Light Efficiency

One of the sponsors of the 10,000 step hike on New Years was the Taiwan Electric Power Utility. It distributed a nice brochure promoting energy efficient lighting.

It basically shows which forms of lighting use electricity most efficiently. I searched their website for a version in English but with no luck. On the web, there are similar tables. The one below I extracted from the similar table on Wikipedia.

For the various forms of lighting( different voltage(V) and wattage(W) ) we see that LEDs and fluorescents are much better than the incandescents. But for Republicans that are rooted in the past, they'll fight to the death for those old incandescent bulbs. "If it was good enough for Moses, then it is good enough for me!".

When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota I lived above a bar. The owner of the bar rented out the rooms on the second floor and third floor to desperate students and transient old bums. The owner was deathly afraid that one day, one of us would fall asleep while smoking and burn down the whole place. There wasn't much he could do about the smoking but he didn't allow hotplates as they also could have been left on and catch the whole place on fire.

One day, one of the bums showed me how to make hot soup with a 100 watt light bulb. Basically you mix the soup in a pot and then lower a bulb on a cord into the soup mix. You plug in the cord to an outlet and stir the soup with the bulb. The bulb heats up and warms/cooks the soup. He made Campbell's tomato soup this way. The trick was to turn the juice on and off only when the bulb was in the soup. Otherwise, the soup on the hot bulb would burn and then the bulb would break and then (if you were lucky) only the fuse would burn out. 

But from the table above you can see that the bum's incandescent bulb was putting out a lot more heat than light. It would be less efficient to make soup with an LED light.