Study Shows Incandescent Bulbs Are Warm and Toasty
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.17.08
The normally sensible Tyler Hamilton reports on a study which suggests that in cold places like Canada, an incandescent bulb can keep you warm and toasty in winter, and may be more environmentally benign than a compact fluorescent. In places like Quebec that get their electricity from hydropower, switching to CFLs would actually increase emissions by the equivalent of 40,000 cars as people use more natural gas to heat their homes.
And who wrote this study? A senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, Michael Ivanco, who might have a small vested interest in promoting such an idea. Furthermore if the study just looks at just the calories of heat rather than the location, it is not considering whether it is useful or wasted heat. I think one might find that a layer of heat from bulbs up near the ceiling does not do much good down at the floor, where the registers or radiators are. I doubt that in reality the heat from incandescent bulbs does much good at all. Stick to your nukes, Mike. ::The Star
the heat rises theory is, while true, somewhat illogical, because the heat from the furnace rises too, and when the furnace is running, it disturbs that warm air from the bulb, and sloshes it around the house. Bulb heat is especially useful in the basement, where it would heat the upstairs. But if we're being really thorough, let's look at in-floor heating. that heat rises almost constantly and equally. And hopefully it's electric, created by clean sources, not gas-fed hot water.
This is nonsense, for 2 reasons:
1. Believe it or not, summer also happens in Canada (and in Quebec)
In summer, we have to use air conditioning for 3 months, and incandescent lights are a real pain in the *** and a total waste of energy in summer.
Yes, it does get hot in summer in Quebec.
2. I have not seen one single gas heated home in Montreal. All the flats I have seen are heated with electricity.
To be fair: The study was authored by three people, two at the University of Toronto. Asking the question they asked is perfectly reasonable, if it's done in a scientifically valid manner. This is science - we shouldn't have sacred cows, and people should be encouraged to question conventional wisdom -- after all, it wasn't long ago that "conventional wisdom" held that CFLs produced poor quality light...
The answer depends greatly on the relative merits of natural gas heating vs. electric heating, and whether or not your house has gas heat. While I agree with you (Lloyd) that it's better to heat closer to the floor, even with floor registers, heat still gathers near the ceiling. I don't think it's reasonable to castigate the authors for asking the question they did, nor for including an energy industry scientist on the study. If their actual methods are flawed, then by all means, chew them to pieces, but a newspaper article about their paper is hardly enough of a basis for figuring out if what they did was sound or not.
Light bulbs are only a reasonable replacement for resistive electric heating, and only then if you've got some other mechanism to distribute the heat they produce throughout the house. If you're using gas (less waste via distribution loss) or an electric heat pump (moves heat instead of making it), switch to CFLs.
seems like quite the biased report. I think this idea assumes that all light bulbs are totally exposed not inside any decorative lighting fixture and are inside the house (not outside where all that heat is wasted) and that summer does not exist in Canada when you will fighting the heat of the bulb with air conditioning.
i think its best from a design point of view for efficiency to let lights focus on providing efficient light and let the furnace take care of the heating/cooling.
I'm not sure I understand why this is being so completely dismissed. Not all light bulbs are going to be near the ceiling. Table lamps will place them down near where people are. And ceiling fans will do as good a job of dispersing the heat layer by the ceiling caused by incandescent lights as they do the heat from other sources.
mirco - best source of heat for radiant floor heating is solar-thermal heated water, not electric. Followed in 2nd place by a ground-source heat pump to heat water (300% efficient), then an air-sourced heat pump (200% efficient). Using direct electric radiant floor heat is as wasteful as electric baseboard heat (only 100% efficient, possibly a little less).
What is your definition of efficiency, because thermodynamic efficiency cannot exceed 100% without breaking a few of those pesky laws of nature...
