This question is way off topic for PLC's and controls but been bugging me for some time. Florescent lights are being toughted as "greener" than incandescent because they produce the same lumens with 1/5 the energy. But I see the following and wonder:

Florescent Light
Made of glass
has metal filament inside it
Has "toxic" Mercury inside it
Has phosphorus inside it
Uses 1/5 Energy of Incandescent
Lasts longer

Incandescent Light
made of glass
has metal filament inside it
No "toxic" mercury
No Phosphorus pollutant in it
Uses 5 times Energy of Florescent
Shorter Life


So to use less energy and fewer bulbs were willing to pollute with Mercury and Phosphorus.

Am I wacked in what I see?

And it takes about 4 times as much energy and twice the material in the manufacturing process.

No. It's a case of the greens going nuts over something they don't understand. By forcing the utility industry off coal and especially nuclear and into natural gas more and more, we are forcing more and more energy-intensive manufacturing overseas where cheap 3.5 cent/kwhr coal electricity is being produced. The end result is that we pay higher utility bills in the U.S., supplement the incomes of people living in less energy efficient and far more polluting countries, and increase the global pollution that we are supposedly trying to prevent. Fluorescent bulbs definitely have their place, and they make economic sense. That's why legislating them is just plain silly. People are going to continue to use them because they save money in the long run and because they are more convenient, regardless of what any legislators do. The mistake is with government getting involved. If you call the EPA offices and ask about clean up procedures, you will quickly find out just how stupid they are because you effectively need a huge environmental remediation company to come to your house with the space suits and do a full dress down of the place if you believe what they are telling you and you ever break a bulb.

Phosphorous is toxic but it's like sodium...once it reacts, it is harmless. Phosphorous is one of the 3 major nutrients for plants. The biggest problem with "phosphorous pollution" is with overfertilizing lawns...the excess fertilizer gets into bodies of water (rain water runoff) and causes massive plant growth (algae blooms) in the water. The place I work for now doesn't make phosphors but we definitely making the starting material (phosphoric acid).

Mercury is definitely toxic all the way around. It is not so bad in it's normal liquid state...the vapor pressure is so different that you have to heat it to get it to vaporize. It's in that form that humans readily absorb it. In the normal liquid state you can't absorb it through your skin for instance (very high surface tension as well). The amount used in a discharge-type bulb is very small. It just has to vaporize a very tiny amount and just like copper, the volume that mercury takes up in gaseous form at a little over 1 atmosphere is astounding compared to the space it takes up as a liquid/solid. There is also a lot more mercury in metal-halide fixtures, enough that you can actually see the mercury pool in the bulb while it is still igniting (very hard to see once it is lit of course).

There is a mercury mine in Spain or Portugal I believe (forgot exactly where) where you can literally see the mercury "sweating" down the walls. It is harmless but very impressive to see. Also, mercury readily amalgamates (liquid dissolving into a solid) with gold. Even today with mercury amalgamation no longer in use for mining gold, most gold still has traces of mercury in it. You are much more likely to get a small amount of mercury in you from wearing gold jewelry than cleaning up the mess if a fluorescent bulb ruptures on you.

Focus on the important part...the life span. If you use 100 W incandescent bulbs, you usually end up changing them about once a year or every 3 months if they are in continuous or nearly continuous application. With the fluorescent it will be years before you do so. At least in an industrial/commercial setting, the labor savings ALONE more than justifies their use since the cost of the bulbs is almost inconsequential compared to electrician labor rates to go around changing light bulbs. I've even gone to changing all panel bulbs out for LED. It's only in the last year or two that LED bulbs are now in the running with fluorescent in terms of usable lumens per watt of light (high pressure sodium is still king, but that usability factor makes it much less attractive). But I've been installing LED pilot lights for a long time purely because they cost so much less to maintain (change bulbs once every 10-20 years).

one thing that I've never seen mentioned before is that fluorescents "flicker" in time with the AC power supply ...

try swinging a mechanic's fluorescent "work lamp" on the end of its cord and you'll see a pattern of light strobes ...

try the same thing with an incandescent lamp and you'll get a continuous circle of light ...

now then ...

a lot of people wonder why I always wear a cap with a bill on it when I teach ... they assume that I'm sensitive about my rapidly balding head ... nope ... it's the fact that I've realized that fluorescent lighting gives me a crushing migrain headache ... if I'm going to do any serious reading when I stay in a "green" hotel room, I usually take my own incandescent lamp bulb to screw into the table lamp ...

