Photo by Dimaano Photography

On Monday night, I caught myself, while waiting at a crosswalk, squinting at the oncoming traffic and studying the difference intensities of light coming off of car headlights. I was trying to figure out which headlights were LEDs and which ones were incandescents. I missed my signal to cross and had to wait for the next light change because of my musings.

My musings were inspired by a 90-minute walk through a hilly region of the city led by Robin Marks. Robin, a biochemist, science journalist and former science tinkerer at the Exploratorium, started Discovery Street Tours this past July. The website describes the tours as “more than just a walking tour. It’s an urban investigation of the science under your feet, in your food, and in your life. You’ll demo the science for yourself with hands-on activities, eat some tasty treats, and meet other folks like yourself—curious, active, and a little beyond the ordinary.”

Science got festive on the night of Sunday, December 11th as 18 of us, bundled against the cold and misting fog headed up 20th Street for the The Science of (Holiday) Light preview tour. Through the up-and-down mile and half route, we took frequent stops to admire holiday handiwork, discuss the history of holiday lights, view the different types and understand how our brains were taking in light signals.

My favorite part of the tour was when we stopped at a corner house strung with both LED and incandescent holiday lights. We were encouraged to look closely and notice the difference in both the quality and brightness of light. While incandescent bulbs use a filament to produce light and heat, LEDs (light emitting diodes) are lower energy semi-conducters. LEDs shoot out light in a straight line. After learning this, I was able to identify the LED string of lights not only by the light but the crystal cut bulbs around the light that enabled the straight line of light to be refracted — making the iconic twinkling glow associated with holiday lights.

As a nerd herder and being generally inquisitive about science, this was a very satisfying tour. I was able to ramble through the city taking in wonderful panoramic scenes in one instance and then turn around and look closer at the mundane with awe at how I was seeing it with new insight and understanding. My fellow tour-goers raised other questions about light and color, as our curiosity was further sparked by what we were seeing and learning. One conversation that got started involved pollinators; which insects and birds are attracted to the red over white flowers, and the effects the visible spectrum they see have on how they pollinate species of flowers.

As this was a preview, the inquisitive can still put science in their step. Robin will be leading The Science of (Holiday) Light tour several more times in December, including Christmas Eve and the evening of Christmas Day. Tours start at 6:30pm and all the dates, more details and booking information can be found online.

The evolution of the light bulb.

This month, California begins its long goodbye to the light bulb – at least the one Thomas Edison helped invent over a century ago. The law, signed by President George W. Bush back in 2007, phases out the old, energy-hogging 100-watt incandescents in favor of newer bulbs that are just as bright, but use at least 28-percent less energy.

Next year, the rest of the country will follow suit. By 2014, the traditional 75 and 40-watt incandescent bulbs will be gone, too.

The law leaves consumers with several choices. Among them are halogen bulbs, which are an updated and more energy-efficient take on the old incandescent bulbs, and compact fluorescents.

CFLs are some of the most efficient bulbs on the market. But they’ve long suffered an image problem, according to Michael Siminovich, who directs the California Lighting Technology Center, at the University of California-Davis.

Listen to the QUEST radio story How CFLs Got Their Bad Rap.

“If you go into a home today in the US, fluorescents are the exception,” Siminovich says. “We should have transformed this marketplace by now, but by and large it’s been a dismal failure.”

So what happened? According to Siminovich, there were two big misconceptions and one big mistake.

Misperception number one: The light from CFLs is ugly and unflattering.

To Siminovich, this is both the oldest complaint in the book and the easiest to resolve. He takes me over to a wall of wooden cubbies, each about a foot square. Installed in each is a different type of bulb, including several CFLs.

Under the first CFL, my hand looks pale and sickly. I tell Siminovich I look like a corpse. “Yep,” he says, “and this is how bad it is in some people's homes.”

Those people simply bought the wrong type of compact florescent. CFLs with high K (Kelvin) numbers –around 5000 — give off a cool, blue-green light. But get one with a lower K number, say 3000, and it's as warm as any incandescent.

Misperception number two: CFLs aren't well- made

Siminovich says initially, that was true.

Many bulbs, he says were touted as lasting for five years. “So when you stick this in and then it dies six months later. That leaves a terrible experience in your mind.”

Which brings us to what Siminovich says was the big mistake. It has to do with the reason CFLs became so ubiquitous, in the first place.

For an explanation, I called Max Neubauer, research associate with the American Council on Energy Efficiency, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington DC. The ACEE evaluates and compares various states’ efficiency programs. (California consistently ranks at the top of the list.)

