The government wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love. 

Incandescent bulbs - that’s the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year.

And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they’re stockpiling them ahead of the day when they’re no longer available.

In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011.

The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

The brighter bulbs are already fading from view, according to Glen Gotten of the light merchant Ryness. “100w and 150w are difficult to get hold of,” he says. “The larger manufacturers have stopped making them. We still manage to get enough to supply our customers for now, but they will start drying up.”

The 150w, in particular, is seriously rare. They’re gone from Tesco. Morrisons have already chosen to ditch them, with 100w to follow in the autumn and 60w next year.

Buzzing noise

Hence the stockpilers. “I’m stocking up now, before they’re banned or get ridiculously expensive,” says Bradley, an insurance broker from West Sussex. “The green ones might save you money and everything, but I just can’t stand them.”

“They don’t look right,” he explains. “They’re not bright enough and they take an age to come on. That’s not what you want from a light bulb. You want it to light up the whole room, just like that.” He clicks his fingers.

Jo, who works in the same office, agrees. “I did try the energy saving ones,” she says, “but they’re not the same. One of them made a buzzing noise, one of them kept going on and off. We gave up on them.”

Are they not concerned about the environmental impact of incandescent bulbs? “I do my bit,” says Bradley. “Recycling and all that. But at the end of the day, if they want us to use those bulbs they’ll have to make them better.”

“And anyway,” he adds, “they’ve got mercury in, haven’t they, these so-called green bulbs? What’s that going to do to the environment?”

Government advice says that because of the mercury in low energy bulbs, if you break one you should leave the room for 15 minutes, clear up the pieces with rubber gloves, not with a vacuum cleaner, and take them in a sealed bag to your local council. The bulbs should not be thrown in normal waste.

Aesthetic issue

The Migraine Action Association has raised another health concern. The group reports that members have found that low energy bulbs seem to increase migraine attacks.

For most stockpilers though, the concerns seem to be more aesthetic than safety-conscious.

In a nutshell, many people prefer the warmer glow of an incandescent tungsten bulb to an eco-friendly compact fluorescent (CFL).

Jill Entwistle, editor of Light Magazine, says much work has been done to improve CFLs but that many people still prefer tungsten.

“There have been issues with compact fluorescents. They have improved a lot, a lot of investment has gone into reducing their size and improving the colour by experimentation with the phosphors that affects the colour temperature. They have managed to warm it up.”

She is against the ban and believes incandescent bulbs have been chosen as an easy target. “It is a shame. This is simplistic thinking.”

But there are those who assert that the work done on CFLs mean that most people cannot tell the difference.

The Energy Saving Trust did a spot the difference test in a shopping centre. Of 761 shoppers, 53% could not tell the difference between a traditional bulb and a CFL.

“They produce the same level of light. The latest CFLs radiate a very similar light spectrum,” says Lyndsey Hubbard, editor of Total Lighting magazine. The dislike of CFLs may be a result of encounters with more primitive examples of them sticking in the mind.

Campaigners see the hoarding of bulbs in a dim light. “It’s a bad idea,” says Ben Stewart of Greenpeace. “They’re not only bad for the climate but mean a bigger electricity bill. Incandescent light bulbs were invented in the 1880s and use 80% more electricity than energy saving ones. The time has come to move into the 21st Century.”

There are certain people who will stick to their incandescent lights, whether it be film companies, or art galleries using the yet-to-be-restricted halogen type, and get their supplies through specialist sources.

But for the ordinary punter, the pursuit of the warm glow of the traditional tungsten incandescent will soon get a lot harder.

Original article can be found at www.bbc.co.uk.

Posted by Sunshine Coast Web Design

Using solar power is a great way of reducing your carbon footprint. Having a few solar panels on your roof and using them to heat your hot water is the way forward. Providing you don’t live in rainy England or Tasmania. There are now government rebates in most countries for installing solar heating so find out about it and get your electricity costs down now.

Posted by Ion e-Business Web Design.

