OT# Hey Scott in Florida

LOL mack you are a treasure. I hope you have a nice comfortable weekend.

I assume you have watched inconvenent truth, al gores move flick? Were you able to stay awake for the whole thing? Remember the part where gore got up on a hydralic stand to illistrate some graph he had on his display? I thought that was very good Hollywood, deserving of an Oscar, LOL.

In a way, I kind of feel a little sorry for the guy. He's on a wave and he can't get off, LOL. He knows his move is pure BS but to say it is would forever put him to shame, so he keeps going and some of the minions are still awe struck with mouths wide open. My heavens we are all gonna die if we don't do something, anything.....!!! Dizzy come rescue the world for us. Halp jon kery we are stuck on earth.... :)

So, you noticed his comment, but you're unable to answer MY message, in which I pointed out that you can't show anyone the questions you think I don't answer. Nice job.

You are not important....or so it seems......

He's not important enough to read all his crap, however I will say this to him,

if you are interested enough go look them up for yourself. I am not your babysitter tonight joeneveranswersthequestionunlessithappenstobenifithisargument, LOL.

Since using a bulb rated for 240 volts at a lower voltage is that same as using a dimmer, that makes sense.

I'll take Tungsten over Mercury any day - Tungsten is inert.

Both can be recycled, but for the most part aren't - nobody wants to pay the excessive costs for lamp collection and recovery, handling them as Hazardous Waste is very expensive and it's very hard (often nearly impossible) to pass along the costs - so the vast majority of the industry talks a good game, but when the rubber meets the road they just look the other way and pitch the dead lamps into the regular municipal landfill...

I'm all for "Doing the right thing" - but when the disposal fees for the old lamps coming out costs more than the new lamps going in, that simply makes no sense...

The one good thing is that they use a lot less mercury in modern "Alto" or "Eco-Lume" fluorescent lamps with the green end-caps, just enough to work. And so little as to raise the recovery costs even higher - if they don't have as much reclaimed mercury to resell, they have to charge the Hazardous Waste generators (us) more of the costs when they send in used lamps for recycling.

The dimmers put out some noise, but it is not long range - it'll rip up AM radio for 20 feet and that's about it... What kills CFL lamps and normal non-dimming fluorescent fixture ballasts is the reduced voltage from being behind a dimmer, plus the electronic hash of the dimmer circuit's Triacs or SCRs chopping up the waveform instead of getting a nice steady sine wave from the utility.

Incandescent lamps are pure resistance loads, they don't care about the incoming waveform - within reason.

Certain cheap incandescent lamps with one long straight unsupported filament don't like dimmers at ALL, frequency resonances cause the filament to start 'whipping' around in a circle like a jumprope doing Double Dutch, the repeated flexing of the brittle tungsten will kill them fast - but most dimmers just chop the power once per half-cycle, they aren't trying to do a high-frequency switching conversion. The light persistence of a white-hot filament makes that 120Hz flicker disappear, until you get down to the 'very dim' levels.

240V incandescent lamps are for use in Europe - use a 240V lamp on 120V and it'll barely glow and be way too inefficient.

You can get both 240V and 277V lamps with regular USA-Spec Medium (AKA "Edison") bases for specialized industrial uses (Janitor Closets in large office buildings where they only had 277V lighting circuits handy), but they are rare - Most developers will pay the few bucks more and put in the proper fluorescent fixture with a 277V ballast rather than deal with the hassles and safety concerns.

(I got called to a mid-rise office in West LA and had to go get a case of 277V lamps and paint "277 VOLT LAMPS ONLY" on the sockets. The tenant that leased 2/3 of the building said "We tried changing them, but the lamps only lasted about 15 seconds and got /real/ bright...")

They make 130V "Long-Life Lamps" for use on American 120V circuits and you get roughly double the life - but there's a big lumen/watt efficiency hit to match. You only want to use those lamps on second- story chandeliers and other places where the lamps are hard to change, or where you have to call a professional to do it for you.

Dimmers give you the same effect if you run them slightly dimmed most of the time, with standard 120V lamps available anywhere.

They use 140V or 145V rated lamps for {} lights on nominal

120V circuits, but that's to save the trouble of changing them - and they have to use a 15W 145V lamp to get about 5W of usable light. When you have to pay someone to change lamps, suddenly the cost of the lamps or the energy they use pales in comparison to the labor.

-->--

Hmm, hmm. Say no more.

Analtyical as in anal tickle? In my day it was called stinkfinger.

Last night on television there was this small enthusiastic crowd talking about "lifters" as if this was something new to enhance the looks of a woman's breast. I turned to my wife and asked (as if I didn't know), Aren't those falsies? Wow! What a re-discovery! And then there was a commercial for a type of squeeze-yourself-in garment they called Trim (something), and I said, Wow, they just re-discovered girdles. I wonder if we'll see a rash of reports on veracious veins in a year or two.

(Speaking of rash) What's coming next? Designer color toilet tissue?

Unless somehow I missed it, you haven't said anything about the lack of a sudden surge of power, which I thought extended the life expectancy of an incandescent bulb. Am I wrong about this?

This is true about just about anything. I give my mom hell for turning the TV off when she's out of the room for 5 minutes. LEAVE IT ON!

Same for almost anything electrical. The inital surge (unless there's a protection circuit) is a bigger killer of devices than leaving it on for years.

Macintosh used to have a lab where they would just turn stuff on and let it run. They had old tube stuff running for 20-30 years!