Re:What happens to all the dead electric-car batteries?
by cduzz on Friday May 21, 2021 @12:04PM
(#27235829)
Well, first of all, CFL bulbs are as dead as Prince. You probably shouldn't be buying them unless you've got a very specific kind of nostalgia. It's also been almost 30 years since I could buy a cup of coffee for $0.05.
It's been my experience that in general LED bulbs last way longer than the CFL / Incandescent bulbs they're replacing. There have been some cheapo CFL / LED bulbs that didn't last very long, but that was also the case for incandescent bulbs as well (cough $0.25 bulbs). There's always been cheap junk in the world, some of it is packaged to look the same as quality products.
Yes, it is slightly tedious to match color temperatures, but that was the case with incandescent bulbs as well. It is also slightly tedious to find bulbs that are compatible with dimmers.
On the whole, though, these new bulbs are far better than the things they're replacing, and eventually even you will come to use them without noticing.
They cost orders of magnitude more than incandescent bulbs. I used to get incandescents 4/$1.00 on sale.
They don't last a lot longer. I haven't kept stats, but it feels like I am still replacing bulbs about as often as I ever did.
They contain mercury and need to be disposed of as hazardous waste. And if you break one, now you have mercury in your house.
LED bulbs don't seem to have the "warm up" period that CFSs need to achieve maximum brightness, but you have to be carful about buying the right color temperature because most of them are very harsh bright blue/white. Again I am replacing them routinely. Maybe in theory they should last a lot longer but in practice they seem to be made of minimally adequate components that don't hold up. And they cost even more than CFLs. I just paid $16 for four LED bulbs for the bathroom. Incandescents would have cost me a few dollars.
The only advantage of these bulbs is the reduced electrical usage. But how long will it take to save $16 on my bathroom bulbs? $16 at KWh/$0.15 buys me 106KWh. Assuming the old incandescents would draw 240W, thats 440 hours of operation. My bathroom lights are on maybe 30 minutes/day? So roughly 2.5 years later the LEDs come out ahead, and by then I am needing to replace at least one or two of them in my experience.