Breaking the bulb
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When we moved into our new home, we made sure all the lights we used most often had CFLs. Following the 80-20 rule on lights seemed the most practical option given that I would have to spend only an extra Rs 1500 on those few CFLs instead of > Rs 5000 if we had CFLs everywhere.
Recently, I identified the “Tier II” lights that could use CFLs. So I bought a Rs 200 CFL to replace the existing Rs 10 bulb in a light that was used for about an hour everyday. The problem that I didn’t expect to face, was that I had no idea what to do with the perfectly good bulb that was replaced.
There weren’t any empty sockets to plug it into. I didn’t want to keep it as a spare, because if another bulb blew, that would be a good opportunity to use yet another CFL. It could have been donated to the domestic help to use at their house but that wouldn’t save any electricity at the macro level. The last option was to break the bulb and dispose it.
This bulb dilemma is a good reflection of most energy efficiency initiatives and or initiatives to reduce CO2. When there is a new initiative or project and if there is enough money to invest, it’s easy to “buy new CFLs” and save money through efficiencies. The problem is with existing assets. How much money can one spend to upgrade these and what does one do with the residual value of replaced assets? It’s difficult to find projects with no upfront or ongoing costs.
Now the question is, what do I do with the bulb lying on my table?
Ordinarily, the answer should have been, let the market decide on the value (possibly negative) of the item. Not sure how common it is in India, but the American solution is the garage sale/craig’s list/ebay. (Unfortunately in this case, the market does not do a full accounting of the externalities related to climate change, disposal, etc.)
Related to this a book that has been making the rounds is ‘Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming’. The thrust of Lomborg’s (who runs the Copenhagen Consensus which “analyzes the world’s greatest challenges and identifies cost efficient solutions to meeting these challenges”) argument seems to be that it is better to spend resources enriching people who will be better able to adapt to global warming in the future (especially in developing countries, fighting malaria, etc) rather than spending meager resources trying to address it piecemeal. An interesting thing he mentioned was that New York City has undergone warming (due to black roads, etc) on the order of several degrees over the last century and rising water levels and yet it has more land (through land fills) and ‘cooler living’ through technology. A blog about this by John Tierney (a big fan of cornucopian economics) is here.
I recommend holding the bulb up high with your right hand (or with your left in you’re a southpaw) and when it lights up, you’ll have a clue on what to do.
Doesn’t the Kama Sutra provide a proper usage for the bulb in one of its recommended positions? Or was it an onion bulb that I remember from my studies?
anupcs, you obviously did not study very hard (yes, consider this a pun).
Sigh, I guess it’s back to school again (armed with a little blue pill perhaps). Maybe the bulbs were just thought experiments during REM.
I followed the same 80/20 logic when I installed CFLs in my house, and kept the removed incandescents as spares for use in those fixtures that don’t get much usage. I hate to dispose of things that still work; in a sense, I wouldn’t be getting the full benefit of - and would therefore be wasting some of - the materials and energy that went into their manufacture (yes, I know I’m anal retentive…). Since incandescents don’t last as long as CFLs anyway, over the years I’ve now gone through most of that stash of spares, despite using them only in seldom-used lamps.
I tend to disagree that donating the bulb to the help wouldn’t save energy at the macro level. Assuming they use it to replace a burned-out bulb in an existing lamp, their consumption will remain the same while yours will have diminished. Of course, if they put the bulb in an additional lamp rather than an existing one, then the net energy usage will go up.