[bensonn]

The incandescent light bulb ban is one of those things that can still get me fired up a decade later.

The idea that LEDs are now cheap, or cheaper seems like a tough argument. 4 packs of Phillips 40 or 60 watts used to be sold at the dollar store. $.25 cents per bulb. Or any hardware store had them for $1.19. Home depot currently has LED bulbs for 1.25 per bulb, 5x the price, IF you buy in bulk. 1.75 (7x the price) per bulb if you don't buy in bulk. If you aren't middle class or above $10 is a decent chunk of money. $10 is deciding between dinner or light, not both. The ban was indirectly a regressive tax that hurts the poor. Maybe if you spend money to buy in bulk then 2 years down the road you will be financially better off than if you bought incandescent bulbs. The poor don't have that option and the rich won't notice the pennies in savings.

The inefficiencies by heat loss doesn't make sense either unless you live in a very hot climate. Even in the PNW which is fairly mild, 9 months out of the year you the heat is on anyway. If the other 3 months are bright and sunny you probably don't have that many lights on.

I used to keep a light on in my well house to keep it just above freezing during winter. Had I not bought hundreds of incandescent light bulbs and stockpiled them I would have had to run a heater. The point here- a nation wide ban is overkill.

Conspiracy theory- I bet light bulb manufactures loved this ban, they probably even lobbied in support of it. Consumers have to pay 7x the price, sweet!

At least the ban solved the climate crisis.

[NullPrefix]

60 Watt incandescent can be replaced by under 10 Watt LED. Assuming 50 Watt savings.

Assuming $0.10 kW/h (California is $0.16 ??). 1 hour of LED burn time saves 50W / 1000 * 0.10 kW/h = $0.005

Assuming LED bulb costs $2, assuming incandescent bulb is free. $2 / $0.005 = 400 hours until break even.

[jwilk]

You got the units wrong, but the end result is correct:

50W × $0.10/kWh = $0.005/h

$2 / ($0.005/h) = 400h

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> 4 packs of Phillips 40 or 60 watts used to be sold at the dollar store. $.25 cents per bulb. Or any hardware store had them for $1.19. Home depot currently has LED bulbs for 1.25 per bulb, 5x the price, IF you buy in bulk. 1.75 (7x the price) per bulb if you don't buy in bulk.

Which is a nonsensical comparison, given that (good) LED lamps (which you can get at around that price) not only save a ton of energy, but also last a lot longer. Those 1.75 give you the same amount of light over their lifetime as 2.50 worth of incandescents you buy in bulk, so it's already cheaper even if you ignore the energy savings.

> Maybe if you spend money to buy in bulk then 2 years down the road you will be financially better off than if you bought incandescent bulbs.

Suppose you are a poor family. An incandescent light bulb fails. What do you do? Well, you move the bulb from your most-used lamp to the one where the bulb failed. Then, you buy a single LED bulb for 1.75 and put it in that most-used lamp. Assuming your typical household, your most-used lamp probably is a "60 W" lamp that gets at least 3 hours of use per day.

The replacement LED with the same light output uses about 8 W, possibly less. At 52 W less power consumption, that means that at (1.75 - 1) / .1 / (52 / 1000) = 144 hours of use, or about 48 days, they have already saved the 75 cents that they paid above the price for the four-pack of incandescents. Another 108 days later, they have saved another 1.75 in energy costs, so now they can buy the next LED without exceeding the total cost of 1 dollar.

So, yes, you have to be able to invest an additional 75 cents for less than two months in order to be able to switch over to LEDs. I am not saying that that can't be a problem for some, but you are sure way overblowing the scale of it.

In the long run, every single LED you buy saves you around 50 bucks total (replacement and energy costs), so once you have managed to come up with that 75 cent investment capital at the start it's about the best thing you can do if you are poor, and in no time you will be able to buy LEDs in bulk, too. Except, of course, that doesn't really make much sense because they last so long, so you are probably better of buying single bulbs when you need them, because they only get cheaper and more efficient. An incandescent bulb that you changed once a year you won't need to change for the next ten years if you switch to LEDs.

