Kinda like The Dreaded Plastic Bag Ban. You get those bags from the supermarket, and then they’re banned as bad for the environment. Yet you can and in fact have to buy big-ass plastic bags (both LDPE) to stick your household garbage into. So, get 'em for free bad, pay for 'em good??
Thank B’harni (pbuh!) that they knocked off that idiocy. I’ve been using those bags for household garbage forever. They’re the perfect size to line small wastepails, tie 'em off at the ears, and toss 'em Those that got holes at the bottom? Use 'em for dry stuff or just use as a liner for bags without holes.
I haven’t had to buy garbage-bags in forever, and can’t even use up the ones I have unless I throw 'em out just for fun.
That had to rescind that ban during The Plague, because people were using filthy reusable bags to the point people working at the stores were more afraid of the wildlife living on those bags than on the drain-circling patient zero spewing aerosolised virus right behind.
Another reason was ('though no one would ever admit it) all the microplastics being shed from disposable facemasks. You couldn’t walk the street without dodging spent masks strewn on the sidewalk that were more plentiful than goosecrap next to a pond. Those fibers are designed to be short and thin like cilia, broke off easily, moreso with any physical jostling, and guesstimates were 100s of metric tons of plastic shed by those masks in just 1yr.
Hotwire bulbs? Granted, in summer your AC if you use one would be fighting against the excess heat belched out by 'em, but in winter, every extra watt of electrical heat from bulbs is that much less needing to be covered by electric/gas heaters, so it’s actually a wash.
Dont forgot they went away from paper bags to save the trees, then they away from plastic bags to save the environment. Now they are going back to paper bags again. Those environmentalists are destroying the earth.
The efficiency is basically perfect when using bulbs for heat. And by perfect, I mean it’s 100% efficient. All the energy which goes in is converted to heat (though a small part of it spends a brief moment in the form of light first).
Usually, efficiency is really difficult. Nothing ever reaches 100%, and it’s typically much lower. Like, LED bulbs are praised for getting 100 lm/W, since that’s about 20X better than incandescent bulbs… but the maximum for white light is ~300 lm/W, so the LED bulb is only about 33% efficient at making light. The rest of the energy is wasted as heat.
But heaters? Heaters are easy. Because virtually no matter what a heater does, all its energy ends up as heat eventually anyway.
The weird thing about heaters, though… is that 100% isn’t really all that great. Heat pumps often reach 400% or even 500% efficiency. Like, you put 1000W in, and you get 5000W of heat. Because instead of creating new heat, it mostly just moves heat from one place to another. It’s kind of amazing.
Anyway, just a long-winded way of saying that incandescent bulbs, even when used for heat in the winter, have poor efficiency compared to other solutions.
Yeah never got the paper bag being bad thing. Trees are easily replaced and eat up Co2 while giving oxygen so what is better than that?
Plastic bags on the other hand if we must have them work real dandy as packaging filler for sending items with less weight than paper. And for sure for small garbage cans, why buy trash bags when these came along free?
Am able to burn here so cuts down on the landfill by burning junk mail with name on it. Not a tire burner mind you
Need a lot of incandescent bulbs to move the climate in a typical room one way or the other. The absolute heat production is low relative to other space heating solutions and their production is radiation - reacting weakly with the air - rather than convection.
Have you ever seen a ceramic bulb? I wonder if those are even more efficient than incandescent. Probably. No visible light at all. It’s just a heating element that screws into a lamp essentially
Seen something like it - basically a heating element enclosed in ceramic, often marketed for terrariums?
Should be more efficacious than incandescent since it principally heats the air around it rather than radiating IR everywhere to be primarily absorbed by surfaces.
The ban on incandescents is really inconvenient if you need a heat lamp for a critter. Pet stores are still allowed to sell “basking lamps” but of course it’s a specialty thing so they’re like $40 a bulb and they’re literally just a 100W incandescent with a lizard on the box. Used to be you could just use any bulb you wanted for a heatlamp. Luckily they still allow halogens here for the time being so I can use those at least.
Oh yeah. Reminds me I should source some and deploy under sinks so I don’t necessarily have to drip faucets during delightful north TX winters where houses don’t weather freezing weather so well.
I’m not sure I parsed that right, but it sounds backward. The point of heat bulbs (a.k.a. radiant heaters) is that they heat up surfaces instead of the air.
It’s really useful in places like a barn in the winter, when the air is well below freezing and you want to use a workbench or something. A heater which heats the air wouldn’t work, because it would require huge amounts of power and most of the hot air would just rise up into a high ceiling anyway. Or for places like an outdoor patio, where there’s a breeze delivering a constant supply of cold air.
Meanwhile, a heat bulb radiates directly onto the person it’s meant to warm up. It works even outdoors in the wind.
A proper heat lamp - deep reflector, ≥250W, spitting out notably less visible light than the 65W incandescent in other socket in the recessed fixture in many pre-00’s bathrooms, producing an amber cast that’s as much red light as white light - yes, that will warm the surfaces it illuminates nicely, akin to facing a fire. Said adjacent 65W flood lamp less so. A typical A19 incandescent in a typical fixture considerably less so.
A former office location had several of these in the outdoor parking garage smoking area which would render said space almost T-shirt comfortable no matter how cold nor how strong the wind (admittedly north Texas cold).
Yep. Just like those Just No Oil muppets who block the roads and trap drivers so they can’t go anywhere and just have to sit there with engines idling… burning more oil.
No wonder they’re funded by The Getty Foundation.
I prefer plastic bags for being waterproof (as long as without holes), but my cats prefer paper bags.
If I could get arsed to do so, I’d rotate in hotwire bulbs for colder months, but that’s probably too much of a chore, worse if I’d forget and leave 'em cooking when things get warm.
While wearing petroleum/plastic based jackets/insulation, glasses, shoes, and lets not forget the plastic poles, and banners printed on plastic media…
Sure would piss me off if I was trying to get someone to the hospital in an emergency.
At the grocery. My meat, frozen vegs, bread, cookies, even the fresh produce gets put in plastic.
Sure glad I’m saving the world by not having the plastic grocery bag.
Which, by the way, get reused for all sorts of stuff here at home.
All the Best,
Jeff
It was very good. And I still have It today. It works! I removed the included incandescent bulb and installed an original maglite xenon bulb. Yeah baby! Pretty good for year 2005 when LED Flashligtts were not widely available and still used 5mm leds…
Funny!!!
I still have incendescent ones!!! Ready for an EMP or nuclear war XD
Although not incandescent, I have two xenon bulb flashlights that take multiple CR123’s that I purchased in the late 1990’s. One takes 3 CR123’s (Browning flashlight) and one takes 2 CR123’s (Dorcy).
Every once in awhile I power them up to remind myself of what to expect out of them if I need them. For the run times and lumens they offer, they won’t be replacing any of my go-to lights. Truth be told, I have a $13 Coast from Walmart that takes 3xAAA’s that gives me more lumens and longer run times than both (car glovebox light).
