You’ve got to admire it:
A German entrepreneur is bypassing a European Union ban on light bulbs of more than 60 watts by marketing his own brand as mini heaters.
Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs — by producing them in China, importing them as “small heating devices” and selling them as “heatballs.”
To improve energy efficiency, the EU has banned the sale of bulbs of over 60 watts — to the annoyance of the mechanical engineer from the western city of Essen.
Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light — he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent — they could be sold legally as heaters.
So what’s the German for, “Take that, Brussels!”
If there was something like German ingenuity at all, then it is about intuitive craftsmanship and not law-fare weaseling.
That said, the idea serves a useful purpose. The one use I wouldn’t want to relinquish on classic lightbulbs is lighting the bath-room mirror. Their excessive heat generation clears the mirror from condensed moisture much sooner, without the need to fully open the heating.
My church replaced their light bulbs last year with the CFC light bulbs. You know, the ones that are much more efficient and last thousands of hours or more? And contain enough mercury to pollute beyond EPA standards a small lake? Well, two of them have blown already. What do I do with them?
Let me guess, you got them from a box store for something like a buck a piece, right? There are two different grades of CFLs commercial and residential. The commercial lamps are designed for a 12 hour burn – they can be left on for 12 hours without the circuits in them being damaged by the heat generated. Residential lamps, the buck a piece ones you usually find, are designed around a 3 hour burn. After that, the circuits in them may be damaged from the heat. If you consistently burn them for 5, 6, 7 or more hours, you greatly reduce the life of the lamp.
Why the two grades? Because people were complaining about how expensive the commercial grade lamps were, so the manufacturers came up with a cheaper and less expensive lamp.
One other thing – if you use the residential grade lamps in a commercial application (and for insurance purposes a church is a commercial application) and there is a fire that can be traced to them, you likely won’t be able to collect on the insurance. “You used the wrong lamp for the application, clearly negligence on your part, sorry.” Pay the extra money and buy the commercial grade, you will usually get the rated life, and not risk the financial liability. Same for if you replace the ballast in a linear fixture, get the commercial grade. Although with the electronic ballasts now, it is not as much of an issue.
Oh, and they get the life of a lamp by taking something like 1000 of them and lighting them until half fail. Most do come with some sort of guarantee, so take them back and exchange them.
The commercial ones usually get to full brightness far quicker as well. MIL had a goverment home energy audit and they replaced all of her bulbs with super cheap CFL’s. I had to replace most of them because they took several minutes to get bright enough to see decently. Not a good situation with a 86 year old with bad sight and even worse balance.
I haven’t noticed that much difference in start up time between the cheap ones and the good ones. I have seen a huge difference between summer and winter. Had one in our shed and last winter it almost didn’t light. Same for the one in our laundry room.
Throw them at the nearest hippie. Or All Gore.
“So what’s the German for, “Take that, Brussels!””
It usually involves a couple-three armor divisions.
Guderian had an effective way of say “auf dein arschloch.”
RonF … That’s the million-dollar question — what to do when they blow out or break. I believe there is a whole instruction sheet up on the internet somewhere, which Texas Congressman Ted Poe read into the Congressional Record last year, much to Nancy Pelosi’s annoyance. It involves turning off all heating and cooling in the house, opening all the windows for ten minutes, vacuuming up the particles of glass and toxic materials and then throwing away the vacuum bag. If you don’t have a vacuum with a bag, you’ll just have to call a haz-mat team and hope for the best.
I’ll fight them off as long as possible. Have been hoarding them for awhile. I was expecting the Mexicans to come through with black market incandescents after Pelosi’s ‘devil’s bargain’ with GE, and this was going to be my one whole-hearted law-breaking act this decade.
Marianne
Check you local regs for disposal. Usually for just a few of them you can take them to your local recycle center at no charge. If you have a few dozen, you may have to pay a per-lamp fee for disposing of them.
Supposedly, at least in CA, if one is broken in a commercial establishment, you need to follow hazmat procedures – evacuate, ventilate, call hazmat for clean up, or have employees certified for hazmat cleanup. Bag everything, including the disposable coveralls.
At home, I usually just throw them into the trash.
Joe, you just gave me a horrible shudder. Thank goodness my mother finally got rid of the last apartment house she and Dad owned, I can only imagine the legal liabilities that will follow the CFL mandate. Say, when the drunk in an apartment busts the CFL in the hallway for whatever reason… Thank goodness!
*THIS* decade, Marianne? What about the “other” decades? Inquiring minds want to know….or would their be legal matters involved above and beyond the mere flaunting of mere social convention?
**”there” viz “their” …brain cells…..going…….fast..
See? They are going TOO fast. Tell them to slow down before they get hurt or wear themselves out.
Being a Deutsch sprecher, Fall Gelb comes to mind.