[bensonn]

Wow, you used a lot math, I mostly made up my numbers and then made guesstimates based on those. :) $50 saving per bulb- holy shintos!

I concede, in most climates and most use-cases LEDs are a better buy. Most of my overhead lights are LED bulbs. I am not anti-LED or an LED-denier!

The whole thing just seems bizarre, even years later. Light bulbs are a small part of household electricity usage- water heater, heating/cooling, appliances, etc take more energy. Household electricity is a small part of all energy use- changes in industrial and transportation would have a bigger impact. While light bulbs represent a tiny fraction of overall power consumption they are probably the most visible and commonly used/purchased item. As a general rule it doesn't make sense to target areas that will cause the most disruption, to the most people to provide the smallest impact- if there has been any impact at all. Has anybody measured the impact? I tried to search for results of the ban but didn't really find anything meaningful. Has household electricity/ft2 usage dropped?

I would be curious if electricity usage did not drop at all. "oh it is an LED and is efficient so I will leave it on all day" I am sure there is a name for the effect/paradox. As far as I know impact wasn't measured. Is it another, "we did something, pat on the back" projects with no meaningful improvements?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> $50 saving per bulb- holy shintos!

... and that's with your cheap US electricity prices!

> Light bulbs are a small part of household electricity usage- water heater, heating/cooling, appliances, etc take more energy.

Well, that really depends on where you live, though. Here in Germany, heating mostly uses natural gas and oil, and AC is uncommon in homes, so lighting is a bigger percentage of electricity use. And potentially also of energy use, because heating with electricity is way less efficient than burning the fuel in your home in terms of primary energy use.

But also, you just have to take the efficiency gains that you can get, and that one was, overall, an easy one to get. If heating is 90% of your electricity use, but you have no way to make that more efficient, it's of no use that it's 90% of your electricity use. Lighting was overall easy to do, plus it didn't even cost anything, but rather saves everyone a not that insignificant amount of money now. Plus, for the migration to renewable energy, the efficiency of lighting is more important than the efficiency of other energy uses: You only need AC when the sun is shining and thus solar power is available, while you need lighting when the sun is down, and people generally want to be able to switch on light whenever they feel like it, while most bigger consumers of electric energy can deal relatively well with shifting their load profile: You can stop charging your car, or heating your house, or cooling your fridge, or washing your clothes for an hour of high demand/low availability without any impact on usability, but just shutting off all lights isn't really an option.

> changes in industrial and transportation would have a bigger impact

Well, maybe, but at what cost? It's trivial to have a "bigger impact" if you have infinite resources to spend. The interesting question is how much impact you can have per investment, and one that gives you a 50 bucks return on every dollar invested (or so) is pretty good based on that measure.

> As a general rule it doesn't make sense to target areas that will cause the most disruption

Except ... this didn't cause any disruption? You had good lighting options available all the way, the migration to LEDs was to be expected, and now everyone is saving money. Where is the disruption in that?

> I would be curious if electricity usage did not drop at all.

Chances are it didn't, but that's simply because people have more devices that use electricity now. I.e.: It would have risen if not for LEDs. But then, the switch to LEDs, while most visible, is not the only thing that's going on, the EU at least also has regulation on the efficiency and standby consumption of power supplies now, which also reduces energy consumption of new devices (or old ones, if you swap out the power supply).

> "oh it is an LED and is efficient so I will leave it on all day" I am sure there is a name for the effect/paradox.

I think "rebound effect" is the term, and I suspect there's probably some of that. But then, it's an about 8-fold increase in efficiency, so it's not that easy to use up again. I am pretty sure people don't use more than eight times the light now than before, and if they use twice as much, it's still clearly a win.

> As far as I know impact wasn't measured.

Well, it's probably difficult to do so, to any degree of accuracy, so possibly not. But it seems very unlikely that it was useless.

[papreclip]

LED bulbs are much, much more expensive, don't live up to their advertised lifetime in my experience, cause problems when used with dimmers, produce more problematic waste...

Most importantly, the light is of vastly inferior quality. You will never match the beautiful spectrum of incandescent light with LED or fluorescent.

A few decades down the line we will be reflecting on how the LED cartel took us all to the cleaners