here goes the govt piddling around with stuff again!

[David Weaver]

What benefit is there to me having to throw away about 20 perfectly good 8' long T12 fixtures? What about all the waste there?
I'm just saying.. stop making the fixtures, keep selling the bulbs.. Let T12 die a natural death instead of being so heavy handed.
As far as mercury goes.. they should stop trying to get rid of incandesent bulbs if they are worried about that.
There's no convienent way to dispose of used bulbs.. so they get smashed up in the trash and contaminate the world.. no matter
if they are CFL, T12 or t8.

You're trying to be too sensible about it. For their position on sensibility w.r.t. waste, see cash for clunkers, electronics recycling loopholes or recycling (chemical and energy waste) itself, or windmill policy in turning off windmills at night if a dead bird is found near them (when a maintenance person falls off a windmill and dies, they keep going, though). The rules change, in the end, it's probably not a net savings, and we'll get something stupid but they can keep the machine of legislating things obsolete going, just as the light bulb cartel did in the '30s (though by collusion and not legislation).

I wish I would've known about this when I put my T12 fixtures in about 5 years ago. I only have four, and one in the kitchen, but it's interesting that they go through the farce of energy saving. I don't remember the last time I heard about grid strain because of lighting. I wonder how total net power consumption changes will be compared to heating, water heating, refrigeration, and air conditioning power consumption - not even touching on industry non-lighting consumption. It'll probably be a net zero change after backing out the energy used in manufacturing and transporting the new fixtures.

[Kevin W Johnson]

I agree with some others here. I think they should just stop making new T12 fixtures, and continue selling bulbs. The pollution created, coupled with the energy consumed to produce and transport the new fixtures (as well as transport and recycle the old ones) most likely outweighs any energy saved by the T8 bulbs.

[Scott Donley]

Went out yesterday to buy a couple 96 inch, 2 pin t-12 bulbs. No such animal anymore. Everyone was sold out and not getting anymore in and can't be ordered. I really don't need another expense right now to replace the fixtures.

[Leo Graywacz]

What benefit is there to me having to throw away about 20 perfectly good 8' long T12 fixtures? What about all the waste there?
I'm just saying.. stop making the fixtures, keep selling the bulbs.. Let T12 die a natural death instead of being so heavy handed.
As far as mercury goes.. they should stop trying to get rid of incandesent bulbs if they are worried about that.
There's no convienent way to dispose of used bulbs.. so they get smashed up in the trash and contaminate the world.. no matter
if they are CFL, T12 or t8.

This could be considered as part of some jobs bill. It will put trash haulers, ballast makers, fixture producer, lamp producer back to work. You government at its finest.

I like the T8 better than the 12's. I have T8's and T5's in my shop.

[Dan Friedrichs]

As far as mercury goes.. they should stop trying to get rid of incandesent bulbs if they are worried about that.
There's no convienent way to dispose of used bulbs.. so they get smashed up in the trash and contaminate the world.. no matter
if they are CFL, T12 or t8.

Incandescent bulbs also indirectly contribute to mercury pollution, because the burning of coal (to make electricity) releases Hg into the atmosphere. For a produced lumen of light, an incandescent bulb actually contributes more to mercury pollution than a CFL does.

[Dan Friedrichs]

I wonder how total net power consumption changes will be compared to heating, water heating, refrigeration, and air conditioning power consumption - not even touching on industry non-lighting consumption. It'll probably be a net zero change after backing out the energy used in manufacturing and transporting the new fixtures.

~25% of commercial energy use is for lighting - it's a big chunk. And compared to electrical uses (water heating, refrigeration, etc), lighting is very inefficient, and it is very cheap to increase its efficiency (unlike, say, refrigeration, where you would have to spend a lot more money to realize the same savings in electrical use).

I can't prove to you that the whole conversion process (including making new fixtures, disposing of the old ones, etc) is net-energy-positive, but isn't it awfully cynical to assume that it's not? This is not some politically-motivated change. Well-educated teams of scientists and engineers come up with the recommendations for these policy actions. You really think your understanding of this rivals the experts'?

[Brian Kent]

If you want a bunch of T-12 bulbs, go buy them on line from Home Depot.

[Josiah Bartlett]

I used to work for an electric utility in the department that sponsored a bunch of the T8 retrofit projects. My information is about 15 years out of date, but we found that the electronic ballasts were more sensitive to heat, mounting angle, and lamp age than the magnetic ones. Electronic ballasts can last a good long time as long as they are kept cool and the lamps are changed ASAP when they start to go bad, but if you leave a bad lamp in the fixture it will shorten the life of the ballast quite a bit.

[Scott Donley]

If you want a bunch of T-12 bulbs, go buy them on line from Home Depot.

No 2 pin, I tried.

[David Weaver]

Well-educated teams of scientists and engineers come up with the recommendations for these policy actions. You really think your understanding of this rivals the experts'?

Strawman much?

I think it's not a big part of the problem when it comes to electrical use, especially when it is extrapolated onto the private market (the mandate). If you want to save electricity, ban the use of it for heating and cooling or set legal limits for interior temp with heating and cooling (not advocating that, making a point).