"And who wrote this study? A senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, Michael Ivanco, who MIGHT have a small vested interest in promoting such an idea." (emphasis mine)
It's this kind of non-sense which makes the environmental community seem arrogant from time to time. What does it matter WHO writes this study? 'Lloyd Alters wrote this article, he's a biased son-of-a-bitch blogger who writes for treehugger and probably has no experience in HVAC, thermodynamics, or electrical engineering.' If you don't like the study REFUTE it. Did you even read the study or base all of your information about 1) a name and 2) a newspaper article NOT from a scientific journal. Your fallacious attacks on the author have no place in proper discourse, only in the arena of infantile rhetoric.
"Stick to your nukes, Mike."
Stick to blogging, Lloyd. Proper journalism seems above you.
Abe, I don't usually respond to abusive comments but:
1) I am a licenced architect and have been around HVAC systems, electrical systems and even having to occasionally deal with thermodynamic issues. One fact about thermodynamics it that a person in a room gets heat in three ways: conduction, convection and radiation. A properly designed heating system convects heat around the room ; a lightbulb only radiates and the heat is not necessarily in the right place. A light fixture is not designed as a heating appliance so you cannot just total up the watts it produces and consider it useful heat. And heat rises, and without a design that encourages convection it stratifies and you have a hot ceiling and a cold floor. Again, the heat is going where it is less effective. Adding a fan to move it about just consumes more.
2) I consistently call out industry types who come up with reasons not to use CFLs, whether it be little dabs of mercury or now this. Anyone who works for AECL is in the industry of making electricity, not conserving it. It is perfectly valid to point that out.
3) people are not likely to swap out their bulbs in summer, so any saving in winter will be lost when the air conditioner goes on.
My issue was with your rhetoric, and presumptive conspiracy theory about someone who happens to work for AECL, not your logical assumptive concern with the study.
The statement about your qualifications was purposely in quotes because it was FALLACIOUS, meant to draw attention to your accusations against the co-author of mention.
I stand by the last jab, until you resolve yourself of yours. Association does not trump merit.
A problem I have with the analysis is that it uses the average C02/kw to translate electricity savings to C02 reduction. I don't think Quebec is going to bypass the turbines on their hydro plants because their customers do or don't use CFL bulbs. They will sell their excess hydropower to someone that will back down a fossil fuel plant - probably a natural gas turbine.
I live in the Southern US, and have assumed that an additional benefit of the CFL's in my house is that in addition to the direct savings, they reduce the AC load, but I have never had a way to quantify the benefit. Does anyone have any data?
Abe- Just admit you got served. Now you are trying to back out of it and saying your name calling "SOB" was just to demonstrate a point. Of course you then follow that up by calling Lloyd's rhetoric as "infantile" so I think Lloyd is justified in refering to your comments as abusive. "Association doesn't trump merit"? What is that supposed to mean? I think the point of the TH post was that the original article was without merit. The association referred to in the TH story simply demonstrates the dubious origins of the article.
But I don't have a degree in Electrical Engineering, Thermodynamics and limited experience in HVAC! How could I understand a report written by a scientist? Common sense? No way. I'm headed home to switch my lightbulbs out with Halogen bulbs cause they get even warmer then incadescents!
Don't get me wrong Abe, I really think you did a great job with the Emancipation Proclomation, but you fall short on your arguments in this case.
I live in a tiny apartment and have actually thought about the effect of lightbulbs. In the summer it now gets so hot that I need every edge I can on cooling. I have replaced all but one lightbulb (a natural spectrum bulb) with CFL. In the winter my appliances, lights and body pretty much heat the space without the heaters coming on very often. My apartment is full of books which moderate temperature and humidity. Cooling's much harder than heating and pushes the electrical grid closer to brownouts and blackouts than heat does even in the depths of the Canadian winter, so the CFLs are probably the best idea unless you choose to switch light bulbs seasonally.
