In which I kvetch about fluorescents

[zdashamber]

Homer: Come on, Flanders, there's gotta be something you hate. What about mosquito bites?
Ned: Mmm mmm! Sure are fun to scratch! Mmm! Satisfying!
Homer: What about, uhhhhh, fluorescent lights?
Ned: Oooh, they hum like angels! You're never lonely if you've got a fluorescent light!

I want to like fluorescent lights. Really, I mean, there's the living-lightly thing, and there's the not-burning-out-suddenly thing, and there's the freeging-politicians-jamming-'em-in-our-face thing. But they just suck. They create crappy light.

I've mentioned this to my friends some, and they're like "Oh, but those are bulbs you got from Ikea years ago! Things are advancing really fast!" But I've been doing a lot of research about light sources lately for an idea I have on backlit mouldings, and I can tell you that the trouble is: every single way to make light today that doesn't involve "heating something up" (ie, incandescents or fire) involves quantized light. We excite this thing electrically, and then it drops back down an energy level, releasing a packet of photons at a certain wavelength. Fluorescents have a vapor in them that glows at high UV energy, and coatings on the glass that are excited by that energy and then put out visible light droppings. EL, neon, LEDs, directly drop photon packets.

Here's a typical "cool white" modern fluorescent bulb's spectrum, from wikipedia. Then, a typical "soft white" incandescent bulb's spectrum from this page of many spectra. Then, sunlight. (I tried to find a directly comparable chart of sunlight with "counts" on the y-axis, but no love. However, the sunlight spectum image I have comes from a really neat page about researching (at Berkeley!) roofing tiles that reflect more light to reduce heat and energy use.)




It's just obvious that the incandescent has the fluorescent beat all to hell. At every wavelength the incandescent has more light. Fluorescents put on several coatings of different stuff to try to get a wider variety of light spikes, but after about three the coatings get too thick to be efficient anymore.

Light doesn't just matter to how an organism sees. Just a week ago at the work retreat someone mentioned that 70% of the light that a human brain concerns itself with doesn't go to the visual centers. There have been studies that found mutations in clock genes in people who get up at ridiculously early hours: normally, the first bright light you see in the morning re-sets your brain and that ticks down over the course of the day, counting out when you should sleep and wake again.

To me, it makes a lot of sense that the brain expects to get light on all the sun's wavelengths, and gets all screwed up if it's only getting 10 of them. Studies have found that people are more depressed and prone to act out under fluorescent lights. LCD screens are filters over fluorescent lights, and screw a lot of people up. Mice die faster. In looking through spectrum/lighting webpages, you'll find tons that talk about bird breeding, or snake thriving. Few seem to discuss that lighting bad for a mouse or a bird or a snake is bad for a human, too. Fluorescents are cheap.

So, going back a couple months, I thought I'd give compact fluorescents another try, just to see if they really had gotten better like my friends claimed. I stopped by Home Depot and got some brand-spanking-new compact fluorescents, in three different light flavors (based on "warmth", the degree-Kelvin measure of how blue the light is). I started with the lowest, "warm." Took those out after a day of use... Don't think you can slip sodium by me, assholes. If I wanted that "living under a bridge" look I could graffiti all the walls and pee in the corners, and it'd still be comfier. Orange! Grah!

Tried "cool white" next, and I've been there for a couple months. I can run 180 watt-equivalents of light instead of the pitiful 120 watts I could run before, and it's diffuse so that I have a better chance of reading stuff without shadows everywhere blocking, and it only costs 45 watts of energy so I can run the electric kettle at the same time without worrying about overloading circuits. And truly, the fluorescents have gotten better at not humming and not flickering. And yet...

The light is ashy.

I can feel my brain arguing with itself. "It's dark," say 95% of my light receptors. "No, seriously, there's light," says my visual cortex. "WTF pitch fucking black" say everything set up for light colors I'm just not getting... It's hard to tell whether my mood and pattern of living are affected, but I suspect they are.

I dunno. 120 watts really is pathetic.

Maybe if I try all three types of compact fluorescents at once, one in each bracket of the central fixture... Maybe I can finally get around to hanging the white Christmas lights all along the wall by my bed, and that would make up the difference in spectrum...

Upshot: politicians trying to ban incandescent bulbs are fucking smoking crack and oughtta be booted the fuck out of office. This is a health choice people need to be free to make for themselves.

Comments

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

In the following, I talk about Australian energy consumption figures, and make a distinction between energy consumption, and electricity consumption. This distinction is necessary because of talk of greenhouse gases and so on; for example, if I just want to be warm, it's better to burn gas at home to warm me, than to burn gas in a power generator, turn it into electricity, send it 100 miles to me, and then put that electricity through a radiator to warm me.