I see commercial buildings consume about 1/8th of the electricity in the US, but let's pad that and make it 1/5th (total commercial use is about 1/3rd, but buildings are where lights are, so the commercial building sector is the big target for lighting change). Lighting is 1/3rd of their consumption (in 2005), or 1/15th of electrical use. If every single fixture was T12 and went to T8, then the energy consumed would be a savings of about 2% of generated electricity. (1/3rd of 1/15th). However, I went through the office and couldn't find a single T12, so the likelihood is that far less than half of the amount of lighting draw is actually T12s. In reality, the savings is probably about 1/2 of one percent or less of total electric generation. The lighting load in the rest of the commercial (non retail and non-other use building) is probably not that great of a part of consumption, especially vs. manufacturing. That's a rough estimate of the gross

(Go to EIA.gov for energy figures, be sure to convert BTUs consumed by a sector to actual retail delivery if you compare charts - the retail consumption of energy appears to be about 1/2 of the energy input for the generation sector).

But nobody here (on this forum) is really talking about the lamps in commercial areas that are on 4000 hours a year, are they? You don't need a mandate to get people to change those. They're talking about replacing bulbs in their own shop or parts of their houses where they are only on a few hours a week.

For everyone on here who has a private shop or a garage where the lights are on a couple of hours a week, a 35% decrease in consumed electricity does nothing except drive people to go purchase new stuff that is more likely to break.

You really think your understanding of this rivals the experts'?

That's sort of a dumb statement, it's as if I have to go pull out a study and compare organized credentials of some sort to describe why it makes no sense in some cases (like probably every single privately owned T12 fixture that isn't in a kitchen). Otherwise, I just have to accept that everyone has good intentions and that I shouldn't think about much of anything.

In my shop where the lights are on a few hours a week (just like plenty of others), and at a 200 watt total load when they're on, it shouldn't be very hard to figure out that replacing them is no net savings, and it shouldn't be someone else's decision to begin with. The net savings would be about one kilowatt hour per month to me, and I'd replace 3 fixtures (to less reliable ballasts) at a cost of what?

Without even looking at the cost if the initial changeover, if I have to replace a ballast or two more frequently than I'd have to change a magnetic ballast, the net present value of the whole thing is about zero - just for a ballast or two. I didn't even figure in production of sheet steel, plastic, transportation, etc of the new fixtures.

All of this was sort of a waste of time, I only need to do what I did two paragraphs above to see why it's a waste for me - and plenty of other people.

[John Coloccia]

re: being smarter than experts

One expert? I'm sure there are plenty of individuals out there that know more than me on specific subjects.

A committee? My experience is that committees are typically made up of one or two experts and the rest of them are at least as dumb as I am on subjects that interest me...and many are dumber. Yeah, if it's a topic that interests me I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that I'm probably smarter than the general consensus of most committees reviewing this stuff, even if there are a small handful of experts that are actually smarter than me.

[Doug Morgan]

I don't believe the government thought about too much in the way of incandescent bulbs anyway. You can't use florescent bulbs in an MRI. They generate noise that distorts the image and that will be a concern moving forward. LED bulbs have the same problem. I know, we tried them in our MRI to see if there were any problems. They caused streaks on the patient images.

[John Coloccia]

LED's generated noise the MRI picked up on? The only way I could see that happening is if the LED were being driven by an AC supply and rectified locally. Maybe the LED was being dimmed with PWM controller? LEDs are usually whisper quiet. I'm not trying to say you're wrong. I'm just curious what you were picking up.

[Jerome Hanby]

If it was a screw in replacement for an incandescent bulb, it would have to have the ac to dc converter/power supply right there.

LED's generated noise the MRI picked up on? The only way I could see that happening is if the LED were being driven by an AC supply and rectified locally. Maybe the LED was being dimmed with PWM controller? LEDs are usually whisper quiet. I'm not trying to say you're wrong. I'm just curious what you were picking up.

[David Weaver]

Interference from the PCB maybe?

In this whole conversation about T12 vs. T8, I would think anyone who really wanted to make a difference on a "committee" would wait for an LED solution to make a real material jump.

Of course, you don't need to make a mandate if it's cheaper, it will catch on on it's own - the same reason recycling doesn't work without a mandate - people don't select net losers on their own.

Never know who else is involved in the decision or what pressure is made when a group comes to a conclusion. It's like saying that nylons are as good as they can be because "scientists were involved in making the best product available". They were actually involved in making the best product available so long as it was too good (as in, nylons were originally too durable and the scientists were told to go back and make nylons that were good but not that good).

In terms of committees vs. scientists, the straw scientists we're referring to are not often left to draw their own conclusions. They are often told by the committee members or regulatory agencies what their conclusion is going to be. It's always more popular to endorse change and legislation with inaccurate results (savings figures in PPACA - $80B of which are already about to evaporate, the cost estimate of medicare part D - the figure released for the cost was a fraction of what the "scientists" involved said it would be, etc).

I wouldn't be surprised if many other agencies (those who get credit for "creating jobs", etc) were involved in the T12-type decision, driving a conclusion before it's really made.

Not that I don't believe there won't be an overall net energy savings from using T8s vs T12s, there probably will be. But we would've gotten there, anyway, and without changing every fixture that's on a few hours a week, a month or a year, just because we can't get bulbs for them.