A small victory against nanny state
December 17th, 2008 at 8:51 am by David FarrarGerry Brownlee has confirmed he is lifting the ban on traditional incandescent light bulbs.
I actually use eco-bulbs myself, but it is not the role of the state to tell people what sort of lightbulb to use, so long as they are safe. 2.5 million households all have different needs, and householders are quite competent at deciding for themselves what sort of lightbulbs to buy.
Personally I would advocate most people get ecobulbs – they save money and power. But I would also advocate most people vote National, and neither of my preferences should be made compulsory!
Tags: Gerry Brownlee, light bulbs, Nanny State
December 17th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Almost makes winning the election worthwhile in itself.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Good news. I’d never use an eco bulb in my pantry. Labour thought that it was ok to ban that. It wasn’t.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Fuck. There goes my bulb-legging plans.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I must say, as a renter in blighty at the moment (god bless the global housing crash), I have some old dodgy wiring that I have no intention of trying to sort out.
However this did lead to many low standard incandescent light bulbs blowing (by design by our Chinese suppliers I’d hazard).
The eco/flourescent bulbs don’t have this problem and last and last and last.
The point I lead to though is this – any parent knows you don’t force children down a path you lead them gently with enticements. I guess Labour failed to draw this analogy as most of them didn’t/couldn’t have children.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Rol – Paul ‘Eco Bulb in the Pantry’, I can see that now – ok I need to get something from the pantry in 5 mins time, turn light on now, wait 5 mins till it’s at full brightness – now look for item, priceless.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:18 am
This is welcome news. I have quite a few eco bulbs in the house and sometimes look at them nervously when the children are playing under them. I think I will start using them only where they are unlikely to spill their mercury inside the house in the event of an accident.
I think the ban was wrong for many reasons. One of them is that it is too early – the technology is moving quickly and it looks like LED bulbs may overtake CFL in the next 5 years. Another is because it’s none of the government business what we use to light our houses.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Thanks Gerry, WTF do I do with 200 bloody light bulbs!
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Worse than that coventry.
The whole mercury contamination thing could mean that you had to turf out all the foodstuffs in the pantry in the event that you took a swipe at an errant fly and got the bulb instead.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:22 am
YAY!!!! It seems that National has found the balls to start turning he ship of NannyState around, slowly.
I had bought 250 incandescent lightbulbs and stockpiled them under the house, though! I wonder how much I’ll get for them on Trade Me? Maybe a nice six-pack of lightbulbs for the mother-in-law for Christmas…..??? Oh sorry, are we now allowed to use the word ‘Christmas’? I can’t keep up with all the changes sometimes…..
(Edit: hahahah big bruv!!! we wrote the same!! Nice one)
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:25 am
LIGHTING PROFITEER!!!!
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
i’ve got 10000 litres of freeze dried water and 5 years of baked beans under the house.
FFS – get a focus guys.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Agree with Optimist. LEDs are the future. More robust, more efficient, longer-lasting and less potentially toxic than CFLs. Biggest hurdle is the electrical differences with more common lighting.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:40 am
expat… its called ‘humour’. Don’t tell me that living in Pommieland has innoculated you against humour?
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Oh dear. Two months ago I was assured (to the point of hostility) by a young student flogging the eco bulbs at my local supermarket on behalf of the manufacturers that “National had signed on” to the incandescent light bulbs ban despite my attempts to correct him after overhearing him telling a elderly couple that they would “have to” buy the bulbs even if National won the election. I wonder what the spotty little scrubber will do for a holiday job now?
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Last I read, LED’s were a non starter since the energy required to provide the same apparent light would make them inefficient in a energy saving context. Apparently the light emitted from an LED (wavelength/type) is vastly different from a halogen or tungsten incandescent. Seem to recall the light goes in a straight line instead of radiating. Someone in the the industry could provide a more indepth explanation.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I haven’t heard any comment from the Melons, I bet poor old Jeanette is having kittens. I love it!!
