Regulation, in my life, has usually been a ratchet. A mandate might be tightened, a tax might be raised, another “green technology” can be forced… but I’ve almost never seen the opposite.
I’ve never seen taxes go down. I’ve never seen an EPA regulation lighten up. I’ve never seen a new car with fewer mandatory safety features and alarms. I’ve made personal choices that gave me more freedom (vote with your feet!) but I’ve rarely seen the noose loosen generally.
Which brings me to lightbulbs. I like efficient lighting where it makes sense. Where it makes sense, I’d already gone fluorescent. Why wouldn’t I? I’m all about efficiency and living cheap.
But centralized bureaucracy cannot abide “where it makes sense”. Rules are applied everywhere, all at once, with a sledge, by people who haven’t got a fucking clue. Examples abound: A dude in a swamp in Michigan has a low flow toilet because water is rare in Phoenix. My truck’s seat belt alarm goes off, when I’m driving firewood across my lawn. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Incandescent bulbs are theoretically inefficient. You know what their waste product is? Heat! You know what the temperature was this February? -42 Fahrenheit.
Repeat the concept just to enjoy the irony. There are EPA regulations on light bulbs that reduce “waste” heat in conditions of negative forty-two Fahrenheit.
Most humans have never ever experienced air that’s seventy four degrees colder than the freezing point of water. If you haven’t done it, you don’t know. It’s colder than you can imagine. It makes your lungs hurt. Machines break and livestock may die. Fluids freeze, plastics snap, you can’t touch metal, batteries give up, and you tiptoe around on the edge of destruction. A bit of heat from a lightbulb can make or break a situation. It can be a miracle and a joy.
When I’m out in my garage trying to warm up an ATV so I can plow the driveway… excess heat is very handy. I sometimes hang a spare pare of gloves near a bulb; so I can switch to the second set as the carbs warm up. I shuffle batteries to keep ’em near lights if I happen to be using the lights anyway. I flip on high beams to keep ice off the lenses. I capture the resource of heat. (I’ll also arrange shit near idling engines, aim engine exhaust at frozen hoses, and harvest virtually anything that’s producing “waste” heat… because it’s heat!)
Especially in my chicken coop. I’m trying to keep it warm enough that the chickens don’t die. I don’t care if a bulb puts a few spare BTUs into the coop… it’s a good thing. But NOOOOOOOO. Some douchebag in D.C. who’s never hammered ice out of a chicken waterer with numb fingers and a screwdriver thinks they know better. I don’t give a fuck about saving $4 annually in electricity at the cost of $300 in dead hens. Stumbling around pitchforks and hay bales in the dim gloom of a fluorescent that can’t quite do the job is a special piece of hell too. Also, the damn things cost much more than incandescents and they don’t hold up nearly as well as they should.
The world is bigger than regulators imagine. Captain Dunning-Kruger, regulator extraordinaire, thinks he knows better than me. He’s wrong. I’m actually doing things instead of just pretending; I know what he doesn’t. For example, there’s no such thing as “too much waste heat” on a lightbulb in my location (especially outbuildings).
I bitch about it from time to time (a quick search indicates I ranted in 2010, 2011, and 2019) but the war was lost; we never win and they never give up. Regulators won’t stop mismanaging things until I’m squatting on the floor of a mud hut praying the self driving car delivers my allotted daily vegan food packet and 100% income tax bill. The slow crawl to dystopia gets to ya’.
But then I read this:
Holy shit! This is what winning looks like.
Note: it’s such a small and easy freedom. So easy! Just step out of the way and let people make a choice that’s right for them. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a bloody revolution. There are no guns blazing, Braveheart isn’t screaming “FREEEEEEDOM”, and it’s not like I’m stopping anyone from buying LEDs. Winning is just the priceless feeling of a simple little courtesy to me. Someone in a suit is being clipped. He or she has to show the humility to let me buy whatever tool is best for my specific needs. I can’t stop smiling.
Keep in mind, I don’t hate LEDs. I have lots of them. I just hate being forced to use them in stupid situations. Sloppy old incandescents rock for icy tool sheds and cold chicken coops. I have very good and logical reasons for my preferences. It’s too nuanced for a dude in a suit in another time zone to understand so they should butt out.
The election of 2016 moved the Overton Window in more ways than one. Now I’ve seen regulations lessen… even just a bit. It can be done. I’m seeing it happen. There is hope. Life doesn’t have to be a boot standing on a human face forever. It can be a wide selection at the hardware store. All hail diversity overcoming the regulators! I salute a world where LEDs and incandescents live in peace and harmony side by side.
I like winning. It feels good.
I’ve never experienced -42F, that hurts to think about.
The Carolina mountains occasionally hit 0F. We used to have a 100 watt incandescent in the pump house, it has given way to a 500 watt thermostatically controlled heat tape because 100 watt bulbs are off the shelves. The trouble is the heat tape burns out with no visual indication of it’s failure, except no water on the coldest night of the year.
All hail our Central Planner Commrades!
Sub zero temps (f) suck. I was in Minnesota for 6 years, just outside Bemidji. I never saw anything worse than -40, I’m not complaining as that was way uncomfortable!
The last two winters kicked my ass and fall is approaching like a freight train. This winter I’m unusually nervous. I feel like moving to Death Valley.
