Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Europe decideds to turn off the lights!

When I heard that our much beloved leaders decided to ban normal light bulbs, I didn't really care! I got some 'eco friendly' light bulbs ( the local council were giving them away free a few years ago! Yeah it's a socialist council!) So little harm there, just some more backslapping among those well fed men in Brussels!

Well, I was wrong, apparently, their decision, welcomed as 'too little too late' by the green lobby was a mistake, one that is only now being shown for the idiocy that it was!

Can you imagine, they can't even decide this! A fucking light bulb?

Over at EU Referendum, they have a great post on why this is just so supremely stupid!

"because (the new fancy 'eco friendly bulbs') must be kept on so much longer to run efficiently, the actual amount of energy saved by these bulbs has been vastly exaggerated."

He then goes on to say:

"Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim – and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem – the so-called "strobe effect"...

Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 50C or lower than –18C they don't work)...

And that is not by any means the full extent of the limitations. CFL's cannot be used for security lights, triggered by photo-electric cells, they cannot be used with timers or dimmers and even use in recessed fittings can dramatically shorten their lives...

In addition to this, low-energy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites – which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem...

Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox...

If people continue switching their lights on and off when needed, as Mr Elliott puts it, they will find that their "green" bulbs have a much shorter life than promised, thus triggering a consumer backlash from those who think they have been fooled. But if they keep their lights on all the time to maximise their life, CFLs can end up using almost as much electricity from power stations (creating CO2 emissions) as incandescent bulbs – thus cancelling out their one supposed advantage.

It is unbelievable, even a fucking light bulb they can't right! Why do we in Europe continue to vote for these fucking idiots?

2 comments:

Leo Pusateri said...

Kinda begs the question...

How many socialists does it take to change a light bulb?

A Free Man said...

Don't even start! You could make a movie out of this sort of non-sense!