight. So much for open-mindedness.
 
The reality is that if you are heating the space you're illumination then a "wasteful" lamp will just replace part of the energy you'd have spent on heating.

This is only true if one is using the incandescent bulb in the space where one's thermostat is. Otherwise, the energy spent adding heat to the room is superfluous.
 
I used an incandescent lightbulb to power a lava lamp.

The early fluorescent lights sold in the UK were bulky and would not fit in many light sockets.

They were very expensive and did not seem to last any longer than incandescent lights.

I regarded them as a poor intermediate technology, and was pleased when LEDs came along.

Happy to use LEDs wherever I can

Regarding the economics, it makes poor sense to use incandescents in warm countries and experience the
double whammy of paying for the heat from the incandescent and paying for removing that by air conditioning.

And in cooler northern countries, there is no value in heating the great outdoors by using incandescents external to buildings.
However it was a different story when it comes to internal lighting in houses and flats. In the summer, the lights
are rarely used (e.g. only when waking up in middle night to go to bathroom) so the loss of money through waste heat
was trivial; and in the winter the waste heat was useful; and if the result of switching to fluoresent or LEDs meant
that the room temperature dropped to the point that one switched on an electric or gas heater, there is no benefit.

And getting florescents or LEDs to work with dimmer switches, is often problematical at best.

The light don't work in my dimmer. You bought the wrong LED. Sell me the right one. We don't do it for that socket etc.
 
It's true that in colder climates energy "lost" to heat isn't such a big deal. But light bulbs usually sit up under the ceiling and heating up that area is not a very efficient use of energy either way.
 
It's true that in colder climates energy "lost" to heat isn't such a big deal. But light bulbs usually sit up under the ceiling and heating up that area is not a very efficient use of energy either way.

Well the way it worked with me, the lights heated the ceiling of the downstairs rooms,
and when we opened the doors to go upstairs to bed, the warm air travels up with us.

Although that don't work if you live in a bungalow.
 
But big government librul types want to stop people from using light sources that give us the whole spectrum. They claim we shouldn't want an abundant source of NIR light. That we should only stick to where our eyes are good, unless the sun is shining. Don't look around indoors with a 300 W incandescent floodlight. So much for open-mindedness.

Just get yourself a 780nm LED then. IF you are feeling adventurous, you can salvage the laser diode from old CD burners. Just be very careful with those, they emit a serious amount of NIR light and can cause serious damage to your eyes.
 
Just get yourself a 780nm LED then. IF you are feeling adventurous, you can salvage the laser diode from old CD burners. Just be very careful with those, they emit a serious amount of NIR light and can cause serious damage to your eyes.

Yeah, I did eventually do all that too. There are 850 nm LED flashlights for night vision devices that give off enough light that you can see a very short distance in front of them. I never did find any 780 nm ones - those would probably have been better given that they'd appear much brighter, but for that reason they wouldn't be popular for the sorts of purposes people would want NIR LEDs for. I've also messed around with lasers at various NIR wavelengths (780, 808, 830, 980) and had some fun that way.
 
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