In its infinite stupidity the federal government has decided to ban the venerable incandescent light bulb. So I guess it's time to say goodnight Mr. Edison and thanks for lighting the way. I only hope that the people in charge of this museum have the good sense to put in a stock of real light bulbs. Because the day it is lit with compact fluorescents will be a sad day indeed. But when you consider that the museum is run by the same outfit that just banned the light bulb, there is not a lot of hope that day can be avoided.

Technically they didn't ban it, but they have regulated it out of existence with higher mandated efficiency standards buried in the recently signed energy bill. The incandescent will be effectively off the market by 2014.

I'm not going to get into the whole "where does the government get the authority to tell me what kind of light bulb I can use?" question. But I have to say it would be interesting to hear the current crop of wannabe Great Leaders positions on if this is something the government should be doing. I fear that only Ron Paul would oppose the idea. Though I suspect Fred Thompson might think it stupid just on common sense grounds.

What I want to address is that this is just another instance of the government stepping in and overriding what the market was doing.

Several years ago I bought a compact fluorescent as an experiment. They were fairly new but made great promises of energy savings. It was very expensive. Which is why I limited the experiment to one bulb.

It sucked. It took forever to get to full strength and when it did, the light was ugly. It was stark, cold, white light. It seemed entirely unnatural in it's lack of depth. I might as well have been lighting the room with halogen flood lights.

After a week I put it in the basement. There wasn't a lot of natural light in the basement so the long warm-up time was a problem. I threw it away.

A month or so ago I bought a 6 pack of CFL bulbs at a warehouse club for less than I bought the single bulb. I bought them for the basement because we have a nasty habit of leaving the lights on down there. It is the basement and it really doesn't matter what the light is like, and the energy cost savings and longer life would offset the cost of the bulbs - particularly since we were going through so many incandescents down there.

The new ones warm up much faster, and the the quality of the light has improved a bit. They are in open fixtures and I'll grant that they would probably be even a little better if they were under a decent shade.

The thing is, the CFLs have gotten better. They got better because they had to. They had to not because of regulation and government mandates. They got better because it was the only way they could compete with incandescents.

It was an interesting market dynamic. People wanted more efficient light bulbs. They wanted the dollar and the energy savings. But not at the quality and dollar cost of the early CFLs. The market was there, but manufacturers weren't delivering. They needed to get better and they did.

As CFL's continued to improve and energy costs continued to climb, CFLs were becoming more attractive. As those two trends continued, CFLs would have eventually replaced incandescents.

The Market Was Working.

But doing the work isn't apparently what some people were interested in. Some people didn't want to earn customers by delivering a better product. Some people wanted to grow the market and their business at the point of gun in the hands of the government. So they teamed up with the environmentalists who revel in telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do, and lobbied the government to regulate incandescents out of the market.

Those people are, not coincidently, the largest manufacturers of CFL bulbs. Phillips.

So here is my lighting strategy going forward.  Every trip I make to the warehouse club store, I'm going to buy a 10 pack of incandescent bulbs. The extra energy cost is worth it to me for the better quality of light. I also have numerous fixtures on dimmers and I want to delay the expense of upgrading dimmers to be compatible with the few CFLs that will work with a dimmer. I also have a couple of fixtures that use specialty decorative bulbs, so I'll be stocking up on those. And I guess I 'll have to put in a supply of the flood lights for the recessed lighting in the kitchen.

I'm going to buying a lot of extra bulbs over the next few years. I know it's going cost me. I also know that there will not be a single bulb in this house made by Phillips. EVER.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 05:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment