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Summary

Paul continues this week’s smackdown with Mark, Ashley, Katie, and Kyle, and moves on to reviewing his Building a Better World book, chapter 3.

This chapter is about light bulbs, and although there’s apparently three repetitions of the first paragraph pointing out their triviality, a lot of people seem quite dead set on discussing them to no end and such a point that if Paul was given the opportunity to infect the minds of everyone in the world with one bit of information, it would be to expose the propaganda of lightbulb companies to link their bulbs with saving the environment.  Heck, they make so much dough from subsidies and other deals that they hand them out for free with a quick “energy audit” that can often be skipped completely (although to be fair, the one person in the group to try one did find that it actually helped reduce consumption a little).  If you just want to save energy, get a clothes line.

If you want to reduce energy use exclusively from lighting, it’d be better to first look at your lighting habits – heck, Paul managed to get down to $8 of electricity used per year for lighting even when using incandescents!  Another plus for incandescents is the fact that they nearly perfectly mimic natural sunlight during sunset, unlike most LEDs that are designed to fool the brain into thinking its daylight which can cause various problems related to sleep if you aren’t exposed to enough actual sunset.  Despite all of Paul’s incandescent bias, LEDs actually pretty good in places that don’t need more heat, such as with Katie in Hawaii, but in cold places where the extra heat is almost always welcome, an incandescent is going to start pulling dual duty keeping the room warm.

Relevant Threads

Building a Better World in your Backyard by Paul Wheaton and Shawn Klassen-Koop

It is 2021 and incandescent is still better than LED

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Location: Massachusetts, 5a, flat 4 acres; 40" year-round fairly even
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Suddenly these past few days I am actually glad there's a chapter on lightbulbs in the book.

I hadn't taken the health aspect of it seriously but listening to the podcast I realized I could put in more incandescents to help heat the house (we're not allowed to use space heaters and the main option for heating is oil).  I found a bunch in the stairwell and the basement of the house we rent, and switched them out for LED's that we have a big freebie box of, since we don't go in the basement often at all.  And put the incandescents in up in our aparment.

Wow, I feel significantly better.  I'm more energized in the evenings and calmer, and happier.  It's like an ongoing irritation that I'd just been tolerating has been lifted.  I wasn't expecting any change, it just hit me completely unexpectedly that I felt more motivated to do things than before.  My partner also likes the feel of the incandescent lights.  It feels warmer in the house even though the furnace seems to cycle on less often.  This is with almost no intelligence to placement of the lights, since mostly they're just where they were built into the house and we don't have an option, but it's very pleasant.  

If I tried to make a change based on every study that came out saying such-and-such is bad for you I'd never be able to do anything, but this one really seems worth it.
 
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