Light Bulbs

Yesterday was the first day of Fall and a full moon. There are a few early turning trees here that are changing color. Yesterday morning it was cold, but it warmed up by the afternoon. Wearing layers is a good idea here and I am not in the habit, since I am used to a climate with two seasons. In the morning I was wearing just a sweatshirt, by noon I was in a long sleeved t-shirt, by late afternoon I was in a short sleeved t-shirt. I need to master the layering thing or I am going to be doing a lot of laundry.

I read that So Cal had the coldest Summer it's had since the 1940s. It was pleasant, but cooler than usual at Dad's, but it's funny to me that the only days I spent this Summer where it stayed warm in the evening were in Boise, Idaho.

The gas bill and the electric bill arrived. Intermountain Gas charged a $14 initiation fee, minus that the bill is $8.40 for 27 days. The $8.40 includes a $2.50 "customer charge" that goes up to $6.50 December through March. I only have gas water heater and furnace and I did not use the furnace in the last 27 days, but the cost of gas seems the same as So Cal and I still do not understand why most people have electric stoves and clothes dryers. The Idaho Power bill was $37.04 including a $20 start-up fee. The bill is for 25 days and I used the air conditioning and did lots of laundry in those 25 days. I don't like air conditioning, but when the movers were here working on the hottest day of the year I thought they deserved it. The clothes dryer doesn't work that great, so I am drying loads twice sometimes. With that, I think electric seems a bit cheaper here.

As long as I am talking about electricity, I want to share some things I learned about florescent light bulbs. The real point is why is government telling me what light bulb to buy? This is not the role of government! But besides that, the energy savings of florescent is a scam and this policy is destructive to the US economy and sent manufacturing overseas. There is no florescent bulb manufacturing in the US, we buy all of ours from China, and the policy initiated the close of all iridescent manufacturing in the US with the last plant in Virginia closing this week. From American Thinker (CFL stands for compact florescent lamp):

* Warm-up time: it takes up to 5 minutes for a CFL to reach full strength, which may be related to why CFLs seem less bright. My friend has installed them in a hallway where illumination is needed only for the thirty seconds it takes to navigate the staircase. Not ideal when Grandma visits and can't see the skateboard on the stairs.
* Few CFLs last for their advertised lifetimes of five years or more. Many people report replacing them after one year, making those return on investment numbers a bit less rosy. Using them in ceiling fixtures, on dimmers or timers, and for less than fifteen minutes per use reduce their life.
* CFLs contain mercury and should be returned to a hazardous waste center for disposal. Studies assume a 25% recycling rate, with the rest going into landfills. (The Westinghouse website recommends recycling only when disposing of "a large quantity" of fluorescent tubes and doesn't mention how to dispose of their CFLs.) According to a 2008 Yale study, burning coal to supply electricity to incandescent bulbs emits more mercury per bulb than a CFL contains, but regions that rely on cleaner fuels like natural gas experience greater mercury contamination with the introduction of CFLs. Why would environmentalists advocate to bring a toxic product into every home?
* Cleaning up a broken CFL doesn't require a haz-mat team, but you have to take significant precautions to avoid mercury contamination of living areas.
* Manufacturing CFLs is labor-intensive. No CFLs are made with expensive U.S. labor; most are made in China, where hundreds of factory workers in CFL plants have been hospitalized for mercury poisoning. The last major light bulb factory in the U.S., a GE plant in Winchester, VA, closed earlier this month.
* CFLs require six times as much energy to manufacture as incandescent bulbs, not to mention -- if you're concerned about such things -- the carbon footprint of shipping them from China.
* CFLs appear to cause migraines and epileptic seizures in a small number of people. Other health risks are being studied.
* CFLs work poorly in cold temperatures -- as a wintertime front porch light, for example. In cold climates, the heat of incandescent bulbs is a useful -- if inefficient -- byproduct.
* CFLs degrade the quality of the electric current (so-called "dirty electricity" with uneven sine waves) on a circuit into which they are plugged, causing problems for other electronic devices and possible health hazards to humans.

The cold weather issue appears to also be related to the warm-up time. In a cold climate (like my current one is about to be) the florescent bulb uses an excessive amount of electricity to try to warm up and dies well before it's promised life. Florescent bulbs are also only energy efficient when left on, so if you are in the habit of turning lights on when you enter a room and then off again when you leave, as you should be, you are not getting any energy efficiency from the florescent and shortening the life of the bulb. So, I'm stocking up on old fashioned light bulbs and replacing all of the florescent that are all over my house. I will, very, very carefully, pack and store the florescent bulbs to put back when I leave.

I was much more disciplined and productive yesterday, but I did go to the antique store around the corner and buy these,



They are old military ammo crates and the seller helped me throw away the canisters that were inside. They were $4 apiece and I thought they would make good planters. I thought they would also make good storage in a root cellar, if I had one. The antique store was huge, it does not look huge from the outside, and full of questionable antiques, but it did have some great old farm stuff, like baked enamel camp coffee pots and cast iron dutch ovens. I stuck to my $8 purchase, went home and got back to work.