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:51 am
“Apparently the light emitted from an LED (wavelength/type) is vastly different from a halogen or tungsten incandescent.”
…so is that emitted from a CFL – but that didn’t stop the good ship Labour…
I stand to benefit by not having to rewire the lights in my house, many of which are on dimmers – which are not friendly to eco-bulbs. i would have been happy to do this if I was compensated (seeing as it was not my decision) – but I suspect that it would have been a cold day in Hell before that came about…
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 9:54 am
HA HA! Dave – you card!
(what part was the funny bit you mentioned?)
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Sam there are dimmer friendly bulbs – just not many of them so you have to check the packaging.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
I bought into it and replaced every incandescent bulb in the house with ecobulbs. Four of the *@#$$%!! things have failed within three months. Long life my ass!
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Commons sense prevails! Eco bulbs have a use in our homes, but not everywhere in our homes.
Because they take a few minutes to fully illuminate, they are quite unsuitable in places where you only want a light on briefly but need full illumination immediately. For example walking down a flight of stairs.
If traditional incandescent bulbs had been banned in favour of eco bulbs I am sure there would have been an increase in injuries suffered by people in their homes because the lighting was not bright enough. The lights are also not the best for reading by.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Gerry Brownlee’s announcement is good politics, but it’s poor policy.
Lighting takes over 20% of the electricity we generate. Efficient lighting has a direct payback in avoided investment in generating stations and transmission/distribution networks. If you crunch the numbers you’ll find it’s about 10x cheaper to put in energy efficient lights as it is to keep using incandescents and have to pay for the new power stations. On that basis Gerry’s plan isn’t good for NZ Inc.
In terms of the reputed problems with CFLs … there seems to be a lot of heat in this debate but very little light (pardon the pun). Good CFLs (ie not cheap Chinese junk) now put out more lumens than incandescents, use tiny amounts of mercury in solid amalgam (orders of magnitude less than in a mercury watch battery or a thermometer), get up to high levels of light within 1-2 seconds, and are a much lower fire risk than incandescents.
The supposed ban wasn’t a ban at all. The Govt was just raising the required efficiency levels, just as they’ve done with all electrical appliances from dishwashers to refrigerators. And it didn’t apply to the low-power bulbs you use in pantries and so on, just the larger 40W-100W bulbs.
As for LEDs … well, they use half the power of CFLs and last 40-50 years. You’ll save about $2 a year on electricity, and it’ll outlive your ownership of the house. But good quality ones cost about US$100 for a domestic fitting (Philips Ledino is the best at the moment). The LED itself is cheap, but the power electronics and heat sink are very complex and expensive. Those are quite mature technologies so I can’t see the cost falling too far there. I’d say it’ll halve in the next 10 years. Who’s up for paying NZ$100 for a light bulb???? And if you think a CFL is ugly wait till you see an LED. It looks like a flies eye.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Building your own gas fired generator?
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Lumens, that’s the word I was looking for!
LEDs had (according to the test I read) the greatest loss of lumens at various useful angles than other bulbs. A very large loss.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Expat, I’m real interested in this freeze dried water stuff.
I suppose it doesn’t need refrigerating, comes in non- plastic or recyclable packaging and to activate it you just add H2O.
Please provide purchase details and price – I can see it would be just the thing to see me through the next ice-age. Might run short of beans tho’
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:16 am
goodgod,
Last I heard, the laws of physics relating to light were constant across all kinds of visible light. As lumens is the measure of light intensity (I think but last studied during the Vietnam War), the general rule is that the rate of dispersion is roughly equal to the square of the distance. I think the only exception is light with coherent waveforms (lasers).
Others more knowledgable are welcome to correct me on this.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I was pretty skeptical about whether Key would do much when he went into coalition with the Maori Party. I thought that, at best, we’d get a stalling in the generation of new nanny stateism but no moves to roll back things already implemented. I’m very happy to have been shown wrong. Biofuels, coal generation — kudos.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:21 am
VIrtual
20% of energy use on lighting? Sorry not true. it’s about 5000gwh out of total demand of 40kGwh. In the two largest consumption areas homes and industrial – it is well under 10% of demand. In commercial it is much higher but most of that will already be fluorescent office lights.
