By Jim Hagarty
2007
Wherever Thomas Edison is right now, he must be shaking his brilliant head.
The former Stratford, Ontario, Canada resident – yes, he lived here for a while as a young man – invented the incandescent light bulb, among many other things you might have heard of, such as the phonograph (which later became the record player, then the tape recorder, then the CD player, then the iPod). And now, the news comes that my province Ontario is thinking of banning Thomas’s light bulb. It eats up too much energy and most of the hydro it uses is converted into heat, not light.
Alternative light producers have been invented and are in the process of being invented and even the twisty, fat, little compact fluorescent bulb, which has taken the old bulb’s place, will one day soon be obsolete as other technologies, such as light-emitting diodes, take their place.
Pardon me for using this old line again, but it seems appropriate here: How many folksingers does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to change the bulb and one to sing a song about how great the old bulb was.
I feel a bit like that folksinger, but just as my father never missed his woodstove once he had an oil furnace and central heating installed in our farmhouse, I am adapting pretty well to life without Edison’s invention.
More than years ago, when I first moved to Stratford, compact fluorescent bulbs were on sale at a downtown grocery store. They came in two sizes: long straight tubes and short straight tubes. They were done up in green packaging and promised great rewards. I bought a couple of them, but about the only place they were of any use was as the light in the range hood above the stove. All these years later, I am using one of them there still.
But throughout the rest of the house, I spent a lot of time buying and replacing traditional bulbs in fixtures and lamps. They always seemed to be blowing out, especially those finicky trilight ones. Then three years ago, I stopped in an aisle and noticed that the “CFL” was now being offered in a whole range of shapes and uses – they are even made for trilights and dimmer fixtures now – and having read where people were saving money by making the switch, I took the plunge for real. One by one, since then, I have replaced 95 per cent of the bulbs in our home.
This new light took some getting used to – it’s a bit colder and makes nice pine wood look more yellow than brown – but I found that after a few days, my family and I were well adjusted to our new atmosphere. Now I can never walk by a shelf of bulbs without checking them out to see what new “twist” might be there and to marvel at how the price of them keeps dropping.
I have not done a careful assessment of how much our hydro bills have fallen off since we began making the switch, but I know they are less. Here are some bulb stats from one home in Stratford. Before I started changing bulbs, there were 47 incandescents burning away in (and on the front and back) of the house and two long-tube, standard fluorescents. Those bulbs were burning 3,430 watts of electricity. I have since replaced 40 of them (which used 2,690 watts) and now use 737 watts instead. When I am done replacing everything, my wattage will have dropped from 3,430 watts to 935.
I know there are incandescent bulbs that it makes no sense to change in my house. They are seldom turned on and burn for only a few minutes or an hour or two when they are on. But being a perfectionist, I won’t be able to rest till all my sockets are twisted (sounds painful).
One statistic I don’t have, and should have kept, is how much all these little beasties have cost me. They certainly have been more expensive. In the long run, will I have saved any money when the bulbs’ long lives are balanced against my lower electricity bills? And one nagging question is whether or not, when we all start using a lot less electricity, our rates will go up to compensate for the lost revenue by the power companies.
All in all, it is nice not to have to change deceased bulbs so often and it’s been a while since I burned my fingers by touching a hot bulb (the new ones are cooler).
But there are downsides. For one thing, some of them don’t last as long as their packaging says they will. Secondly, some of the bulbs have caught on fire (not mine) though there apparently hasn’t been any recorded cases so far of this resulting in a larger house fire. And containing mercury, they have to be disposed of with a bit of care. I take ours to a local disposal depot at a hardware store down the street.
If Thomas Edison was still around, I guess he would have left his bulb behind him long ago and been inventing newer and better lighting devices. And he’d be listening to the song about how great the old light bulb was – on his iPod or iPhone.
(Update. The store shelves in my town are filled now with LED bulbs. I have yet to take that plunge but I know it’s coming. I have been waiting for the prices to fall and now that they have, I will soon be on board. They emit almost no heat, use less power and last a long, long time.)