Amen. I’m waiting for the duly elected criminals to decree I can’t plug my truck in when it’s -30. They’ve already shut down my ability to heat my house with my woodstove anytime it’s between +32 and -25, which is 98% of the time between October and May. Subsidize my $4.00 a gallon oil bill? Follow through on tge natural gas pipeline gtgey’ve spent BILLIONS on in the last 15 years? Of course not. Can you say kickback?
Here’s hoping they can un-f**k gas can regulations next.
Oh God yes! I’m so sick of spilling fuel on all of my stuff. Count on California to start a regulation that’s supposed to eliminate a little bit of vapor and winds up with me spilling a pint of liquid every time I use their craptacular technology to fill my woodsplitter. I have several old gas cans and they’re precious to me because they’re currently irreplaceable.
INDEED! Whoever mandated the use of those damned things has never had to USE one! I find ABG (Ancient But Good) gas cans at yard sales. I pick them up as soon as I see them and hang onto them until they rust through!
You might enjoy this podcast (although you may already have listened to it). If you want to skip to the pertinent part about light bulbs and heat, start at about the 45 minute mark.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/paul-wheaton-building-a-better-world-in-your-backyard/
I haven’t listened to it. It’s now on my to do list.
I have a very small “galley” style kitchen. Under the theory that bright colors make small rooms feel bigger, the kitchen is mostly white and I installed two three bulb fixtures in the ceiling. Six 40 watt bulbs lights it up in there admirably, however for some reason, those fixtures tend to eat light bulbs. With 6 of them in there, when incandescent was the rage, it seemed like I was changing a bulb every few days.
Since they were only 40 watters, they didn’t get banned right away (maybe still hadn’t been?), but when LED bulbs started coming down in price (even though they were still much more expensive than today), I bought LED 40 Watt equivalents and put them in those fixtures.
That was, I’d guess, about 4 or 5 years ago. I haven’t changed a bulb in the kitchen since.
But…as you said, that was a personal choice based on individual needs. I’m perfectly happy with incandescents in many fixtures, those were just a pain so LED was the logical choice, once they became available.
I know that’s a long, convoluted way to agree with you, but it is what it is. Personal choices are exactly that and are none of the government’s business.
Now if they’ll just let me buy a proper gas can instead of that self-inhaling slow-flow gas-vomiting abomination perhaps I can live a life of peace. Oh, and Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, looks like we might some day get dishwashers that will clean dishes and not simply burn electricity for three hours for no reason. You know, like we had until about 10 years ago.
https://spectator.org/making-dishwashers-great-again/
My supply of real gas cans is slowly dwindling. I’m trying to ration out parts to keep the old ones working because the new ones suck so much. Someone in Havana kept a rusty Chevy going for their entire lifetime for the same reason. In my case I have hope I can get a decent gas can spigot in the future… but when?
And THAT, good sir, is why they will do ANYTHING to keep him from being re-elected in 2020.
Good point. Can’t let the Deplorables discover that the ratchet effect can be reversed.
Hallelujah, brother! You got in Dunning Kruger so I don’t need to; but it’s not just the suits in DC, most people can’t see beyond the end of their noses, so are easily led. They look at the thought you put into the reuse of “waste” heat and perceive the mental effort you expend to be huge, easier to plug in a heater… they just don’t understand what you think of as simple common sense.
D-K works both ways; most people are not like you, or your readers. Fully half of them are below average.
Even plugging in a heater doesn’t elude their folly. I posted about the decorative lights in one of my electric heaters (looks like a faux fireplace). The original incandescents that came with the heater died. I wound up with LEDs that supposedly save me money by avoiding waste heat… in a heater!!! I couldn’t have made up that Catch22 as a joke.
Then there’s the rules for dishwashers. Can’t get around them. So create rules allowing Fast Dishwasher to use heat and water that have been regulated out of regular dishwashers, thus bypassing all regs regarding dishwashers.
Tricky, very tricky.
Used to use incandescents in my stove hood light in order to make a rising oven out of the stove and hood (cardboard box enclosure, incandescent light, could get temps up to around 90+ degrees, perfect for bread rising.) Now? I have to use the oven heat… How efficient is that?
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Although it has never gotten to 0 here, let alone -42, I’m with you completely. The EPA has forced rules onto people that simply don’t make sense because they’re our masters and they’re sure they know better than we do about how to run our lives.
The one that annoys me the most are the rules that make the dishwasher and clothes washer take longer than they need to. When I put clothes in the washing machine, I set the water temperature to warm. Why? Because it fills faster and I can get more done. I can turn hot on or I can turn cold on, but I can’t turn both on because the EPA rules say my cold water is warm enough out of the tap. They’re not going to let me fill the tub with 50/50 hot/cold, but 100% hot water is fine. Doesn’t that take more energy? A few days each year, my tap water is cold enough that it lets me use the warm setting.
When Trump got his transition team going, he said he was going to repeal two regulations like this incandescent bulb ban for every new one. At one point, they said they were averaging repealing 22 for every new one.
I used to have an “Edison” floodlight in a fixture nailed to a board up in Alaska. I’d slide the ting under the truck and aim it at the oil pan. It kept the oil warm enough to flow straightaway when it got nadshattering cold outside.
I have LED’s everywhere in my house… everywhere but the ham shack. It didn’t take more than 30 seconds to realize how much RF noise those LED bulbs put out! The difference was being able to use my ham radio, and NOT being able to use my ham radio. Fock you, Obama…