In Australia in 2000, 400.0 of 3,374.7 PJ of energy consumed from all sources (oil, coal, solar, etc) was consumed in households (Source: ABS (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/bf60fce62cc84fceca256dea000539cf!OpenDocument), Table 17.18). So, 11.85% of energy use was residential.

Of this, about 60% - or 240 PJ goes to electrical appliances of all kinds. Of that, typically 1/3 - or 80 PJ - goes to lighting. CF bulbs use 1/5 the power of incandescent to produce the same lumens. If that were all incadescent, changing to CF would make the 80 PJ into 16 PJ. But about 25% of household lighting is already fluroescent (not usually compact fluroescent, but larger ones in kitchens, on porches and so on). So the imrovement would be more like from 80 PJ to 25 PJ, a saving of 65 PJ. It's hard to be exact because of patterns of use in the home.

This 65 PJ savings is not insignificant. The entire agriculture industry in Australia only used 71.2 PJ in 2000, and we managed to feed a few other countries. The entire construction industry used 51 PJ. The entire hydroelectric sector only produced 60.4 PJ in 2000, (Source: ABS (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/41FFA4BC1C41736FCA256DEA00053A83?opendocument), Table 17.5, this compares to total electrical production of 721 PJ, or 8.3% (ibid, Table 17.8).

As touched on in the first paragraph, probably more important than CF vs incandescent is how we get the things we want.

Human beings do not really want electricity, gas and coal. We want hot showers, cold beers, hot dinners and entertainment. We also want to get these things in such a way that our children can get them, too - ie, not fuck up the planet too much. There are many ways to do it. For example, in Sweden they have a few towns where the local power company operates a wood-burning plant and a large forest. They burn the wood to produce steam to drive turbines and give the town electricity, but rather than sending them electricity for heating and cooking, they send them the steam in pipes; by the time it's circulated around the whole town, it's cool enough to go back through the reactor and the turbines again. So what is normally "waste" (the steam coming off cooling towers you see in all the adverts about the environment) now becomes a resource - heats their homes and helps them cook. Lest people think, "oh, but you couldn't do a whole country this way," well, Sweden has commited to becoming fossil-fuel-free by 2020; they're combining this sort of thing with solar, wind, hydro, etc.

But this sort of thing is a society-wide one. It's hard for you or I to get our whole town to do that kind of thing. But we can do little things, like use CF globes, use public transport more, turn off appliances at night, and so on. And our small changes contribute to the whole.

One of the ways that people resist changes to their lives is to pick something trivial - CF bulbs, how much they drive, how often they go to McDs - and quibble with it.
"I know things are going bad, but what can I do?"
"You can do X, Y and Z."
"I can't do X because..."
"So you can't do anything, then?"
"Well anyway if just I do it, what difference would it make?"

If you don't want to change, then don't, don't make quibbles for excuses. If you do wish to change, then change what you can and feel comfortable with. As Yoda said, do or no do, there is no whinge.

Our home uses 1/4 the water, gas and electricity of the average. We are not living like the Amish. If everyone were to live like this... well, everyone could live like this. Not everyone could live like the typical Australian. There's just not enough energy in the world for that - or food, or water, etc.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Let's be clear here. No matter how shiningly awesome you are, you don't get to tell people that their valid, scientifically-backed observations are just quibbling and whinging.

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

It's nothing to do with being shiningly-awesome. Your scientifically-backed observations about the dreadful effects of CF bulbs are opposed by a heap of scientifically-backed observations of the dreadful effects of doing nothing to reduce our levels of consumption.

It's just a very common pattern, as I said. If a person wants to avoid action, they first say that they don't know what actions to take; when some are suggested, they quibble with them individually and whinge about how hard it'd be; then they say well, I'm just one person, my changes would have no real effect anyway. Voila! No-one does anything!

There's always an excellent, scientifically-backed reason to do nothing at all. If you don't want to do anything, don't! You're in the USA, right? Like my own Australia, the world has given up on us and doesn't expect us to do anything. If we do anything at all useful and good in terms of consumption, the world will fall on their arses in surprise.

[(Anonymous)]

This is Mike Sullivan, again.

Madeline drives a hybrid -- I think that her cred for caring and making a change to her lifestyle is established by her spending an extra $5,000 or so to get a car that produces a lot less carbon per mile, in a way that is not justified by purely rational economic self-interest.

So, while there may be some people who use targeted complaints about specific policies to add up to a policy of doing nothing at all, you're way off-base in pointing fingers at Madeline in particular.