Are there any edf energy customers on the forum?  If so I'd like to thank you all for allowing yourselves to be overcharged for your electricity so that edf can ‘sponsor' Tesco to sell low energy light bulbs at just 20p each.

I know you're not doing this voluntarily, this is government policy so that the energy companies can subsidise schemes to make us use less electricity, and edf just happen to have lit upon this wheeze to discharge part of their responsibility. 

I have mentioned before the dilemma I have found in trying to use these energy saving bulbs in my office.  The main light over my desk has always given completely adequate light with a normal 100 watt bulb.  These bulbs used to last eight or nine months but cost very little to replace.  A few years ago I decided to ‘go green' and bought an energy saving type billed to give out the equivalent light.  It was encased in a glass bulb so that it looked similar to the normal bulb.  In summer this light was just about adequate, but come the autumn and it was apparent that it was not bright enough and I had to buy a desk lamp to make sure I could read adequately.  Then after about six months the bulb failed.

I replaced it with a more powerful version which meant that I used the desk lamp less, but again after about six months this bulb failed.  So far ‘going green' had cost about £12, and I was beginning to doubt if ‘greenness' was worth it, but I persevered and bought a stick type bulb which was definitely brighter and it seemed, longer lasting.

The problem is that, although these bulbs have a theoretical life of 15,000 hours, over time the bulbs degrade.  The light output falls as mercury is deposited on the fluorescent coating inside the glass.  After a year's use I had to change the bulb because it was becoming impossible to read without strain, and recognising that there was still plenty of life left in the bulb, saved it for potential future use.  Last autumn the same thing happened again so I now had two part used bulbs in the drawer.

Last week, after the clocks went back, it was apparent that I needed to change the bulb again.  I sat down to work out how much use my office light gets and discovered that it would be about 4,500 hours so these bulbs I was saving still had two thirds of their life left, If these were used in normal household situations that would be about ten years.  We actually have only three light fittings in which they could be used, even supposing the reduced light output would suit those situations, so I am in the position of producing one used bulb per year but would not need to replace any of them in the new locations for another ten years, by which time I would have a stock of ten used bulbs.  These bulbs have been costing about £2.50 each and it seems a criminal waste of money just to throw them in the bin and definitely not ‘green'.

Yesterday I filled up at a Tesco Express and as I queued to pay I spotted a special offer on energy saving bulbs sponsored by edf - any five bulbs for £1.  I bought ten.  They will keep my office light burning for ten years and at just 20p each I am not going to wince as I throw them away.  These bulbs are obviously inferior quality and are only designed to last 10,000 hours, but that won't really matter if they're thrown away long before their design life, will it?

In fact it will make my decision to discard them when still working a little more ‘green' - won't it?

Jacobus:

These bulbs are obviously inferior quality and are only designed to last 10,000 hours, but that won't really matter if they're thrown away long before their design life, will it?

As ever. Interesting reading Jacobus and as to disposal, I expect that you have obtained the necessary licence to dispose of the mercury contained within these 'green' bulbs?

Other outlets for energy saving lightbulbs also are available.

Lidl were selling them 5 for 50p but then every little helps!

I am helpfully supplying an explanation on the WEEE to ensure that you are all complying with this important regulation.

The WEE Directive aims to both reduce the amount of electrical and electronic equipment being produced and to encourage everyone to reuse, recycle and recover it.

The WEEE Directive also aims to improve the environmental performance of businesses that manufacture, supply, use, recycle and recover electrical and electronic equipment.

If you are an importer, rebrander or manufacturer of new electrical or electronic equipment then it's likely that you'll need to comply with the UK's WEEE Regulations, which in part implement the WEEE Directive. If you do need to comply, then you must register on a producer compliance scheme.

You may also have obligations under the WEEE Regulations if you are a business with electrical or electronic equipment to dispose of, or if you sell electrical or electronic equipment.

I think Ikea bulbs are also quite reasonable, of course you either have to drive to your nearest Ikea or pay vast amounts for them to drive over in a massive van to deliver your minimum order, very eco sound!

The main issue I have with so called eco bulbs is that the only 'normal' bulbs I have are on sensors, one outside the front door to allow me line up my keys with the keyhole, and one in the garage to prevent me walking into the wall on the way out. (Both are vital if you live in a place without local government sponsored streetlights.) Apparently eco bulbs are not suitable to be turned on for short periods only and this shortens their life considerable. Thanks for that EU, and for the bruises from hitting the wall and for the fact I can only enter my house in daylight cos I can't find the keyhole on the lock. Oh, and for the huge expense involved in buying the machinery to recycle all the failed bulbs because for about 6 months I refused to belive they really do have a shorter life!

