Energy saving lamps don't exist!

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	Article Energy saving lamps don't exist!	Monday 3 Mar 2008 6:53pm
	You might be surprised to hear that energy saving lamps don't exist....but think again; if it really saves energy you better buy a lot of them and switch them on all the time sothat you can help to save more energy…. I hope you get the point now! Energy saving is of course related to what you used before. If you used a CFL already and buy a new CFL to replace a broken old one you don’t achieve energy saving right. It is a very strange thing actually that a manufacturer is allowed to tell you that a lamp is “energy saving” while instead it is “energy consuming”. You can only claim to be energy saving compared to what was used before. In case you were in the dark before and the lamp is your first lamp of course you don’t save energy but instead add on to the 4,5 billion people in the world who consume more and more electric energy every day. Watt is wrong? Correct! What is wrong is Watt and the way the lighting industry is expressing how energy saving or energy efficient a lamp is. What is right? A lamp is a device that has the function to convert electrical or chemical energy into light energy. The unit to quantify light output has been decided by the scientific community to be Lumen. Let us focus only on Electric lamps and thus we can say that an electric lamp has the function to convert electrical energy into light energy. As we all know our technologies are never 100% perfect and thus there are also no lamp technologies available that can convert 100% of electrical energy into Light energy. In case it was possible to convert 100% electric energy into light we would produce 683 Lumen per Watt of energy input. Now we know that; we can calculate how efficient a lamp is. Let’s say a lamp produces 1000 Lumen and consumes 20 Joule per second (watt); that means this lamp produces 1000/20 = 50 Lumen per watt. At maximum a lamp can produce 683 Lumen per watt and thus the above lamp is 50/683 = 7.3% efficient. In other words the lamp converts 7.3 % of the electric energy into light and the balance into mainly heat (and invisible light like infrared etc) This percentage is the most important number that indicates how efficient a lamp can do it’s job and therefore should become the main indicator on a lamp to state how efficient it is. Efficiency of today’s state of Technology: 1) Incandescent lamps 0,5% – 3% 2) Fluorescent (CFL, TL) 3% - 10% 3) Light Emitting Diode (LED) 0,5% - 15% (going to 30% by 2010) Why is every CFL light manufacturer claiming 80% energy saving? The average 100W incandescent light bulb is about 1% efficient while the average CFL is 5% efficient and thus they can claim that it uses 80% less energy than an incandescent bulb. But be aware that there can be differences between one CFL-brand and the other CFL brand as much as 30%-40%! The best way to create a level playing field for manufacturers of lamps is to make it compulsory to state the efficiency of lamp on the packing. A 10 % lamp is more efficient than a 5% efficient lamp and a 15% efficient lamp is more efficient than a 10% efficient lamp; it is just logic like that. The higher the efficiency the better the lamp does it’s job in converting electric energy into light. How to express how much light you need? a 100W incandescent light bulb produces about 1000 Lumen of Light output. Please try to program this number in your mind and than forget about Watt forever! When you can picture in your mind how much light 1000 Lumen represents you can decide how much Lumen you need. Next time you are looking for a lamp select a lamp that tells you how much lumen it produces and when you see 2 brands with the same lumen output; select the one that has the highest efficiency number. Unfortunately the light manufacturers (except Sundaya) do not yet mention the lumen and effieciency figures as the main numbers on their products. It is time that the lighting industry starts waking up and use Lumen numbers and efficiency number instead of the misleading Watt and 80% energy saving lie. (Maurice Adema)

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			Comment 1 By: budhy			Tuesday 6 May 2008 12:32pm
			Wow! A good point! :-) Please do campaign to use LUMEN instead of WATT as base for an Energy Saving claim. :-) This article is too high above the grown, means it use much technical term. Not much people out there understand like us. Can you (please) make it more down to earth. Hehehe... but I do understand, it hard to "convert" technical term to common words/term.


