Are they actually worth it? That’s what I find myself thinking as I’m replacing yet another one which has failed to live up to its claimed 10 year lifespan.

Those are all thats going to be available in the next few years, so better get used to it.

Also, the “ten year life span” should have “up to” before it.

Mine are fine. I can’t keep up with all their birthdays though.

and they are only about 10p a go aren’t they. Unless you need the candle types like I do for hall and landing at 5 per fitting and £3.00 a go for some reason. 🙁

Monthly elec usage of £20 despite having a TV, humax, router and a few other bits on, and computer most evenings. Moved to a new place, all the same kit but very few energy savers and now I’m up to >£30 a month!

IIRC There’s a website in Germany which has started selling 100watt ‘heaters’ to get round the EU legislation. The fact that the ‘heaters’ give off loads of light is purely an incidental bonus.
A heater that also gives off light! What could be more eco friendly:)

Those are all thats going to be available in the next few years, so better get used to it.

I’ll just buy myself some heaters which give off waste light.

edit: as just mentioned by IanMunro

If you search around you can still get proper 100w light bulbs in back street stores or markets. I’ve got several years supply and am hoping something better than the current low energy light bulbs will be produced.

If you search around you can still get proper 100w light bulbs in back street stores or markets. I’ve got several years supply

Me too,I’ve got 2 [x 72] cases of 100W incandescents in the garage
Should see me out

Given that when it is dark, it is normally cooler not warmer, losing energy in the home as heat doesn’t seem that unfriendly environment-wise, particularly when you think about the drive towards electric heating you are going to see over the next few years because you can make electricity renewably – oil and gas are a little harder, though sustainable wood is of course fine.

So not entirely conviced – LED lights are cool though. You can match emitters with your bike lights, and you can have colour changing ones. Geektastic.

Sadly, using light incandescent bulbs as heaters is a bit of a false economy. It is cheaper and more efficient to produce the heat that a 100W light bulb produces by using a gas heating system. Also the heat produced by a light bulb is in the wrong place – the ceiling (heat rises). You want the heat near the floor which is where the radiators are.

CFL’s are a temporary aberration along the path towards a fully LED base lighting solution.

Incandescents approximately 14 Lumens/Watt
CFL’s approximately 44 Lumens/Watt
LED’s at least 100 Lumens/Watt.

It is cheaper and more efficient to produce the heat that a 100W light bulb produces by using a gas heating system

Assuming that you have gas 🙂

It’s probably cheaper and more efficient to heat your home by burning fivers than it is to use electric lightbulbs.

Slight thread hijack, but what was the name of that book (with an on-line version) on energy sustainability that was mentioned a week or so back?
I did like the quote in it along the lines of “small changes lead to little differences”

Does anyone else have energy saving bulbs that ‘flash’ after they’ve been turned off? the one in our bedroom really p’s me off , just as I’m dropping off the bloody thing will come on .It’s only a millisecond type of thing but really grates.

Given that when it is dark, it is normally cooler not warmer, losing energy in the home as heat doesn’t seem that unfriendly environment-wise, particularly when you think about the drive towards electric heating you are going to see over the next few years because you can make electricity renewably – oil and gas are a little harder, though sustainable wood is of course fine.

Except we’re not even remotely close to covering normal power usage via renewables (in fact we’re miles off target) and adding space heating power requirements to that will royally **** any chance we ever have of hitting renewables targets and leave us with massive fines. Add to that the fact that all power costs are going to rise through the roof in our lifetime and that electricity is going to be the first and fastest to rise – doesn’t seem a smart or environmentally friendly way forward really.

not going to get into the hows and whys but as I rule I find cheap energy saving bulbs are slow to light up, dim and don’t last. £3 ones a fast, bright and last forever (so far). Incadescent light bulbs are an old inefficient design and i’m sure candles are better. LED’s are best though.

Coffeking – electric space heating is coming like it or not, because only wood, solar heating and electric heating can be done without burning fossil fuels.
Similarly electric cars are coming for exactly the same reasons. In terms of hitting the renewables targets, the targets if I recall are for energy, not electricity.
Therefore moving to electric heating is bad in the short term (gas/coal burnt in power station, not in domestic boiler) but only by the efficiency difference (which admittedly even for a well run CCGT is still pretty noticeable) and it’s probably good in the longer term.
Electric cars are more clear cut and could assist significantly with some of the power balancing issues.
I agree there are some issues in connecting all these renewables – I’ve presented on the subject on occasion – Google me and CE Electric and some of the recent ones might come up.

Also the heat produced by a light bulb is in the wrong place – the ceiling (heat rises). You want the heat near the floor which is where the radiators are.

Generating heat near my downstairs ceiling seems quite a good way of getting underfloor heating upstairs though.

igm – you’re assuming a) we’re going to stop using fossil fuels fairly soon (unlikely for a long long time) and b) electric heating is very inefficient (including power station conversion, transmission etc – transmission losses are ~20% IIRC? On top of the rather massive efficiency hit that power stations take when they fit carbon capture hardware) and so for the short to medium term it’s just going to bring on any potential problems (be they load power system load or CO2/green problems) faster and increase fuel costs more quickly before renewables are sufficiently viable/numerous to take over the loads. A decent microCHP plant per house can be 90% efficient, even taking power storage into account it’s significantly better than power station based elec heating. I’m not denying that eventually we may be highly elec based heating, but it’s not a smart move to encourage it before it is necessary.