He says from a state government standpoint, CFLs are pretty much efficiency 101.

“If you look at any state that's invested in energy efficiency, chances are they’ve invested in some sort of lighting program, including buying a lot of CFLs.”

At both the state and federal level, government agencies have spent billions of dollars subsidizing CFLs. Here in California alone, energy utilities, like PG&E, are spending over 500 million ratepayer dollars, over the course of seven years, on CFLs.

And when you buy tens of millions of light bulbs at a time, you probably want to get the cheapest ones you can find, says Siminovich.

“So what did the poor lamp manufacturers do? They compromised some of the color, some of the quality, so we ended up with a lot of compact fluorescent lamps that don't satisfy people's preferences.”

In short: state and federal agencies bought millions of inexpensive and low-quality CFL bulbs. Many of the bulbs burned out early or made people look corpse-like. That’s how CFLs got their bad rap.

To be fair, the bulbs have made a difference in energy use, although their exact contribution is hard to quantify. The ACEE’s Max Neubauer believes CFLs aren’t a bad first step for states to take, especially if they follow it up with more sophisticated efficiency programs.

But to Siminovich, those early investments in CFLs were a missed opportunity to have achieved greater savings, earlier on.

“A more expensive lamp — $5, $4 — a lamp that produces great color, lasts five years, is dimmable,” he says, “we could have transformed the marketplace.”

Well, it took a while, but today that’s what’s happening.

At the Home Depot in Daly City, there are still some 100-watt bulbs on the shelves, but when they sell out, it’s over.

Assistant Manager Brian Thomas says when customers ask about the phase-out, he has a very simple response. “We show them our display.”

The display is a table with about a dozen lit bulbs of different types, including traditional incandescents, and CFLs. Thomas points to the CFL.

“Look at this and you can’t tell me that’s less bright than a normal incandescent, right? And it’s dimmable. I mean it’s not only better for the environment, but it’s going to save them money down the long run.

He says CFLs are on their way to becoming the best-selling bulbs in the store.

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Say goodbye to an old friend. Photo by WikiMedia.

You know which light bulb I mean. It’s the one you’ve burned your hands on when trying to unscrew it too soon after it’s been turned off. It’s the one you put in the lamp in your living room to read by in your comfortable chair; the one you use to light the stairways at night. It’s the 100-watt incandescent that uses practically the same technology put together by Thomas Edison in 1879. It’s a metal filament inside a glass vacuum that gives off light and heat when exposed to an electric current. Say goodbye. It’s out of our hands. It’s a goner. I’m guessing it won’t go quietly.

It’s a little late to say goodbye in California, where 100-watt incandescents have been effectively banned since January 1. The rest of the country will catch up to us next year, when the popular light bulb will be banned everywhere in the United States. It is not really an outright ban that is clearing the shelves of 100-watt incandescents in 2012, followed by the 75-watt bulb in 2013, and the 60- and 40-watt bulbs beginning in 2014. What’s killing the familiar bulb is an act of Congress that mandated efficiency standards that incandescents cannot meet: the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007. As the standard for watts per lumen (a measure of light output) become higher and higher, the familiar bulbs will begin disappearing from store shelves. It will be illegal to manufacture the less efficient bulbs in the United States or import them from abroad. A few special use incandescents will still be allowed, for example 3-way bulbs and appliance bulbs.

The most popular incandescents will gradually give way to more efficient halogen, fluorescent and compact fluorescent lights, and solid state lighting (SSL) devices like light emitting diodes (LED). The reduction in total energy use and green house gas emissions in the United States will be dramatic. According to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) the efficient light bulb provisions of the EISA will reduce national energy use by 60 terra-watt hours (terra equals trillion) of energy and reduce national emissions by 12 million metric tons of carbon by the year 2020.

Incandescents are already banned in Europe, but according to Ira Eisenstein, writing in the Home Energy Pros blog space, some stores there are selling 100-watt incandescents under the name “100-watt heat source.” Look for the creative American mind and the market to come up with similar workarounds in the United States. But gradually the incandescent bulb will be a thing of memory, while cleaner, more efficient, and longer lasting light sources become much less expensive.

Look for more on the phaseout of the incandescent on the QUEST radio segment airing on Monday, January 24.

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Light up costumes are creative ways to celebrate Halloween.