And on that note I'm off to purchase all the 'normal' bulbs from my local hardware shop!

the greenth:

I am helpfully supplying an explanation on the WEEE

Wow!  You couldn't really make it up could you, but how heartening to see that someone in the EU commission has a sense of humour. 

On the other hand you must need a pretty thick skin if you work for the Environment Agency with responsibility for this legislation.  I can just imagine the conversation when you phone up a manufacturer or importer of Electrical and Electronic Equipment and say "Good morning Mr X, this is Mr Y of the Environment Agency and I'd like to talk to you about WEEE."  It's a pity they didn't substitute Products for Equipment, it must be enough to make you WEEP!

For anyone with an interest in WEEE the full story can be found here.  I looked up the section regarding businesses to see what I should do with my waste light bulbs.  It seems that if the light bulb being replaced was supplied after August 2005 then the producer is responsible for disposing of it.  If I can find out where I bought it, the supplier is obliged to tell me who made it or imported it and I can contact them to see where I can return it to for disposal.  However, if I am replacing it with another item of equipment to do the same job, the supplier of the replacement is responsible for disposal.

If the original bulb had been supplied before August 2005 it would be termed Historic WEEE and it would be up to me to find the nearest place where I could deposit said Historic WEEE.

So, in pursuit of my options I looked at the Tesco website.  If you search their main website you will find no reference to WEEE, but if you go to their Greener Living website you will find that, with the exception of some larger items which they deliver direct, they will not collect dead equipment.  They discharge their obligations by providing some funding to local authorities to subsidise free disposal.  If you put in your postcode you will find what facilities are available locally. 

As a householder I find that I can take my bulb to the local council waste site where there is a facility for disposal of fluorescent tubes.  Apparently I am allowed to put low energy bulbs through the same hole.  As a business, I am not allowed to do this.

As my old bulb is still working I think my company will have to donate it to me personally then I should be able to dispose of it as surplus to requirements at the council site.  It's only a round trip of 5 miles so this will be another dent in my ‘green' credentials. 

But hang on; I haven't checked the householder section of the EA site yet.  When I do, I find some pertinent advice:

Householders are not banned from disposing of WEEE in their bin but the WEEE Regulations have created a network of collection points for WEEE.

So I can put it in my bin after all.  Problem solved!

Heh, heh, glad your being dutifully compliant Jacobus! You could of course spend some of you free time turning your ex-light bulbs into useful or decorative items, here are some alternative reuse suggestions and not a Wee in sight.

1. Clothes hook, carefully remove the bayonet/screw end by breaking the resin seal, don't shatter the glass although this simplifies the disposal issue, once removed clean out the filament (metal recycling), fill the bulb with cement/resin and insert a suitable guage screw or bolt head first into the setting mixture, leaving sufficient thread exposed. Once all is dried, carefully shatter the glass (glass disposal) and then attach one or more of the bulbs to a convenient wall/door.

2. Paperweight, as per the clothes hook but this time reattach the bayonet/screw fitting with resin glue to the cast bulb end, leave the bulb as a cement cast, decorate bulb end to suit taste (multi colured glitter is charming), or if using clear resin, you may like to embed an interesting artifact inside the resin to both act as a conversation piece or as a memento of a treasured memory or loved one.

3. Novelty Light Fitting, buy yourself a string of little lights as used on Christmas trees, coloured ones are nice and saves you having to paint the bulb! Separate the bayonet/screw end as before, drill an access hole through the base of the bayonet/screw end, large enough to accomodate the light fitting, reassemble the components using resin as before.

4. Light Bulb Garden, after sperating the two pieces of your bulb, fill the bulb with fine gravel and place small leaved/flowered plants into the growing medium, reassemble using the base as a stopper, that still ensures an air supply thereby creating a mini-garden to amaze and astound visitors.

Xmas gifts and special occasion presents solved forever eh!

Jacobus:

As a householder I find that I can take my bulb to the local council waste site where there is a facility for disposal of fluorescent tubes.  Apparently I am allowed to put low energy bulbs through the same hole.  As a business, I am not allowed to do this.

As my old bulb is still working I think my company will have to donate it to me personally then I should be able to dispose of it as surplus to requirements at the council site.  It's only a round trip of 5 miles so this will be another dent in my ‘green' credentials.  But hang on; I haven't checked the householder section of the EA site yet.  When I do, I find some pertinent advice:

Householders are not banned from disposing of WEEE in their bin but the WEEE Regulations have created a network of collection points for WEEE. So I can put it in my bin after all.  Problem solved!

Wonderful John.

I only wish William Shwenk Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S) fame were alive today. He would have made a wondeful plot out of this story, and the happy ending would have sent theatre goers home with a song on their lips and joy in their hearts.