In the last couple years I’ve seen about 15 seminars/lectures by people in the power gen industry, the smart grid industry (only the other week I was at one by the IET) and what comes to the front of my mind is lack of direction, disagreement on standards, possibilities and needs, and that there’s a heap of people doing a lot of talking and subsidising the wrong technology in this country. I’m not suggesting that’s you, but I am suggesting everyone thinks they know the answer and has their own version of a proof that everyone else is wrong – it’s a mess. I’ve had a solar cell manufacturer telling me the only way forward is PV. In Scotland. Where I’ve real-world data that a PV rooftop array producing <10% it’s rated power on one of the brightest days of the year. More people at the heart of development of standards in smart metering who spend an entire day discussing that they’ve made no conclusions and despite smart metering being forced ahead no-one is sure how it’s going to work, what level of control the supplier will have and what the benefits are. I’m not saying I have the answer, but I do have massive questions of just about everyone I speak to and rarely can they answer them.

All electric cars make no sense, with current or mid-to-near-term technology, apart from city/short range driving. Toyota recently presented a public discussion on their own research as to what technologies to follow and they concluded that the foundry->scrapheap carbon footprint of an all electric car was notably higher than a hybrid, and that on both financial and source-to-car efficiency, hybrids are notably better. While all-electric is very easy for them to produce with fairly mature technology, it just doesn’t make sense. Power balancing with their distributed storage seems like a smashing idea, until someone wants to use their vehicle. That sounds very similar to someone I spoke to (who presented at an IET seminar) who suggested the best way forward was to use all business laptops as distributed storage and sacrifice half the battery capacity to load balancing, forgetting that people want a 4 hour battery life so they can use their computer for 4 hours, not so they can use it for 2 hours and have a nice warm feeling that they’ve filled the lull between the winds. It’s the same with cars – I want my car either refillable on the go or charged to 100% for whenever I want to use its range. Sure you could use interchangeable fast-charging battery packs and leave them at a station, but that requires pretty massive infrastructure changes and a policy of pricing/rental and massive standardisation across all car manufacturers – not something we’re good at.

Coffeking – I assume very little actually (outside of the politics of it) but otherwise, agreed. Except it makes no odds – this isn’t about engineering science and making sense. Note that the subsidies in the FiT are not in line with the technology’s worth but in line with what it needs to make the technology break even and you understand where the game is. This of course means that better technologies get a lower subsidy.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain what a smart grid is – or a smart meter for that matter. And I run the section that for a seventh of the country designs the distribution network that people hope is going to become the smart grid.
And don’t get me started on demand side management – we used to call it non-firm supplies or rota shedding, but apparently it’s going to be cleverer than that; only no one can quite tell you how.
Power balancing using vehicles (OK this is demand side management and for info Goran Strabac tells it far better than I) might well work mainly because humans are incredibly predictable in their habits. Perhaps not as individuals but as a nation surprisingly so – which is the only reason you can power balance now of course.

I’m not sure what your background is but I’m the System Design Manager for the YEDL and NEDL franchises. We don’t generate (in this country), we don’t bay or sell energy and we don’t sell gadgets for smart grids. We just own and operate the network that will facilitate (in a physical sense) load and generation into the future. Lots of people with something to sell will tell you lots of things (frequently at IET lectures). All I will tell you is it is coming and nobody really knows what “it” is.

igm – it seems we’re singing from similar hymn sheets to be fair, I’m on the academic research/eng side of some of the possible “solutions” (smart meter design, uCHP, energy harvesting) and still trying to make sense of what “it” might finally be, as is everyone I suppose!

Not really a discussion for here I guess, but it’s interesting to get stuck in with someone else with an experienced/educated position to trade ideas!

Coffeeking and IGM – despite some wordy answers you are quite succinct. I have been worried for years about the crap we are being fed about energy use/global warming/renewable resources, and I think you have have both demonstrated that the people who tell us what is what don’t have much more of a clue than I do.

Homer Simpson – “I’ve got an inside line — it’s all a bunch of crap.”

Problem is, these are the guys who should be telling us..!

If we need demand management in domestic markets it will be achieved through load limit or peak pricing, hopefully the latter, not by Electric cars discharging into the grid. No one is going to buy electric cars, thats the problem, fine if you’re a milkman, *** if your not.

losing energy in the home as heat doesn’t seem that unfriendly environment-wise

As discussed above – if you wanted to heat a room you wouldn’t install heaters on the ceiling would you?

only wood biofuels, solar heating and electric heating can be done without burning fossil fuels.

Fixed that for you. Some people are running very nice CHP setups using waste veg oil, for example. Of course I appreciate the problems with biofuels but should those problems be addressed it’s another way of not needing electricity for heat.

CK, can I come and work for you please?

Re the OP – there are good and bad energy saving lightbulbs. We have had some that failed easily but they’ve now gone, and it’s been 3 years or so since any failure.

Molgrips – agreed biomass and biofuels are options – but in this country and at present sustainable biomass normally means wood (though there are some bioethanol installations – which I think means vodka burners) and I’m thoroughly unconvinced by biofuels.

At present, yes. Can’t wait for cellulosic ethanol myself. Seems like big potential there, since cellulose is not in short supply.

just look at the graph on the right

It’s probably cheaper and more efficient to heat your home by burning fivers than it is to use electric lightbulbs.

Go on then; you do a test, see if that is true. Then report back to us.

Energy saving bulbs have improved loads, but what pisses me off is the price of dimmable ones compared to standard ones. I figured the cost of old-fashioned bulbs and leccy was actually a lot less over time than buying dimmable ‘energy savers’, so I’ve stockpiled some old 100W bulbs. 30p a bulb. Given that an old-fashioned one will last what, couple of years? 30x30p=£9 so still cheaper than a flippin’ ES bulb.

Energy Saving? No thanks I’d rather save my money. Fascists.

so you didn’t look at the graph then?