Quote:
Originally Posted by sclitheroe
Light bulbs are incredibly efficient heaters, up around 98% or so! Far more efficient, in fact, than the best gas furnaces, which come up on 90% or so I believe with the latest models.
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Pretty much all of the electrical energy becomes heat or light (both of which are useful except for a handful of weeks every year or outdoors, where CF bulbs should exclusively be used). There is very little emitted in the UV spectrum and next to no noise from an incandescent bulb.
I found a story on the cbc that supports my contention about lightbulbs.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/st...ght-bulbs.html
The article says that rather than saving 75% of the energy for CF bulbs, the actual energy savings in Winnipeg would be about 17%. It further says that in jurisdictions like BC, people end up with more GHG emissions because they burn more gas to replace the hydro-powered energy "wasted" by regular bulbs.
Anyway, part of my beef with CF bulbs is how badly they do at actually lighting rooms. Some of them (especially the ones meant for chandeliers and pot light sockets) are terrible. They take a long time to get to full lumination (maybe 90% brightness in a minute, 5 minutes for full brightness). I know this because I was a good little elf and replaced most of the lights in my house, hoping to save money in the long run - then my big engineer brain got to thinking about where that waste heat was going and got to wondering if adding a bunch of mercury-vapour lights was worth what turns out to be a pretty poor return on investment.