Biden admin moving forward with light bulb bans in coming weeks

[PlainName]

It's trivially easy to fit LED or HID H-x replacement lamps anyway.

You "have" to replace the whole fixture on most modern cars (pre-LED modern) if you upgrade to LED as the beam pattern is based on filament bulbs.
At least in the UK, you should fail MOT (yearly vehicle check to see if it is roadworthy) if you use LED bulbs in a filament-based fixture if the beam is modified outside of spec.

Although it's possible to cheat the MOT (replace with original bulbs just for the test - like bikers would do with loud exhausts) the bigger 'danger' for the driver is insurance. If they want to wiggle out of a claim, a car not MOT-worthy is the easy route. Then you're driving without insurance, and open to a huge world of hurt.

[schmitt trigger]

I also searched for the original Fox News source, and read it thoroughly. The news piece has this golden nugget, copied verbatim:

 Former President Donald Trump was also personally opposed to LED light bulb adoption, remarking in 2019 that they are often more expensive, not good and make him "look orange."

[tooki]

I don't see any reason incandescent bulbs would be banned on vehicles: 60W per side of power consumption is nothing compared to the 60kW or so required to cruise on the highway for an ICE (after efficiency losses).  Far better to phase out ICE vehicles instead... which will eventually happen.  Not to make this an EV debate but it's already on the roadmap for most car makers and governments.

And yet, in some US states, it is still currently illegal to have 'Day Beam' headlights or run your headlights during the day because of the slight extra load on your alternator, wasting a few tea-spoons of gas over the year.

No, daytime running lights (not headlights by day in general) were illegal until 1995, when GM successfully convinced the NHTSA to allow them. That was federal vehicle law, not state laws.

Every state has conditions under which headlights must be used, and when high beams are and aren’t allowed. None prohibits the use of headlights by day: https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/headlight-use-laws-for-all-50-states

[nctnico]

Incadescent light bulbs can still be bought in Europe ... they just label them "for industrial equipment" ,  as heating elements for warming fertilized chicken eggs...

Nowadays you'd be a complete idiot to buy incadescent light bulbs for having light in your home. CFL and LED are so much better AND cheaper to run.

[themadhippy]

so if there banning light bulbs how are we meant to grow more lamps?

[tooki]

I'll tell you one thing, I'll be danged I'm going to put those gay, blue, hideous, over-bright, stabbing, abomination LED lights on my vehicle.

Thanks,
IM

So, just how are you able to determine the sexuality of an LED light, and why do you think its particular preference is a bad thing?

Gay=Happy, jolly

That’s clearly not what OP meant. They were using the puerile meaning of “gay” to mean “lame”.

[Zoli]

I'll tell you one thing, I'll be danged I'm going to put those gay, blue, hideous, over-bright, stabbing, abomination LED lights on my vehicle.

Thanks,
IM

So, just how are you able to determine the sexuality of an LED light, and why do you think its particular preference is a bad thing?

Gay=Happy, jolly

That’s clearly not what OP meant. They were using the puerile meaning of “gay” to mean “lame”.

Another example of misinterpretation "justified by modern times"; personally, I stick to the complete meanings, and I will promote the lost meanings; welcome to my fight.
I understand and accept that the language is a live, changing entity; at the same time I remember:"Those who forget the past, are doomed to repeat it".
For our future discussions, please remember.
Thank you.

[BrianHG]

And yet, in some US states, it is still currently illegal to have 'Day Beam' headlights or run your headlights during the day because of the slight extra load on your alternator, ....

   really?  source?   I haven't heard this. although it wouldn't surprise me in some of the People's Republics.

Back in the early 90s, when daybeams first became mandatory here in Canadian cars, I was stopped for speeding driving down south to Florida and the cop said I was not allowed to have my headlights on during the daytime (unless bad weather) and I said it wasn't possible to turn off the daybeams.  I believe it was in the N or S Carolina.

[james_s]

I don't see any reason incandescent bulbs would be banned on vehicles: 60W per side of power consumption is nothing compared to the 60kW or so required to cruise on the highway for an ICE (after efficiency losses).  Far better to phase out ICE vehicles instead... which will eventually happen.  Not to make this an EV debate but it's already on the roadmap for most car makers and governments.

You don't see any reason because you're an engineer (or something like it anyway) and understand that distinction. Politicians on the other hand have no idea what they're doing most of the time and I wouldn't expect them to understand at all.

It's all kind of moot anyway though, most new cars are already using LED lighting, old cars gradually wear out or get wrecked.

[james_s]

Incadescent light bulbs can still be bought in Europe ... they just label them "for industrial equipment" ,  as heating elements for warming fertilized chicken eggs...

Nowadays you'd be a complete idiot to buy incadescent light bulbs for having light in your home. CFL and LED are so much better AND cheaper to run.

I phased out incandescent for general illumination more than 20 years ago.

More recently I have brought a few of them back though as I've collected a few antique floor lamps that use the 100-200-300 mogul base 3-way bulb, something that there is currently no truly equivalent LED retrofit for. They get used relatively little so the cost is negligible and in the winter when I'm most likely to run the big bulb in the reflector floor lamps the supplemental heat is a useful effect. In certain decorative applications nothing quite matches the look of a real incandescent either.

[james_s]

However:

Being told what I must use boils my piss.

I get it that the administrations in the UK, Europe, and the US, do need to conserve energy. The reasons are not made clear though, to them it's just a freaking popularity contest to gain the acceptance of self-righteous snowflakes who think they're saving the world by buying millions of tonnes of eco approved technowaste to pollute the environment even more than it already is.

This. I made my own choice to phase out incandescent lighting many years ago in favor of first CFL and then starting around 2010 LED. At the time I was paying $40 each for the new Philips LED bulbs which was ok because I was an early adopter and LED lighting was a technology I believed in and wanted to succeed. BUT I absolutely loathe being told what to do, especially by self righteous twats and stupid politicians, and had they tried to force adoption back then I probably would have pushed back and refused. I want to make my own choices, if I choose to use inefficient products I pay for it in my energy bills. I'm ok with government subsidies to kickstart and encourage development of more efficient technologies, and I'm even ok with taxes on inefficient products, but I am not ok with mandates. There are always edge cases that nobody thinks of, antique or decorative fixtures that have a unique look, lava lamps and childrens toy ovens that rely on the heat of an incandescent lamp, oven lights that get much too hot for LED bulbs to survive, projector lamps, fixtures with precise optics, etc.

[abeyer]

For our future discussions, please remember.
Thank you.

I don't think anyone will not remember that you are either disingenuously obtuse or utterly unable to infer context and intent.

[james_s]

And yet, in some US states, it is still currently illegal to have 'Day Beam' headlights or run your headlights during the day because of the slight extra load on your alternator, wasting a few tea-spoons of gas over the year.

It sounds silly, but I can see the reasoning behind it. There are around 290 million cars in the USA for example, if we take a very rough estimate and say 1% of those cars are on the road at any given time that's almost 3 million cars. A pair of 55W H4 bulbs means 110 watts to power the low beams on each car, which works out to around 330 megawatts of electricity. These numbers are probably inaccurate but even if they're high by an order of magnitude that's still a LOT of energy. While it's true that the energy required to move the cars absolutely dwarfs what is used by the lights, hundreds of megawatts is still hundreds of megawatts, that energy has to come from somewhere, it comes from the fuel used to power the cars and it pollutes just the same as a 300MW gasoline fired power plant. This is just in the USA too, I suspect we have more cars per capita than most parts of the world but probably not THAT many more than other developed nations.

Does it make sense to try to regulate this with a law? Probably not, there are so many other variables, tire pressure being one of them, that have a much greater effect but when looking at the big picture it is not quite as silly as it first seems.

[nctnico]

Nahh, that 110W is likely lost in just turning the alternator anyway.

[james_s]

Nahh, that 110W is likely lost in just turning the alternator anyway.

You will absolutely burn more fuel running the headlights than not. 110W is a very small amount of energy when dealing with an engine rated at 100kW or more, but it's not free and turning the alternator with no load requires almost no torque, it spins freely until you load it up. I can hear the idle sound of my car change slightly when turning the headlights on, the idle air control valve opens very slightly further to keep the RPM steady. On cars that I've driven that have electric primary radiator fans the load is significant, you can feel the engine lurch when the electric fan kicks in.

Actually measuring this added consumption is probably tricky because it gets lost in the noise, but if you could maintain a constant set of circumstances I bet it would be measurable.

[magic]

I don't think anyone will not remember that you are either disingenuously obtuse or utterly unable to infer context and intent.

I hopefully won't; why let random pedants live rent free in your head?

[Miyuki]

Nahh, that 110W is likely lost in just turning the alternator anyway.

You will absolutely burn more fuel running the headlights than not. 110W is a very small amount of energy when dealing with an engine rated at 100kW or more, but it's not free and turning the alternator with no load requires almost no torque, it spins freely until you load it up. I can hear the idle sound of my car change slightly when turning the headlights on, the idle air control valve opens very slightly further to keep the RPM steady. On cars that I've driven that have electric primary radiator fans the load is significant, you can feel the engine lurch when the electric fan kicks in.

Actually measuring this added consumption is probably tricky because it gets lost in the noise, but if you could maintain a constant set of circumstances I bet it would be measurable.