Your ten times cheaper than power stations is way overstated – it’s under half that though still significant.
I think your 1-2 seconds to full output is a bit optimistic based on my experience with Philips ones. The Ecobulb brand are better IMO but still take longer thatn 1-2s.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Insider … the electricity industry stats is actually 22% of world electricity goes to lighting. But yes I figure that a fair portion of that is non-residential lighting (like street lighting). The domestic mix is probably a bit different, with heating loads the big domestic use. But I’d be confident that 10% of the domestic usage is lighting. Interestingly enough the industry view is that lighting is an increasing portion not a decreasing one. Other appliances (like heating & TVs) are getting more energy efficient, meanwhile lighting use is climbing (particularly with halogens, where you end up with lots of 50W bulbs instead of 1 or 2 100W bulbs). And lighting use coincides closely with the peaks (like winter evenings) so it’s a valuable reduction to introduce.
The figures I’ve got (and have some insight into) show for example that replacing all the incandescents in NZ would cost about $150m, and save 1,800GwH pa. Genesis e3p plant generates a little more than that every year, but cost $520m to build and a good portion of that every year to run. Meridian’s new “son of Aqua” is going to be the same size and cost over $1bn to build, then further amounts to run/maintain.
My comment on the 1-2 sec was in reply to Chris2′s comment at 10:04. Sure, it takes a CFL about 30sec to get to full brightness, but there’s enough light in 1-2 sec to walk down a flight of stairs.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
insider … just did some digging. The 22% figure comes from a World Bank study. So it’s a global figure.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Thank God for that. The oppression I was suffering under Labour’s enforced-lightbulb scheme was just UNBEARABLE, I tell you!
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
virtual
The HEEP study shows home lighting use consistently at 8% over the last 6 or so years.
Your numbers seem a bit high compared to the KEMA study on potential efficiency which says that a 75% subsidy will deliver 2200gwh across all efficiencies, not just lighting. Lighting looks to be about half that but at 75% subsidy your cost/benefits trade off against new generation decreases. It just depends on how much you want to spend to achieve the gains. Of course one of the ironies is that as you get more efficient the net benefits from greater efficiencies diminish, though the technology costs should drop too.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Insider I agree – I think virtual’s figures are overstated ……
Just looked at the UK dept of trade and energy official report and for the UK and it states less than 10% of energy use is lighting AND appliances – admittedly UK has more manufacturing and bigger heating problems
Other figures representing 20%+ of power use in the home are invariably combining lighting AND appliances.
The figures I can find state that in NZ ~33% ELECTRICITY power use is domestic. It is obvious that lighting is only minority proportion (I believe 20% or less based on figures I can dig up) then we are talking about an approximate 5% national reduction in power use if every single light was replaced with CFLs.
So the contribution of domestic lighting to power consumption DOES tend to get overstated in the information promoting its use either by judicious selection of what figures are used e.g. exclude industrial or by using the biggest percentages around.
BUT …. 5% is not to be sneezed at. It’s a power station or two or even three.
Also, while we are it …
As mercury is bioaccumulative i.e. hard to flush out of the system once it is in there and get in the food chain and end up at top of the food chain – us. It needs to be handled properly. Hundreds of millions of CFLs need to be properly re-cycled as even with the tiny amounts of mercury involved in a single CFL such numbers will accumulate (sic). The incandescent lights aren’t exactly models of green-ness but not as polluting as the CFLs.