The opening scene would be a darkened stage and a solitary figure singing a sad refrain 

My light is dim oh woe is me. I find it very hard to see. I'm told that this is due to WEEE

The show would conclude in a blaze of tungsten light to the strains of:  

Oh joy oh rapture unconfined

my bulbs at last, a home I find.

 

Jacobus, with all these bulbs you are accumulating, perhaps you should consider setting up as a mercury reclamation processor.  Mercury has many important industrial uses including:

• Electrical equipment e.g. Batteries and Semi-conductors
• Medical appliances e.g. Sphygmomanometers and Thermometers
• Dentistry e.g. Mercury amalgams
• Barometers
• Paper Manufacturing
• Paints

townie:

with all these bulbs you are accumulating, perhaps you should consider setting up as a mercury reclamation processor

townie - I don't think I could cope with the inevitable red tape to handle such hazardous waste without going over the edge.  I am building up quite a collection now including 4 brand new 40 and 60 watt equivalent bulbs sent to me 'free' by British Gas and two unsuitably low powered bulbs which came 'free' with light fittings. 

I'm wondering if I could send them to someone in the thirld world to use, even if the habitat of some toads may have been ruined to provide the electricity.  Would I get some kind of Carbon Credit for them?

ps.  I didn't mention that Tesco's Greener Living website offers some helpful hints on how to be greener.  On the eve of bonfire night it is perhaps appropriate to mention one of these tips in particular - they suggest that whilst you are watching an uncontrolled blaze of half a forest interspersed with a zillion fireworks burning gunpowder (carbon, potassium nitrate and sulphur) manufactured in the perfect eco-environment of China, that you should use an energy efficient (LED) torch!!!

 At secondary school I was, well every pupil got a couple of free equivelent 100w energy saving bulbs. We put them in the lounge where they lasted for about 10 years and where as bright at the ordinary bulbs they were Phillips bulbs but haven't see the same ones since.

 katndog2 you need a little light like my brother was given as a back up during a 24 hour bike race that is about as bright dipped headlights on a car.

sjk:

you need a little light like my brother was given as a back up during a 24 hour bike race that is about as bright dipped headlights on a car.

What I really need is someone to invent one of these stupid bulbs that can cope with being switched on for short periods of time. And now I hear rumours that they are thinking of banning halogen bulbs found in downlighters. Where will it end? 

katndog2:

What I really need is someone to invent one of these stupid bulbs that can cope with being switched on for short periods of time. And now I hear rumours that they are thinking of banning halogen bulbs found in downlighters. Where will it end? 

 White LEDs can be switched on and off as many times and as fast as you like without problems.  The colour rendering is often rather blue, but some are OK, and they should last for at least 20 years and probably more, in normal usage.  The actual diodes need about 3.5 volts to run, and the transformer + electronics to produce this may well be the life determining factor.   At the moment, virtually all the world's production of such things is going into back-lighting for flat panel TV screens, but production is ramping up remarkably quickly, and prices should drop below those of compact fluorescents for the same light output in a couple of years.

          There is a completely mistaken view in circulation saying that LEDs are not dimmable.  In agricultural terms, bullshit.  However, some of the transformers/power supplies do not allow dimming.

2658336:

The colour rendering is often rather blue

That is one of the problems with both LEDs and fluorescent style bulbs.  They may be great of you don't mind living somewhere lit like a laboratory, but most of us prefer the homely yellower end of the colour spectrum when it comes to our living space.  Even in domestic kitchens, the once ubiquitous fluorescent strip light has given way to halogen spots and downlighters.

The other problem with them is that they cannot be focused.  With fluorescent bulbs the area producing the actual light, ie the whole convoluted surface of the glass, is too large so the light they shed is rather diffuse.  You could not put one of these bulbs in a mirrored fitting to give a beam of light.  With LEDs the light output of individual diodes is too small to produce a concentrated beam from anything much larger than a key-ring torch.  For a reasonable output you need multiple LEDs.

On one of our buildings with no mains power we have a solar powered flood light activated by PIR and light sensor.  It gives quite a good light but uses 24 LEDs to do this. For general illumination it's fine so that you can see not to trip on the step or fall over anything left lying around, but it is not good enough to help you get the right key for the door.  The effect is like being in a patch of moonlight rather than a sunbeam.

If someone can come up with a single LED with a light output equivalent to a halogen bulb from 60 to 500 watts, they've got it made.

Jacobus:

If someone can come up with a single LED with a light output equivalent to a halogen bulb from 60 to 500 watts, they've got it made.

 They have, in fact the first ones were demonstrated about 10 years ago.

