Oct 13 2009
More material to make you feel old
This is the second grocery-shopping post I have made in a row, which is slightly alarming. In future will all my blog posts have some theme of standing in the cheese aisle, fretting over which kind of cheddar to buy? I hope not.
Anyway, at some point in the last six months — and I can honestly say I refuse to hunt down the references because it simply does not matter — the supply of 100W incandescent light bulbs has dried up. By law. I refuse to act like it is my human right to buy bulbs that are hot enough to burn fingertips. No doubt there are professional Boring Farts out there doing that very thing, in between complaining about the weather forecast being in degrees Celsius and milk being sold in litres.
Instead I will say something that really matters:
- The aforesaid Co-op (the one that occasionally stock Our Kind of Tea™) has decided that No 100W Bulbs means No 100W-equivalent Bulbs. I’m only asking for something like a 20W bulb, but the most I can buy is a 65W-equivalent (=14W actual).
- Sooner or later there will be a generation that doesn’t know what a 100W light bulb means. Woah.
7 Responses to “More material to make you feel old”
I suppose we will have to get used to everything getting dimmer…
i will not sit in a dark blueish living room!
if you plug ‘100W equivalent bulb’ into amazon.co.uk you get a range of bulbs claiming just that. They seem to vary from about 18w bulbs to more like 25W although perhaps that’s just to get full spectrum effects.
I’m all for saving money/the planet through using less power. but I want to be able to SEE THINGS!
the alternative is that I buy millions of 50W spotlights and fry the planet that way.
also, today I read a paragraph about personal spaces which had distances in the diagram, and was thinking ‘that seems quite big’…took me a full minute to notice the distances were in feet not metres. and i struggled to meaningfully convert them back.
Maybe you should walk into the COOP and ask for a 1750 lumen bulb, I would guess that is how much light you require given the 17.5% efficiency of a 100W incandescent bulb. So should all bulbs be sized given lumen, and then Power as a value and efficiency?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_%28unit%29
ooh, colin I like that idea! then there might actually be some impetus on manufacturers to raise their game slightly (some years ago tesco realised that by slightly changing the profile of their bulbs they could use less glass and save on shipping/raw material costs…I realise they did this largely in their own interests but if it meant they were ferrying about less glass i’m all for it!)
gimmie loadsa lumens but make it green, baby!
(should clarify i don’t want to sit in a green sitting room anymore than i want to sit in my current blueish one. i realise it’s just a matter of what you’re used to, and i’m used to tungsten. i wonder if i’d find full spectrum bulbs equally weird?)
I suppose I’m a bit of an early adopter on the bulb front. I tested in a house scale LED GU10 bulbs and Micro fluorescent GU10. I have to say that the LED GU10’s were a let down in the end. I had reliability problems with many of them, and although they only used 2W they only gave out somewhere the equivalent of about a 15-20W conventional GU10, I’ve heard that they have improved a lot recently though (untested). The 7W & 11W fluorescent bulbs are a success, and I’m buying up a few ever time I have a little spare cash about £7-10 each, and they look good in GU10 spotlight sockets. But there are two distict types, the earlier ones had a more blue/white look, that just doesn’t seem bright and warm, these are still available for choice. However, I now prefer the types that have a warm glow with a more red white, these are almost complete replacements for the standard 50W halogen with the 11W equivalent. Some of mine are 7W which is about 35W equivalent. Anyway their great, if a little expensive when converting a house with lots of spotlights. I do think all conventional bulbs should be removed from general use, with some being reserved for specialist applications.