Why can’t we have people that ingenious making the rules (or deleting them!) instead of having to find ways around them?
I’ve bought exactly two (top-line, brand name) CFLs and I’ll never buy another. Crappy light, abysmal actual power factor, slow start, and toxic waste do not a preferable product make.
I spent $125 to retro my six-lamp halogen ceiling fixture in my office with modern LED minispots. Vastly preferable to CFLs in every way except price, which will yield to scale soon enough. And they dropped actual power draw even more than the CFLs did.
I’ve stocked enough incandescents to likely carry me until LEDs get better-cheaper.
Screw the twisty bulbs.
And screw any pol dumb enough to mandate the use of any specific technology, thus ensuring there’ll be no further development by erasing the economic incentive to innovate.
Concur Sarge, LED is the way to go. Did all the undercabinet lighting in my kitchen with LEDs, goin on a year with no replacements required and near constant use. I also replaced the porch light with an LED spot; that one is on 100% of the time day and night, that’s 8700 hours straight without burning out, and provides better light than the incandescent that was there before.
I have replaced the halogen Streamkight Stinger flashlight on my duty belt with a LED Stinger, which is much brighter, and runs longer. The Streamlight LiteBox in my truck has been replaced, again, with the LED version, which, when turned on, makes one feel as if one is in the first chapter of Genisis, because when you press the ON button, Let There Be Light, and there is light, and it is Good.
I will soon be starting to replace the lights in my apartment with LED lamps, too, for brighter and cheaper light than CFLs.
Hopefully the battery in your LED Stinger will last longer, too. I don’t dare use my Stinger as a primary light because it sucks down too fast.
It seems to run longer. My regular Stinger is like yours, a battery snarfer. I see SureFire now has an LED version of thier M-3 Combat Light, the M-3LT. It’s only $400.00, so I guess I’ll have pick up a dozen or so. I don’t know where SureFire gets thier pricing from, yes, they are a superb light, and i own several, but they aren’t $400.00 good.
Wunderbar! Siegfried ist ein genie…
Ja! Ist sehr gut!
In Virginia, Home Depot will take the useless CFL bulbs. My entire house is CFL bulbs.
So far I’ve replaced 16 CFL bulbs under the warranties. Because I use the warranty so much, I now have to ship overheated bulbs to Ohio for engineering analysis.
My engineering analysis is that residential bulb are cheap, nasty, and the manufacturer does not honoring their warranty.
Grammar police: Please replace honoring with honor and use preview next time.
Me: Yes, Sir.
That’s OK. The grammar fairies are still in a state of catatonia, so your grammatical peccadilloes will go unnoticed.
That being said, you KNOW people are going to copy this tactic.
I’m OK with CFL bulbs – I figure that they are cheaper in the long term if you buy good ones. Unitl the LEDs are available, which are a better solution all the way around.
But I do NOT like Congress or the EPA dictating what sort of light to have in my home.
My brother and I used to build forts between our yard and the wrecks of fortress’ past at Brenton Village and we would ‘heat’ them with 100 watt bulbs, in Newport RI, in the winter, for not more than an hour or two a day.
Parent’s must have viewed this as a good thing since they never pulled the plug since the option was rafting into caves in Brenton Cove or rafting into old fortress wreckage batteries that were mostly underwater or sneaking into the old fort and ‘exploring’. We were in 8th and 7th grades and at the time girls we knew were schoolmates at the Catholic school. There’s nothing like messing about in boats.
You may laugh but it is true. That came later.
“Nothing like messing about in boats”. Ratty, is that you?
I love engineers. They have no patience for the absurd.
We replaced our bathroom vanity lights with squiggly lights and bought the expensive ones. That would be… 12 bulbs. Within two weeks, 50% had burned out. We returned them under warranty. Squiggly lights suck.
QM be an Engineer. Therefore I am loved
I just ship all my burned out bulbs to pelosi’s office. Cracked of course.
Maybe if we adopt that tactic here the 400 people who made light bulbs at GE’s recently closed lightbulb factory in Winchester, VA can get their jobs back. No I guess not as they were contributing to Global Warming. Now they just contribute to the unemployment statistics.
GE proudly announced they were contributing to the greening of America by selling their CFC’s made in China.
Obama called for the middle class to “continue the fight” and not go back to the old ways of the past.
I’m guessing their are 400 votes he can’t count on in 2012 from Northwest Virginia.
“Hier sind Ihre Brussel-Sprossen”
After reading through this thread earlier this afternoon I went to Amazon and bought 6 dozen incandescent bulbs. Take that Al Gore!
Also, when I tried the CFL’s in high hats a few years ago they made an annoying buzzing noise. It turns out that you have to have special switches if you use dimmers. Nice little extra expense there.