The other day, the Canadian government announced that they would, like Australia, ban the sale of traditional incandescent light bulbs. Why the move to alternative light sources? Where incandescent bulbs are extremely inefficient and waste most of their energy as heat, the alternative, compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), use about 75% less electricity to produce the same amount of light. It’s an obvious way to save energy and reduce carbon emissions nation-wide.
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I like to save money as much as the next guy, and I do support the idea of reducing carbon emissions by using less energy on a national scale, but I have to admit a little When it comes to lighting, fluorescents just feel… wrong. The tint is off — usually too green or blue — and they flicker. Usually not perceptibly, usually at an extremely high rate, but they do flicker in the same way that your CRT monitor flickers.
I’m not just making this stuff up. An article published by the National Research Council Canada (link) states that the frequency of fluorescent light flicker can have a significant effect on visual performance. Maybe I’m overly flicker-sensitive, but I feel distinctly uncomfortable in fluorescent light environments. At past jobs, I have ensured that the fluorescents above my desk are off, even if my workspace is a little darker, and used a halogen desklamp instead. Incandescent bulbs don’t flicker at all.
The colour bothers me too. A few people insist that modern CFLs can produce a nice warm glow, but that’s not my experience. I recently bought a resonably expensive, brand-name CFL bulb that claimed to produce warm light. It’s over my desk right now, and I hate to turn it on. It’s sickly, yellowish-green, and the flicker grates on my visual cortex. It’s a constant irritant, like the visual equivalent of a barely audible high-pitched whine. Like a grain of sand stuck in your sock when you’re out for a walk. Like that yappy little dog barking a block away.
What is it about the colour that bothers me? Back in high-school physics class, the teacher used a spectroscope to demonstrate the differences in light from different sources. Where the incandescent bulb produced a nice, full rainbow, the fluorescent had large, obvious chunks missing from the spectrum — very few frequencies were actually visible. A handy page by I.N. Galidakis documents his photographs of actual spectra produced by various light sources. These images show a striking difference between the two spectra:
Spectrum produced by a common type of compact fluorescent
Spectrum produced by an incandescent bulb
There is an apparent difference, but why should it bother me so much? Maybe it pokes at some deeply primitive, caveman part of my brain (which, incidentally, is most of my brain) that associates firelight with warmth and safety. The caveman in me — let’s call him Zog, because I understand that was a common name back then — feels more comfortable in the warm glow of something that’s actually burning hot, like a campfire. Zog like fire. Fire make Zog warm. Fire make meat good. Zog like eat meat. Zog not like eat fire. But Zog like fire anyway.
Zog talks about himself in the third person a lot. Conversations must have been confusing before they invented the first-person pronoun.
So even though CFLs are bright and efficient, even though the country would save a bit of energy if everyone adopted them, I have to question whether an outright ban on incandescents might be a little heavy-handed. I can reduce energy in other ways — I turn off lights when I don’t use them, I avoid turning on the heat, I turn off appliances whenever possible. I’ll do all these things, but I refuse to light my home with that nauseating, flickering light. I would rather light my home with candles.
I wonder. If other people feel the same way I do, will people resort to buying light bulbs on the black market? Will it lead to more people lighting their homes with candles and oil-burning lamps? Any potential reduction in carbon emissions could be negated with the burning of millions of candles country-wide.
Before this draconian law comes into effect, I plan to buy a few crates of bulbs. Not only for myself, but for other cavemen and cavewomen who prefer to gather by firelight. And I’ll buy an extra box of those little bulbs that go into lava lamps too. Canada would only be diminished by the extinction of lava lamps.
Zog like lava lamp.
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