Kate at SmallDeadAnimals.com points out that there’s a new hockey stick afoot. With some homogenization and principal components analysis, I’m sure the past can be smoothed out.
From: United States Unemployment rate, Aug. 2010
Meanwhile, light bulb workers of America go dim as one of America’s proudest inventions disappears from production. Mr. Edison is scowling, wherever he is.
From the Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2010;
The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.
…
What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.
Now the hoarding begins.
Expect container loads from China arriving on our shores soon, at least until 2017 when they’ll disappear there too…or will they?
Speaking of China and light bulbs, someone just mentioned on the radio that China is planning on using the “Sears business model” on the USA. Sears was notorious for hooking a small business into expanding their business because of a lucrative short term contract. Then once hooked the second contract had prices that barely covered business expenses but the business having expanded (with bank loans) to produce for Sears is now between a rock and a hard place and has to take the contract or bankrupt.
Once US manufacturing is gone who is going to produce the products once the prices are hiked up by China??
CFLs suck, anybody that has bought more than one and used them for a year knows what happens to the little “dimmer by the week” bulbs. What do you do with the mercury?
LEDs win, until you figure out we have a 115 VAC power system and components to convert the AC power to something a 3.6vdc LED can use are expensive and short lived.
Bring back the incandescent.
re: unemployment rate H-stick, “It’s worse than we thought!”
re: incandescent bulbs, we’ve been stockpiling for more than a year. Like squirrels facing a long, long winter.
OT, but relevant: Go BUY and read Roy Spencer’s “Great Global Warming Blunder” for a dose of rationality and optimism. Very readable description/discussion of variable cloud cover as Earth’s thermostat. PDO alone can account for three-fourths of the 1900-2010 temperature record – both warming and cooling. Absolutely shoots down the hyper-sensitivity condition built into the fancy-schmantzy GCMs. A joy to read.
Europeans panic over filament bulbs ban
http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/09-09-2010/114893-europeans-0/
Yet another “nudge” towards global tyranny. We’re being nudged to death, and don’t even realize it. Lighting, RFID’s in garbage cans, told what to eat, what to drive, control of your electric use thru net monitored power, what medical care you can receive, etc., etc.
I will not EVER use CFL. Hate is too mild a word for how I feel about them and what they symbolize.
After my stockpile of Edison bulbs are gone. I’m piping my house for gas lights!
You want a long lasting incandescent lightbulb? How about 109 years and still going?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
100W incandescance bulbs are still legally available in the UK, they are called “Rough Service” bulbs, such a definition is outside of the (EU) legislation banning such bulbs for home use.
When I was in the Australian Navy we were required to (but usually didn’t) treat flourescent lamps as radioactive material, requiring the wearing of thick rubber gloves, masks, etc for the cleanup if one of them shattered. I’ve not seen anything about this aspect of modern CFLs or the longer flourescent tubes, only the worry about the inclusion of mercury.
The govmint has been up to its dirty tricks again, read zerohedge. A week’s or quarter’s reports are repeatedly revised down after the next two or three are published.
Right now, in advance of the elections, the Fed is buying longer term treasuries and the sellers are propping up the market as we are getting early distributions and piling out of the market. Govmint is hoping to keep things together thru Nov.
I’d bet on their success except for the PIIGS-treasuries took a hit as the week’s 30 year auction was met with trepidation. Things could get ugly in a matter of weeks.
I’ve found you can buy new incandescents at thrift stores very cheap. I prefer the halogens, especially in winter.
Here, we can also get surplus CFLs, 2 for $1. The boxes say that they are subsidized by SoCal Edison, meaning we’ve already paid for them via our electric bill and our legislators.
Gail Combs says:
September 9, 2010 at 2:03 pm
===========================
Gail, I’ve got a house full of lamps, track lighting, recessed lighting, you name it,
that those CFL’s will not fit.
Making someone change bulbs is one thing, making you have to replace almost all of your fixtures is another….
Enneagram says:
September 9, 2010 at 2:00 pm
DesertYote says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:31 pm
“Mr. Edison is scowling,”
And Mr.Tesla is having a party…
Oh yes, the Electrical Genius Nikola Tesla went straight to heaven when he died. 😉
(Warning: Facetious comments may contain some slight theological inaccuracies for fun.)
“there’s a new hockey stick afoot”
===================================
We certainly managed to “stimulate” something,
unfortunately it was the unemployment rate…..
Our politicians have nothing better to do than to mandate neurotoxins in our lighting, and make electricity harder to get and more expensive.
“America’s proudest inventions” Sorry to break this to you but Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. Henry Woodward(Canadian) invented an electric light bulb in 1874 and sold the patent to Thomas Edison. Edison was no Nicola Tesla, Tesla was a genius and left many inventions in the US.