			Comment 2 By: informed			Thursday 15 May 2008 5:18pm
			Your argument is moot because the basis of your argument is flawed. Here's why. The 683 lumen per watt number you mention is part of a standard set by the Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE for short) which defines this as the ideal for a monochromatic light source emitting at, and only, the wavelength of 555 nm. This means that to achieve that efficiency, you would get a light that is completely green. Not exactly desirable now is it? The lumen unit is based on the human eye sensitivity curve which looks like a bell shaped curve(As a supporter of the peak oil theory I'm sure you are familiar with this one) peaking at 555 nm. To give you a clear example of the fallacy of your argument 1W of 400 nm is more energetic than 1W of green, but the green will have a higher lumen value due to its close proximity to the curves maximum. Thus for a full spectrum(white light) 683 lm/watt is not even a theoretical possibility. When comparing efficiencies one must understand the importance of CRI and spectrum no matter what the application is. Generally it is more pertinent to compare efficiencies in watts rather than lumen. For the record today's most advanced LEDs have an efficiency slightly exceeding 30% which i directly comparable to that of HID lighting(the previously most efficient man-made light source), which you did not even care to bring up, further illustrating your lack of knowledge on the subject. What troubles me about today is people like you who do not take the time to properly research energy subjects, yet feel the need to misguidedly speak out on them in an authorative and commanding tone. This entire article of yours is riddled with and based upon factual errors, which could have easily been avoided by a few minutes of googling. It is ironic you would speak out against energy illiteracy when you yourself display several symptoms of this supposed disease. My guess is that you do not have any real scientific background as you do not seem to even attempt to substantiate your claims with any facts. I see no sources or references whatsoever in your texts except for your own. What is certainly obvious is that while you wish to convey the impression that you are savvy to energy issues of today, you simply do not have a single clue about the underlying dynamics nor do you genuinely care to understand them. This makes you into a political activist rather than an educator.


			Comment 3 By: Maurice Adema			Thursday 15 May 2008 6:05pm
			Thanks for this critical comment Mr Blitz; and would be happy to discuss with you in a more pleasant tone. I am a pragmatic person and am very well aware of energy issues and have studied them deeply. I like to make things practical sothat it becomes easy to understand for those people that are not so highly educated as you. It is a fact that in todays lighting world people get cheated with false statements like 80% energy saving and 100W = 20W. By stating this you assume that your customer was using an incandecent lamp before and even such a lamp can give 5Lumen up to 15 or even 20 Lumen per watt....which one do we take as the benchmark? It is not more than logic to name a product with a number that represents what it delivers not what it consumes. You don't go to an electronic store to ask for a 100W TV right; when you select a TV you choose a certain size for exmple 21" or 61 cm screen etc..... Nobody can argue about the fact that Lumen is a unit to measure light output; the same we don't argue anymore about meter or gram being a unit in which we quantify length and mass. You are right I did not mention HID lamps in my article; but we do have an eductational book in development which have much more details. I did not mention HID because HID is not available in small size lamps and almost never used in households; but only in streetlighting and industrial applications. This site is focussed on household-consumers. References: Very correct; the website is still under development and we will add references where you can find the data on which we have based our numbers. Thanks for reminding....we need critical people like you to comment to improve our energy education further. I recommend you to download the book "Energy" from this site and look forward to your even more critical comments on that. Energy Illiteracy is a HUGE problem; and I confess that I am still in the process of developing my energy literacy further and further every day. It is not an easy process because even in the energy expert world energy illiteracy is widely present. People who I call energy literate are those who have build up a database in their mind with approximate "daily life energy numbers". For example a human being needing 6 to 10MJ of food per day; a liter of fuel containing 20-40MJ of Energy; A fuelburning car consuming 3up to 10MJ of energy per km and todays technology electric car consuming in the range of 0.3-0.5MJ/km etc etc..... Energy literate people will be able to ask the right questions.....for example a new car-technology coming to market with a compressed air engine....conuming 1 liters of compressed air per km....well wat we should find out is hom many MJ's it consumes per km... sothat we can place it in our mind's database. if for example it turns out to be 1 MJ/km we know that it can be placed in between the full electric car and the fuel-burning car.... I hope you start getting the point of introducing a single currency for energy!


			Comment 4 By: adibakri			Thursday 5 Feb 2009 5:49am
			Baru tau kalo kita selama ini di boongin orang pinter seluruh dunia. Tega-teganya.... Besok-besok aku translate boleh ya pak.....


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