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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S. (www.digitaljournal.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

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[–] 80 points 3 years ago (2 children)

The U.S. is pretty late with this, compared to the European Union. Only a few special bulbs are still sold here. Apart from that, the only allowed lighting technology is LED.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Tell that to the bar I was at last night in Palermo. They had a string of festoon lights going down the laneway and every one of them was incandescent. I noticed the same in Taormina. In fact, Italy seems pretty far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to environmental concerns.....but that's for another thread.

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  • [–] 40 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Are you sure they were incandescent bulbs and not just LED bulbs copying the incandescent style? They make a lot of decorative LED bulbs now with straight sections of LEDs to imitate the glowing wire of an incandescent.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Are you talking about an Edison bulb?

    Picture of an LED Edison bulb

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago

    Having grown up in the era of incandescent bulbs I remember the fancy white bulbs made with frosted glass being more expensive than the totally transparent ones you could see the glowing filament inside, because the filament was irritating to look at and the frosted ones smoothed out the light for you.

    I'm very amused that we're now jumping through hoops to make skinny LEDs that can fake the look of the old filaments nobody wanted to look at back then, and those are now the fancy expensive ones.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    They are not sold anymore, but whatever is left and working can still be used. Many people also bought a ton of incandescents before the selling stopped (tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)

    narrator voice: "but it was not"

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    It can be. Cheap LED lights with low quality AC rectifiers are awful. If those are your point of comparison then yes, incandescent light is better (more steady).

    Of course that difference goes away if you just get a better LED light.

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  • [+] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Even the "cheap" LED bulbs are still many times more expensive than incandescent, and incandescent will give much better light than poor quality LED.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    yeah, i was referring to current tech. First LED or those mercury vapor bulbs were basically useless.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    It generally is though. The look of incandescent and halogen is only rivaled by high end LEDs.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    nah. in my experience, even cheaper LED bulbs from discounters can nicely replace old bulbs.

    It's true that what "el-cheapo product" once was done by simply reducing lifetime is currently done with looks.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Maybe they still run on "new old stock" bulbs until they are used up. But even if they do, they clearly didn't do the math. I've upgraded all my lighting to LED and binned all my incandescent stock.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago

    I'm sitting inside a house where, presently, all lights turned on at the same time will require 30w. Before we went through all the lights, a single lightbulb would use 45w.

    Just by replacing the old light bulbs, we reduced energy consumption and the number of lights required to light a room.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I think to update the string of lights you’d need to change transformer. Household bulbs have a driver in the bulb that converts the 230V to the ~12V the bulb uses. But for that string of lights, they’d need to get an electrician (or someone who knows what they’re doing)

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    This applies to all the things, unfortunately. It must be nice to have a functional union. Even though I'm sure it's not perfect, progress is made at a decent pace. Our country is hijacked by a cruel/angry/illiterate cult every 1-2 elections, it's not ideal.

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