The costs to re-cycle CFLs are typically not included in the cost calculations but would still leave them economically superior
As power prices will continue to increase faster than inflation (unless the government stops treating generation as a hidden tax and we don’t use ETS and realise the Kyoto is a flawed approach – cue National – even then expect power charges to go up) then CFLs will become even more attractive
Dangers of breaking a CFL are overstated. The amount of mercury in a CFL is so small that you need to crack quite a few, close the doors and windows and breathe in the vapour to have any issues – that aside it’s bioaccumalative. Similarly break it in the pantry – give the surfaces a wipe with a paper towel – I don’t bother as it doesn’t get in the food and dissipates if left alone. I just don’t stick my head in the pantry and deep breathe – but I would never use a CFL in the pantry – see next point.
CFL’s don’t’ last long in tracks or recessed lighting (I can personally vouch for the recessed lighting problem) or if you have a light you switch on for 5 minutes and then off e.g. in a cupboard. In those cases incandescents are quite likely comparable for economic costs.
The comment around time to light does not take in to account how eyesight works – if you want to be able to see then unless you are coming from the dark then the light needs to be near maximum for effective viewing – it’s not a linear relationship. For instance, reading requires one to wait until practically maximum light generation unless you are using an over-powered light.
But – why do I need to be legislated to make personal choices? Can we have a government do something useful like manage ACC costs, improved health, get out of my personal life and be the government etc.
I think I need to get out more
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“Sam there are dimmer friendly bulbs – just not many of them so you have to check the packaging.”
And I think they all voted Green at the last election.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
very clever brian
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
slijmbal
I think the bioaccumulation risks are overstated and the recycling cost unnecessary. For there to be a significant risk you have to have a source and a pathway. If you think about the way we dispose of most rubbish, an old bulb that contains a micro level of mercury, gets deposited inside one if not two plastic bags (and then often inside a box as well) before going to a tip which now tend to have leechate control.
So all those vectors have to be negotiated before it can enter the wider environment and have the risk of bioaccumulating (remembering mercury is naturally occurring in micro levels in the first place).
It would be interesting to see what the bioaccumulation level is like in locations like Wairakei and Huntly, two major point sources of mercury entering the wider environment.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I worked out how to travel faster than the speed of light.
Now where ever I go, it’s dark when I get there.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
insider
back of a fag packet calculation shows “maybe” 100kg of mercury per year for all the new bulbs (tried to be conservative so likely to be overstated) – so yes not much in the scheme of things as current world emissions are estimated at 5,000 tonnes a year (biggest contributor gold mining I think – so we attack that first – low hanging fruit and all that) – once again not a lot but it is highly toxic, sticks in the environment and has a magnified effect on the top of the food chain and damage is permanent and it affects the nervous system.
Now while I’m against the new carbon religion for bad science I’m a damn site more scared of heavy metals in the environment precisely because of their accumulative properties (not all heavy metals bioaccumulate). Batteries the new devil
On the balance no value to recycle but well worth avoiding letting it leach in to the environment.
Anyway doesn’t stop me using them
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Yes and it would be interesting to know (for example) how many of the people who cry “oh but the mercury is so toxic!” nevertheless use strong hypochlorites like Jif to clean the bath tub, which they then happily bathe their small children in…
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
“Oh the mercury is so toxic”
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
DPF said “Personally I would advocate most people get ecobulbs”
And therein lies the difference – National advocates; Labour legislates.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Just need to get the local govt sorted out now. Read in the Kapiti News that the Kapiti Council is spending over 70 grand to give everyone 2 ECO bulbs. Time for the council to get back to basics.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Thank goodness for that!
After the new test reports about the mercury in the CFLs came to light ( so to speak
I got rid of the CFL in my room, and dumped about 5 new ones unused as well. Ended up by using the Halogen ones which also save 40% energy.
Vote:December 17th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
I’ve replaced six 50w halogen spots in the kitchen with 3.6W LEDs. While not as bright and more directional than the halogens, they are do an amazingly good job for 18Ws instead of 300! They did cost about $35 each from ledstuff.co.nz, but I think they look cool!
Vote:December 18th, 2008 at 9:19 am
I know it is a bit late and everyone has probably gone home from this thread, but for those who are interested in the theory of light and an alternative theory, follow this link.
http://www.theatrecrafts.com/humour_darksuckers.html
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