According to the government a dripping tap can waste more than 2,000 litres of water a month or 24,000 litres of water per year. With water shortages a problem nearly everywhere it is important that we fix our leaky or dripping taps. So, turn off your taps tightly but don’t overdo it because you’ll damage the tap washer and make your tap even more drippy. Once you’ve been shown how to do it, changing a tap washer is simple as and we all know that plumbers get paid too much so look up how to do it on the internet and save yourself some cash.

Posted by Sunshine Coast Web Design.

One of the easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to eat locally grown produce. Eating seasonal, regional produce reduces the transportation incurred by importing from different countries or regions. So, visit your local farmers market once a week and buy your seasonal fruit and veg there instead of buying from the supermarket.

You can do each of these steps straight away and they will begin to reduce your carbon footprint:

• Sign up to a green energy supplier who supply electricity from renewable sources such as wind and hydro-electric.
• Turn electrical items off at the wall when you’re not using them.
• Turn down the central heating (for those of you in the UK) and turn up the air-conditioning to 24 degrees centigrade (for Aussies).
• Turn down the water heating temperature a couple of degrees. There’s no point in burning yourself while you’re trying to get your shower temperature right.
• If you’re making a cup of coffee for one person, use enough water for only one person.
• Unplug your mobile after it’s finished charging.
• Run to the gym instead of drive. Not only will this stop you producing carbon dioxide from your car but you’ll ask yourself why the chuff you’re paying for a gym membership when you could be running instead.
• Recycle as much as you can. Or as much as your council will let you with their pathetic attempts at collecting your recyling rubbish.

Though we call them “lights,” traditional incandescent bulbs are actually small heaters that produce a little light — and waste a lot of energy making heat. (You know this if you’ve touched one that’s been on for a while!) In the 1880s, they revolutionized the world. But today, we can do better.

Better alternatives use more efficient technology

Once dismissed as buzzing tubes in offices, fluourescent lights have gone compact and upscale. Energy-saving compact fluorescents (CFs) now rival the cozy, warm light of traditional bulbs. They use a fraction of the electricity, which means lower electricity bills and millions of tons less global warming pollution. And in the summer, because they don’t burn as hot as incandescent bulbs, they’ll lower your cooling bills.

If every household replaced just three 60-watt incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs, the pollution savings would be like taking 3.5 million cars off the road!

Whilst you can minimise your carbon footprint you will never be able to reduce your carbon emissions to zero. Whilst I’m typing this I’m using electricity which is affecting my carbon footprint. It is, however, possible to offset your carbon footprint by planting trees that will absorb the amount of carbon dioxide that you generate.

The plant-a-tree-today organisation can help you calculate your carbon footprint and will plant trees to offset it on your behalf.

The carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive global amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases emitted by a human activity or accumulated over the full life cycle of a product or service (see Wiedmann and Minx, 2008).

The life cycle concept of the carbon footprint means that it is all-encompassing and includes all possible causes that give rise to carbon emissions. In other words, all direct (on-site, internal) and indirect emissions (off-site, external, embodied, upstream, downstream) need to be taken into account.

Normally, a carbon footprint is expressed as a CO₂ equivalent (usually in kilograms or tonnes), which accounts for the same global warming effects of different greenhouse gases (UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology POST, 2006). Carbon footprints can be calculated using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, or can be restricted to the immediately attributable emissions from energy use of fossil fuels.

An alternative definition of the carbon footprint is the total amount of carbon dioxide attributable to the actions of an individual (mainly through their energy use) over a period of one year. This definition underlies the personal carbon calculators. The term owes its origins to the idea that a footprint is what has been left behind as a result of the individual’s activities. Carbon footprints can either consider only direct emissions (typically from energy used in the home and in transport, including travel by cars, airplanes, rail and other public transport), or can also include indirect emissions (including CO2 emissions as a result of goods and services consumed). Bottom-up calculations sum attributable CO2 emissions from individual actions; top-down calculations take total emissions from a country (or other high-level entity) and divide these emissions among the residents (or other participants in that entity).

Read more at Wikipedia.