Stupid Compact Florescent Bulbs!

Another comment from FB turned into a blog entry....

@Donna, we would just need to be more responsible "adults" than we are now. We'd have to actually take those pesky dead CFL's back to the store, and the stores should have a box for them to be taken for recycling. I know that's such a tremendous bother, to have to put a light bulb in a bag, and haul the insufferable thing all the way back to Wal-Mart and drop it in a box by the door. And I can't imagine all the hassle it would cause for Wal-Mart to have an employee move the box to the back of the store at the end of the day. And the Garbage Corporations, bless their poor souls, they would actually have to BUY A TRUCK and HIRE some moron who was only smart enough to drive a truck and pick up garbage, not a worthy, college educated person. And they'd have then find some way to get that truck full of light bulbs to a DANG RECYCLING PLANT, those immense wastes of private corporation time! And they'd have to do the unthinkable, dole out some more precious money to some more igorant morons who just aren't smart enough to do anything better than change broken light bulbs back into working light bulbs... That would be such an immeasureable waste of our time.

Instead we should keep using incandescent bulbs. I mean, let's just use some math and illustrate how stupid this whole thing is. A 100watt light bulb is used for on average 10hours a day let's say.

100 watts time ten hours works out to 100w times 10 hours times 365 days.... that's (calculator helps) but it's kinda no brainer if you write it out 100x10x365 and realize that "converting to kilowatts from watts is just dividing by 1000. We get a measly 365 kilowatts a year. That's all! at a national average of about twelve cents 365 kilowatts only costs around 45 dollars a year. So what!

How much could a stupid CFL that costs like $5 compete with a bulb that only costs 50 cents? That's a no brainer too right? I mean, how long does a CFL last anyway, on average like 8,000 hours, and a regular incandescent bulb lasts 2,000. So one CFL only lasts as long as 4 quality regular bulbs! that's .50 x 4 = $2

so if a CFL is twice as expensive as the same light Incandescent when we take life of the bulb into account!

That means that the CFL would have to use $22.5 electricity just to break even!

so let's do the math for the stupid, environment polluting CFL! the old technolgy is totally going to KICK BUTT. GO Edison! WOOOO yeah babay.

let's see, to get a light equivilent for a 100w bulb we need at 23watt CFL.... well, i see some easy math. that's 23%. So 23% of 45 is $11. So the CFL Actually saves money. Well dang, they're so inconvenient that it's worth the $11 not to have to make a bunch of jobs or be troubled with not just tossing them in the trash!

Not to mention that mercury in the CFL when you chunk it in the trash! I mean what are the leading causes of mercury in America after all. A 23w CFL has a whopping 2 milligrams EACH. And there is no way I'm going to be inconvenienced with all the trouble of taking it BACK to Wal Mart. And I don't see any reason to create a bunch of jobs handling all the stupid bulbs that would be work that was beneath Americans anyway, we'd wind up having to hire a bunch of economic refugees from the Depression in Mexico so we wouldn't have to give the ignorant Americans who couldn't go to college those low jobs. If we hire Americans, they'd have to give them HEALTH INSURANCE... Jesus! What's next, poor people don't need that stuff, they're just a step above a friggin Mexican right?

I mean how much mercury does an incandescent bulb have, ZERO!!! Am I right?

And how much mercury is in the coal we use to make the electricity? Approximately 0.0234 mg of mercury—plus carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—releases into the air per 1 kwh of electricity that a coal-fired power plant generates. That's all. So that hundred watt bulb using coal for energy only causes .0234mg times 365kw for a year, which is..... calculator

uh oh.....

that works out to 8.5mg of mercury in the environment!!! That's crazy talk, I better check the math again.

... nope, it's right. But we have to take into account the CFL's mercury from the coal... don't want to be unfair! 23% of 365 times .0234mg mercury... that's 1.964 grams of Mercury, plus the two in the bulb! So that's ... well dang. CFL wins again! I'm starting to feel stupid.

so not only does the CFL save $11 a year, it puts half the mercury in the ecosystem, and it would put a quarter as much if I could just be bothered with returning the bulbs where i bought them so they could be gathered up.

I'm not just being facetious here. I went through this mental exercise about 6 years ago, when I switched every bulb in my house to CFLs. Since then I've only had 7 bulbs burn out, and they're all sitting in a box, waiting for me to responsibly dispose of them.

They actually last far longer than 8,000 hours, and most incandescent bulbs last far less than 2,500 hours, so my math in this example is heavily skewed IN FAVOR of incandescent bulbs.

That said, LED's are the true solution to the problem. No mercury in them, and they use only 1/10th what an incandescent uses! They cost 30+ dollars at the moment, which won't be so bad when they iron out all the bugs and get the to last the 50,000 hours they're shooting for. At 50,000 hours life, compared to an average 2000 for an incandescent bulb, and using 1/10th the electricity, they could literally cost $70 each and we would break even.

Changing our ways is never easy. We as a species are resistant to change, it's one of the things that has helped us survive, but it's also been one of the things that has caused a lot of problems. Neither the Jews or the Romans wanted to listen to Christ, and we all know what problems that caused, because people didn't want to change.

We have to responsibly think about these things and take the whole picture into account. Making judgments about things as trivial as light bulbs based on emotion and not reason can not only be detrimental to our bank accounts, but our environment as well.

I guarantee you the electric companies, and the coal companies want you to keep using incandescent bulbs!