I can't say I'm in total agreement with either Lloyd or the original post. If one has lived without heat and AC they would realize that incandescents do indeed work quite well as heaters both in the months when it does some good and in the months you wish it didn't. As for heat rising and pooling, that happens whether it's bulbs or anything else... high ceilings simply aren't energy efficient.
However, as pointed out by others, the argument in favor of incandescents doesn't take into account that carbon free hydro could be shared with neighboring geographies that are not blessed with hydro, if it were conserved with CFLs. The CO2 released by replacing incandescent BTUs with gas furnace BTUs could be more than offset by emissions savings from shipping that electricity where it would displace coal or gas.
However, it is a fact that the payback period for a CFL varies quite a bit depending upon whether a person lives in an air conditioning dominant zone or a heat dominant zone... as well as what their alternative heat is.
"What is your definition of efficiency, because thermodynamic efficiency cannot exceed 100% without breaking a few of those pesky laws of nature..." - Abe Lincoln
It seems you weren't paying attention in physics class, Abe. Probably because you didn't attend one since you did most of your schooling at home back in the 1800's.
Heat pumps have a greater-than-100% efficiency because the system has two inputs, but they are rated on their efficiency based only on their electricity input. The other input? The heat they draw from (or dump into) the air or ground, depending if they are air-sourced or ground-sourced.
Pay attention because this is where it gets tricky. 100% efficiency = 1 kW of heat out for every 1 kW of electricity put into the system. This is what you get in resistive heat systems. There is no 2nd input so you only get out what you put in.
200% efficiency = 2 kW of heat out for every 1 kW of electricity put into the system. Many air-sourced heat pumps give you this, due to the 2nd input into the system.
300% efficiency = 3 kW of heat out for every 1 kW of electricity put into the system. Ground-sourced heat pumps fall into this area.
Like someone else said, just admit you've been pwnd several times now, suck it up and move on.
Apparently you weren't paying attention...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
and the most relevant to our discussion...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency
Coefficient of Performance is your measure, not efficiency, as so explicitly outlined in the last link.
From your wiki reference:
"The effective heating per watt of electric energy used can be up to 450% as much as resistance heating however, making this more an issue of semantics than science."
A coefficient is just another way to state a percentage. You say po-tat-o, I say po-tah-to.
Pwnd again.
"Due to the principle of conservation of energy, energy efficiency within a closed system can never exceed 100%."
"Sometimes this is inappropriately expressed as an efficiency value greater than 100%"
So I asked what your definition of efficiency is.
The use of 'pwnd' in your 'arguments' is a testament to your maturity.
"'Lloyd Alters wrote this article, he's a biased son-of-a-bitch blogger who writes for treehugger and probably has no experience in HVAC, thermodynamics, or electrical engineering.'
...
Your fallacious attacks on the author have no place in proper discourse, only in the arena of infantile rhetoric.
...
Stick to blogging, Lloyd. Proper journalism seems above you.
- Abe Lincoln
Don't look down, Abe, but your fly is open.
I made it clear before heat-pump systems are not "closed systems"... like I said before, they have two inputs, not one. And depending on what you use as the 2nd input, you can stuff just as much extra energy into the system as you want (for example, some heat pumps use a gas flame to boost output when it gets too cold outside). So they can have an efficiency greater than 100% when measured against one of the inputs, which in this case is the electrical input. Since the heat pump companies don't want to explain this to their customers again and again, they chose instead to express this as a coefficient to make a nice, neat number.
Percentages are easily converted to coefficients:
Heat pump @ 350%=
350/100 (% means "per hundred") =
Coefficient of 3.5.
They are not "efficiencies" since efficiency is a metric of a closed system. All you had to say was that your metric was the Coefficient of Performance. Do you understand this? Everything other than that simple three word answer was irrelevant.
The conversation would have gone like this...
Abe: What do you mean by "efficiency"?
You: Coefficient of Performance
Abe: Thank you for the clarification.
You seem to think you're a part of the other conversation ... you're not.
Flame on?