I agree, it is a problem.
We are leaving our children with a legacy of lead, cadmium and mercury in the environment.

The amount of mercury in todays flourescent lamps is much less than just 10 years ago. Even so, with incandescent being replaced by flourescent on a large scale, it ads up to too much.
To my opinion there should be a deposit on items such as lamps and batteries that contain lead, cadmium or mercury. It is crazy that there is a deposit on beercans but not on batteries and flourescent lamps.
The light from flourescent lamps is also not as evenly distributed as natural white light. I guess this is the problem behind getting headaches from staying in areas with only flourescent light.

I see that LEDs are beginning to appear, even as replacement bulbs for old style incandescent light bulbs.
LEDs are still way more expensive than flourescent, but on the other hand yet more energy efficient. And the newest types have a much closer resemblance to natural white light than flourescent.
To me LEDs is the way to go.

You guys ever have a sales guy come to your office and try to sell you stuff? At the end of the meeting, it's always the same thing: "We recommend adding 'this' to your specs." 'This' is something that they choose to put into their product that they feel is beneficial, but is rarely necessary. Yet, they want us to change the basis on which we operate, without even fully researching or understanding the negative impact this may have on other things (like cost, effeciency, etc.), because they will profit from it.

This is what happens in politics. Except the lobbyists have 10x the money behind them, take the polies out for dinners, golf, etc, and convince them to put stuff into LAW, which demands everyone MUST follow what is stated in their 'spec.'

If our clients don't like our specs, they can ask us to change them or go elsewhere. We're stuck with our laws, put into place by the ignorant, who were duped by greedy, and we the people pay the price.

So now the question is, what have YOU done about it? Lobbyists are calling on your congressmen everyday. How often do you email or call them?

The key is to stay ACTIVELY informed and involved. I say actively because most bills are passed in relatively low fanfare, with ridiculous attachments on them (example: a new hate crimes bill has been attached and will be passed with our troops' defense budget*).

Some groups to join are:

Campaign for Liberty
FreedomWorks

Each are run by former or current freedom-minded and common sense congressmen.

*Hate crimes laws mean that minorities or LGBT's will have MORE protection under law, instead of equal as our constitution states. A loophole in the bill is, if you say 'I believe that being gay is wrong,' and a gay man states that this caused him emotional stress and made him sick, you can be convicted of a crime. Also, it protects people's 'choice' of gender. So if a man decides today he wants to be a woman, he can dress as one and go into the women's RR where your 5yo daughter is on the toilet. Crazy? The governor of Colorado already tried to pass this in his state. Do the research and see for yourself. Lightbulbs and digital TV are the least of our worries. Our young sons and daughters are at stake.

This is actually not true in most cases, YET. In THEORY an LED can exceed the efficiency of a fluorescent tube. So far it hasn't happened YET. There are probably a few by now that exceed that of CFL's though because the compact fluorescent tubes are not quite as efficient as high efficiency fluorescent fixtures (the ballast is a problem).

There are two major sources of losses for LED's. First, the "white" LED's are actually blue LED's with a phosphor coating. The phosphor coating CAN be very close to sunlight (and incandescent) but with that mixture (a little more yellow), efficiency also drops off so LED manufacturers basically try to stay with more of a cool-white color. The phosphor coating absorbs blue light and converts it into a more broad spectrum "white" light via fluorescence. The second problem area is in the power supplies. A blue LED takes roughly 6-12 volts DC to power it. The AC->DC conversion is another efficiency limitation. Either way, the end result is that the limiting factor on LED's for many applications right now is heat dissipation. The actual element is so small that it takes a lot to move the heat away from the LED itself. It's similar to the CPU cooling problem for computers except that in that case, nobody cares if you glue a giant heat sink and a fan on top of it.

Paul.
There is a quite new variant that does not use phosphor coating but 'quantum dots' in stead.
http://www.nexxuslighting.com/news/pressRe...news_050509.php