 5 watt single LEDs are available from several leading manufacturers, including Nichia and Cree.  They are designed to give the same light output as a 55 watt car headlamp bulb, and do.   In fact the LEDs themselves emit light at the short wavelength end of blue, and a phosphor is used to convert some of that blue light into red.  Getting a "warm white" light is a question of getting the right balance of original light and light converted by the phosphor, which is why I said some of them are OK, though this decreases the efficiency a bit, and the manufacturers can sell everything they produce in the bluish white region at the moment.

For display lighting, LED clusters that emit red, green, blue and white in sequence of some sort are common.  I think we will see domestic versions which just allow you to balance the blue/white with red to suit yourself; in fact I know we will, but I don't know when they will appear in the UK, or how much they will cost intially.  With two LEDs in the same package like this, the emitting area taking both together is still small enough to focus using a single lens, unlike the multi-LED fittings you see at the moment (which are a transitory feature of current manufacturing capacities). Personally, I think one of the limitations of these very high power LEDs is that they may be too bright, and are liable to leave an after-image on the retina for minutes if you look directly at them.  This is avoidable by what I regard as better design of the light fitting, but seems to be the norm at the moment.

And will I have to change my light fittings in order to use them?

what you need is one of those led lights on a keyring, have had them on my car/house keys for a few years because we don't have any of those sensor lights outside our house.

I spotted a small item on BBC news website saying that scientific tests on these dreadful bulbs had shown how they lose their light output over time.  I couldn't immediately locate the source but have now found this item published in the Institute of Engineering and Technology magazine. 

It seems that not only do these bulbs diminish in power much quicker than conventional bulbs, but the 'equivalent' light output figures are misleadingly optimistic and tests in the US show that when subjected to intermittent switching on and off, to simulate real life usage, up to 25% of the bulbs fail.  Added to this there will be new standards for light equivalence and warm up times introduced in the EU next year which will be lower than the existing British standards but will, nonetheless, supersede them.  There will also be changes to the energy efficiency labelling (A,B,C etc) because virtually all bulbs fall in the A category already.

Thank you for that Jacobus, I didn't write that IET article, but could easily have done.  I've been putting the message across about light reduction after operation in compact (in fact any) fluorescents, but the green bunny huggers don't like facts if they don't fit with their own agendas, and I've regularly been howled down.  The reason for the drop in phosphor efficiency is the fact that in a gas discharge plasma, the electrons are nice and light and zoom about doing most of the excitation of the phosphor, but the heavy positive ions are also there, and the high energy ones knock hell out of the phosphor as and when they hit it.

 I am involved with research into 2nd generation GaN based LEDs, and there is little doubt they will take over most domestic lighting tasks within about 10 years.  However, I still wouldn't recommend them at present for anything other than specialised applications: the colour balance is usually (not always) bad, they are expensive, and the fittings for them are, politely, not very good yet.   However, GaN LED crystals are mostly grown using Metal-organic-vapour-phase-epitaxy (MOVPE) systems, which my colleagues pioneered about 25 years ago in the UK, and around 400 of them ( at £2million each) are now on order (mainly in Korea and Taiwan) for making LEDs.  There will be dramatic improvements in price and performance on a timescale of about 3 years.

 Either stockpile conventional bulbs for a few years, or get tungsten halogen replacements running from 12 volts via a soft-start electronic transforment, or both.

While I'm ranting, I understand that most manufacturers have stopped making the "T4" type small diameter fluorescent tubes.  If you have light fittings using these, I suggest you buy a few spare tubes to see you through the next few years, maybe 5, when acceptable quality linear LED arrays should be readily and cheaply available.

2658336,

           Do you know if these LED's give out the wavelength for Photosynethesis and what sort of Lumens /mtr would they be capable of producing.

burocrat basher:

2658336,

           Do you know if these LED's give out the wavelength for Photosynethesis and what sort of Lumens /mtr would they be capable of producing.

 Yes they do, but the difficult bit is getting a reasonable "white" light spread over the whole visible spectrum, whereas for photosynthesis you only need a small band of wavelengths.  This is not only a great deal easier than "white" LEDs, but a great deal more efficient if photosynthesis is your aim.  White LEDs will give around 200 lumens per watt, or a wall plug efficiency of over 20%, but I don't think either of those figures will be much use to you.

Guess you could put the old, dim one in the desk lamp. The thing I really do like about these bulbs is the slow start, its a god-send to bleary midnight eyes on a trip to the bathroom.

 LEDs though are fantastic, I have worked in live music and the LED stage lights are nothing short of amazing. Sure they weigh 3 times as much as the old style, but they have red, green, blue dimmable built in, on average they replace 6 to10 conventional lamps, provide a superior light show, the 600kg dimmer rack stays in the warehouse, the sun burn hazard is removed, stages are no longer a sauna and all the while using less juice.