By now, your home has one or more (probably many more) CFL bulbs in it. CFL stands for Can't Flick the Light, because the "slow" design of this bulb prevents you from pretending to use the light switch for Morse Code messages - every ten-year-old's hobby when bored. The kids will have to find a new time waster.
The Compact Flourescent, which by coincidence also could be abbreviated CFL, was mandated by the government to save energy. They are also supposed to last seven years before they need replacement. Since I haven't seen one yet last even seven lousy months, I know that seven years is a bogus claim. I mean, they came on the market LESS than seven years ago, so you should never have changed one out yet. How many have you changed out? Dozens, like me.
With the seven years claim a dirty lie, I started looking at my utility bill to determine if the energy savings was true or not. However, this turned out to be a bad indicator because energy prices do not stay level. When the utility company doesn't get enough money from us using lots of energy, they raise the rates.
For example, here in Dubuque, the city-owned water utility installed "smart" water meters all over town last year. Residents were conned into allowing this by the promise of lower water usage. When the water usage did in fact decrease, the utility said they had to make up for that by raising the rates. They came right out and said the increase was due to the "smart" meters providing lower consumption rates. I am not making this up, it was in the news yesterday.
So due to this kind of ongoing utility chicanery, comparing the electricity bill will not help determine the energy savings of the CFL bulbs. So I decided to come up with my own explanation of how they save energy.
It is in the popular form of a "top ten list" if you will pardon my unoriginality.
Top Ten Ways the CFL Bulbs Save Energy
10. They don't come on when you turn them on.
It's happened to you. You're in bed in the middle of the night, dreaming about a scene from a Bob Hope / Bing Crosby movie you saw on television forty years ago, when you're awakened by shuffling in the kitchen. You sneak out there and hear voices in the dark. You are certain that when you flick on the light, the sudden surprise will paralyze the burglars with fear, giving you time to take aim and hold them at gunpoint till the cops arrive.
You sneakily flip the switch and yell out, only the light doesn't come on. Your yell has alerted the burglars, who don't "freeze" as you ordered, but instead speedily make their way for the back door while the light slowly rumbles from total darkness to a dim haze over the course of seventeen seconds. By the time the cops get there in fifteen minutes, your bulb is now operating at about sixty-five percent of its potential, giving just enough light to fill out a police report. An hour later as you drink coffee and try to calm down, the light is finally burning in all its true 17 watts of glory.
Yeah, this happened to me like six times just last week. But I am not complaining; I am thinking about all the energy savings.
9. The bulbs don't have Wi-Fi or internet.
You know that's what kills the battery on your phone. You would think talking or listening to MP3 tunes at full volume would sap your battery life, but you can do that forever. Now turn on Wi-Fi though and you're dead in the water before you even finish reading my latest blog post.
The secret to the new bulbs is they are the only new product in the last five years that doesn't have internet access. Hello energy savings, your name is CFL !
8. You can't put them in the trash at home.
Due to the mercury content, these bulbs cannot go in the regular trash. These bulbs were mandated to save the environment. They do that by taking all the harmful mercury out of the earth, and not letting you put it back in via a landfill. Now, if you never read the package or just didn't care, like the 99.6% tiny minority of Americans, you're still throwing them in the trash and polluting the earth with a product the government expects to save earth. But that's the government's problem to solve, right? And you only throw away one every seven years when it burns out, right?
Meanwhile, the 0.4% vast majority of us are keeping the bulbs out of the trash like good little sheeple. So there is energy saved by the garbage truck not having to crush them and haul around all the extra weight. I mean, I have eight or nine of these bulbs burn out every week, especially the G.E. brand. So that's a lot of weight savings for the weekly garbage truck.
Also, you're supposed to take them to a special processing center. Only nobody knows where that's at and the government forgot to tell anybody. What category would you even look under in the yellow pages? Why isn't there a public service announcement on television with a crying Indian telling you where to take your burnt-out bulbs? I think they passed the law for the bulbs and they are going to pass another law after seven years to build the processing center for all the bulbs that should be burning out for the first time right about then.
Since there is no place to take the bulbs, they save you the energy of transporting them there. And since you can't throw them away either, they are stacking up in your house and that is fewer cubic inches you have to heat or cool, so that saves energy. These bulbs are very helpful !
By the way, also taking space in my house, which reduces my heating bill, is a pallet load of the old bulbs I stocked up on while I could still buy them. They are right next to a pallet of R-12 freon, two barrells of leaded gasoline, a case of teflon-coated skillets, a can of DDT and a lifetime supply of REAL sudafed.
7. They make your cat or dog queasy.
Have you noticed your pets don't like to be in the room where a CFL bulb is turned on? It makes them queasy. Which means they eat less, Amen? Yeah, Buddy, you're saving more than just energy, now.
6. They don't work in a dimmer switch.
And since the bulbs that DO work in a dimmer switch are now illegal to manufacture or sell, it means millions of installed light sockets in homes across the land now have no working bulbs. Savings bonus! When you write your check to pay the electric bill, which should now be much lower (or higher), do it in the dark under one of these empty light sockets next time. It will remind you how much energy you're saving.
5. They couldn't even produce a full top ten list.
How much energy will be saved since this blog post is shorter than you expected? When you print and file this post, as you always do (you stalker, you), how much paper, ink and electricity will you save?
There you have it. I'm so happy my government knows how to save energy. I'm glad they're not trying to save any money! That would be a financial disaster. Oh... wait... nevermind.
VM
No comments:
Post a Comment