Still sad to see a factory closing, people need to wake up and put an end to the insanity of Milton Friedman free markets. China is strictly a one way market they sell to you, but will only buy raw materials leaving trade deficits for every country in the world. The Chinese only want “joint ventures” so you give them you intellectual property with the faint hope you will see some profits for awhile. They will copy everything including recently Russian Fighter jets SU-27’s. The only way to reverse the economic disaster is to put up tariffs against Chinese goods, put up a solid trade barrier to protect your valuable consumer market and you will have the Chinese factory owners quickly making plans to set up factories on the other side of the barrier which could very likely be US factories so US workers will have wages to buy the goods produced by the factories. The idea that there will ever be a consumer market in china that will buy US made goods is a myth meant to pull off this trade deception. China ruthlessly protects their consumer market, including using the censor board to pull Hollywood films out of the theatres there on Chinese new years and replacing it with Chinese movies, because that is the most profitable days of the year.
With the incandescent goes the Big Three of American Lighting Industry. Backed by Boxer & Co. as a good tradeoff to support the Energy bill of that day: goodbye American jobs, hello expensive imports. GE joins Westinghouse and Sylvania, off to China for GreenBack Pastures.
Lost in the equation is the expense to ship all those bulbs back over here, the Hazardous Waste fee for disposal (All of them contain Mercury … read the warning label and what to do when they twist apart in your hands or pop spontaneously)., and the fact that they are every bit as prone to on/off cycling failre as an incandescent.
We lose:
Jobs
Exports
and we suffer
Import expenses
Hazardous Material Contamination
Poor manufacturing risks
and we do all of this for no tangible gain in throughput.
Next time you screw in a light bulb, think about it.
PJP says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:58 pm
* Stumbling around in the dark until they “warm up”.
* Having to pay a fortune to replace them….
* Living in the green-blue light they produce – even the “warm” variety”.
* Being told I have to live like a caveman by “my betters”.
Same problem here in Spain…
Thankfully, there is a very Spanish response to these new rules: switch across to new fittings with Halogen light bulbs… bright light… no mercury… no warming up period… no stumbling around in dull dim light.
Add a dimmer switch for more versatile lighting and lower electricity bills… works very well for me… but I am sure the EU will make this illegal as it is far too sensible.
I am OK with using CFLs outside. Outside, the waste heat of a incandescent bulb is actually wasted.
[But consider each region’s environment and summer/winter power needs: “wasted” heat inside (in the winter, in cold climates) is valuable. “Wasted heat” inside (in summer, in A/C required areas) requires even more power to be put in the AC units. Robert]
@ur momisugly Richard says September 9, 2010 at 1:33 pm:
Ah, come one, Richard – when the CFLs came out they were expensive as hell, too. The LED price will come down. LEDs are really cheap in industry already and have been forever. These LEDs will come down and push CFLs – WITH THEIR MERCURY – right off the shelves. And in the process, we will save what? another 80% in electricity? The LEDs use like 95% less electric than incandescents, so WTF is the argument here? The white light LEDs put out full spectrum light.
(Not bad for a lab accident, really… they weren’t even TRYING to create white light – they’d all given up on that long ago. They just pasted some crystal mixture on the outside of a blue LED, trying to do something else, and “Holy crap!!” they had white light coming out. They totally fell into it.)
Also, the LEDs last umpteen times longer, so they pay for themselves, even at the high price – and when the price comes down, we all save at both ends.
If – actually, WHEN – China shifts over to LEDs, they will save a whole lot more than half of Germany’s electrical needs. Same thing for the U.S.
It’s a no-brainer.
CFLs suck.
BTW, the worst thing about Edison was that he was a thief who invented the U.S. system of workers creating new products and the company giving the guy squat for it, putting their name on it and making all the money – and fame. Edison pulled that on Tesla, and Tesla told him where to stick it. 95% of the inventions with Edison'[s name on them he had nothing to do with except slapping his name on them after someone working for him did the real inventing.
TESLA is the individualist hero. Edison was a corporate thief.
I remember reading somewhere that..
the mercury from a single compact florescent light bulb can contaminate six thousand gallons of drinking water.
[Any contaminant can completely contaminate any volume of the diluting medium. But check what the limit is on mercury-in-water, and how much mercury is in a given size (and era) of light bulb first.] Robert
Incandescent bulbs are 100% efficient if you are heating your home anyway.
Will I be able to buy incandescent bulbs for medical reasons?
Florescent bulbs give me a headache.
John – Re careful disposal of broken florescent bulbs:
Florescent bulbs normally actually generate ultra-violet light, and so are useless for us humans. They are coated on the inside with florescent material (hence the name) which glows brightly when exposed to ultra-violet radiation (the “black light” bulbs you can by simply omit the florescent coating.
In early versions, the coating included a beryllium compound. Beryllium is a fairly toxic metal, and breathing in dust of its chemical compounds is not recommended.
So treating early broken florescent bulbs as if they were radioactive was actually a pretty good practice. You definately didn’t want to breath the dust, and you don’t really want it on your clothes or skin.
For the last 40 years or so, alternative florescent materials have been used, but people that were bought up handling the old lights are sometimes not aware of this, and even if they are, ingrained safety procedures are hard to overcome.
Of course, modern florescent bulbs still contain mercury, in small amounts. The vapor is required for operation. You don’t want to breath that either. But it is nowhere near as toxic as Beryllium was, no matter if they do seem to call out the hazmat team and evacuate for 20 miles around if you drop a thermoneter these days.
Carbon filaments bulbs do last do last for 30 years or more. That’s why manufactures didn’t make them…