We're all familiar with the notion of getting a bedsheet, cutting out a couple holes for eyes and draping it over ourselves in a pinch. With a little more time you could light that costume up and dazzle friends, neighbors and fellow trick-or-treaters.

Cool Costumers with EL Wire

Electroluminescent wire (EL wire) is incredibly easy to work with and in great supply in the Bay Area, thanks to all our Burning Man friends. There is an excellent Instructables on creating glowing fairy wings out of EL Wire by SewLolita. Follow their instructions and you'll have a one of a kind creation to light up any fairy costume.

If fairies aren't your thing, consider making a TRON costume, outlining the edges of the costume in EL Wire and voila, you've created a TRON outfit.

Check out Cool Neon, a Bay Area company that specializes in EL wire, and all kinds of things that light up. They have an online store and you can also pick up from there warehouse in the East Bay. Furthermore, they have a great guide to soldering with EL wire that is indispensable if this is your first time soldering.

Light up using LED's

Like EL wire, LED costumes allow you to stretch you imagination to create unique light shows and funky designs. You can build your own light saber, make all kinds of illuminated clothing and even turn yourself in a live fireworks display! Believe it or not, using an umbrella and programmable LED's you can do just that thanks to this Instructables from Chris Huebner.

Resources

Noisebridge offers their space to the public for free use of their equipment including soldering irons and sewing machines. Wednesday nights they host a sewing and craft night that welcomes anyone to come and work on a craft project and get help from others.

The Crucible is offering an EL Wire workshop on October 23rd to get you ready to create illuminated costumes.

Good luck with your Halloween costume and let us know what you're planning on making in the comments!

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When you replace incandescents with CFLs, you use less electricity for lighting, but you use more energy for heating your home in the winter, since hot burning incandescents–which produce a lot more heat than light–decrease the heating load. This is called the take-back effect. Anil Parekh, who does research for Natural Resources Canada, and his colleagues, studied the take-back effect. They wanted to know if CFLs really saved energy in a home over the course of a year.

The Canada study, which took place at the Canadian Center for Housing Technology (CCHT)–two identical homes that allow researchers to compare different technologies–showed that even in heating dominated climates, such as in Fairbanks, Alaska, you save energy overall by swapping out incandescents with CFLs. And in cooling climates, such as in Los Angeles, you save on lighting electricity and there is an added bonus (as if Southern Californians deserved it) you use less to cool your home in the summer, since cool CFLs, which put out 90% less heat than incandescents, are not adding to your cooling load.

Some readers may have noted that I declared my allegiance to light-emitting diodes (LEDs), in a recent blog, since they are potentially much more energy efficient than CFLs. But we'll have to live with CFLs until LEDs become more cost effective… kind of like driving my pretty-fuel-efficient 1997 Geo Prizm into the ground before investing in a newer, hybrid car, or until I quit driving. It takes a lot of energy to make a hybrid car.

Sometimes the most efficient car, or appliance, or light bulb, is the one that's already been made.

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Philips Lighting was the first manufacturer to commercialize CFL bulbs in the 1970s, and has long been an innovator, as well as being the largest manufacturer of lighting products in the world. "We aren't even near the limits to this technology," said Dowling. Technically, solid-state lighting, or LED lighting, is ready to be the next big thing after CFLs. The challenge that remains is making LED lighting affordable and ubiquitous. That is a challenge when you consider that today's incandescents work in 1880s-style fixtures. Dowling proved it in a backroom of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. And in the progressive Pacific Northwest, after 15 years on the market, CFLs have achieved only 8% market penetration.

But LEDs are an easy sell. Compared to incandescent lights, which produce 10–12 lumens per watt (lpw), and fluorescents, which produce 90-100 lpw, the best LEDs produce approximately 100 lpw, have the potential to reach the 150–200 lpw level, can last 35 years and don't release any mercury into the environment. History has shown that the cost of LED technology has decreased, while performance has increased– both exponentially. Dowling expects LED lighting performance to continue increasing 35% per year while the price decreases about 20% per year, and that in 24-36 months LED lighting will reach the level of linear fluorescent lights in light output per watt of energy use.

LEDs have evolved from mostly lighting that attracts attention to lighting that illuminates. LEDs can produce a range of color temperatures, from cool to warm. It has been installed in the Old North Church in Boston to rave reviews from the curators of the historic church. Legislation is supporting the evolution of the lighting technology. Legislation and guidelines will raise lighting efficacy to at least 45 lpw by 2020, according to Dowling, making LEDs an easy choice.

Goodbye CFLs, it was good while it lasted.

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