At city speeds, you need just lower ones of kW to move the car
It used to be something just like 2kW to keep small European car at 50 kmh, will be way higher with today's SUVs
It can easily make a few percent of consumption when running in a city

[py-bb]

Let's go Brandon! 

Biden admin moving forward with light bulb bans in coming weeks
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/biden-admin-moving-forward-with-light-bulb-bans-in-coming-weeks/ar-AA19lTsY

"The Biden administration is preparing to implement a sweeping nationwide
ban on commonly used light bulbs as part of its energy efficiency and climate agenda."

------------------

I'll tell you one thing, I'll be danged I'm going to put those inappropriate ward removed, blue, hideous, over-bright, stabbing, abomination LED lights on my vehicle.

So the question(s): How do I get regular lights for vehicle?

-Smuggle them somehow?
-How hard would it be to home-make a bulb?


Thanks,
IM

I'm turning 30 soon and I'm of the age group here in the UK which just about remembers "don't touch lightbulbs as a kid and remembers doing it anyway and is thus amazed that you can touch lightbulbs still.


I will agree that cheap LEDs suck and there are some really cold ones but there were shitty bulbs before that too. Trust me everything's fine.

[shapirus]

At city speeds, you need just lower ones of kW to move the car

at what angle of inclination?

[Zoli]

For our future discussions, please remember.
Thank you.

I don't think anyone will not remember that you are either disingenuously obtuse or utterly unable to infer context and intent.

Thank you, too.
Edit: your comment was really helpful; from now on I will try to be more detailed on my intentions.

[CircuitChaos]

They did it in Europe too, a long time ago. I don't care as long as the bulbs are still available (and surprisingly they are, at least in Poland; just not in regular stores, but there's no problem in buying them online).

[coppice]

They did it in Europe too, a long time ago. I don't care as long as the bulbs are still available (and surprisingly they are, at least in Poland; just not in regular stores, but there's no problem in buying them online).

Incandescent bulbs were still being manufactured in Poland well after the EU ban. I don't know if they still are. We were buying those Polish bulbs in Asia.

[nctnico]

Nahh, that 110W is likely lost in just turning the alternator anyway.

You will absolutely burn more fuel running the headlights than not. 110W is a very small amount of energy when dealing with an engine rated at 100kW or more, but it's not free and turning the alternator with no load requires almost no torque, it spins freely until you load it up. I can hear the idle sound of my car change slightly when turning the headlights on, the idle air control valve opens very slightly further to keep the RPM steady.

Likely this is under software control. The same happens when you turn the steering wheel of a car with power steering; the idle speed will be bumped up a little. You should really think about the energy lost in driving the belt, tensioner & bearings here. That isn't nothing!

[james_s]

Likely this is under software control. The same happens when you turn the steering wheel of a car with power steering; the idle speed will be bumped up a little. You should really think about the energy lost in driving the belt, tensioner & bearings here. That isn't nothing!

In this case it's a 33 year old car, the only software is in the Bosch LH Jetronic ECU and the EZK ignition box. I'm intimately familiar with the hardware and know that the only input to the ECU that responds to this sort of thing is a signal that tells it when the A/C is switched on and bumps the idle up slightly. Beyond that it is simple closed loop control using the RPM signal from the EZK box which the Jetronic ECU uses to PWM the idle air control valve that bypasses the throttle body.

Yes the amount of energy lost in the belt is significant, especially as it uses V-belts which are significantly less efficient than the serpentine belts that came into common use a few years later. There are all sorts of losses throughout the engine, accessories and drivetrain, that's not really the point. My only point here is that the headlights consume energy, and across millions of cars that energy adds up to a considerable amount, many megawatts even by the most conservative estimates. That energy has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the fuel burned in the engine. It is a very small amount of energy relative to all the other losses, but it's still a lot of energy. I'm not even arguing that it makes sense to legislate it, but likewise I don't think it makes sense to have the headights on when they are not needed. On a bright sunny day the increase in visibility is minimal at best, and once daytime running lights became common they stopped standing out anyway.

I got curious and did some searching and came across this: https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy/drl-gas-consumption.htm

Looks like the estimate is a penalty of 0.5% to 1.5% increased fuel consumption. You're probably not going to notice that in your wallet, but spread across hundreds of millions of people it adds up. Of course if we want to reduce fuel waste there are almost certainly bigger fish to fry, but that doesn't mean the small fish don't exist.

[james_s]

They did it in Europe too, a long time ago. I don't care as long as the bulbs are still available (and surprisingly they are, at least in Poland; just not in regular stores, but there's no problem in buying them online).

I was kind of surprised that I could still get some unusual 48V indicator lamps recently. I think JKL manufactured them when I placed the order as it took several weeks before they were shipped to the distributor. A lot of oddball lamps have gotten harder to find but a surprising variety are still available.