Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

  • Cubic25@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    Tell that to the bar I was at last night in Palermo. They had a string of festoon lights going down the laneway and every one of them was incandescent. I noticed the same in Taormina. In fact, Italy seems pretty far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to environmental concerns…but that’s for another thread.

    • Dima@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      ·
      1 year ago

      Are you sure they were incandescent bulbs and not just LED bulbs copying the incandescent style? They make a lot of decorative LED bulbs now with straight sections of LEDs to imitate the glowing wire of an incandescent.

        • Dima@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          This is one example of the LED bulbs I was describing, but there’s plenty of different styles of these being made

      • Cubic25@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Definitely. I’m an electrician, so my eyes are usually drawn to these type of things. Light fittings, outlets, switches, etc.

    • thisNotMyName@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      1 year ago

      They are not sold anymore, but whatever is left and working can still be used. Many people also bought a ton of incandescents before the selling stopped (tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)

      • heeplr@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)

        narrator voice: “but it was not”

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          It can be. Cheap LED lights with low quality AC rectifiers are awful. If those are your point of comparison then yes, incandescent light is better (more steady).

          Of course that difference goes away if you just get a better LED light.

          • heeplr@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            yeah, i was referring to current tech. First LED or those mercury vapor bulbs were basically useless.

            • vithigar@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              You can definitely get “current” LED bulbs with bad hardware inside still today. See: Everything made by NOMA.

          • heeplr@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            nah. in my experience, even cheaper LED bulbs from discounters can nicely replace old bulbs.

            It’s true that what “el-cheapo product” once was done by simply reducing lifetime is currently done with looks.

    • M-Reimer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      Maybe they still run on “new old stock” bulbs until they are used up. But even if they do, they clearly didn’t do the math. I’ve upgraded all my lighting to LED and binned all my incandescent stock.

      • qyron
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m sitting inside a house where, presently, all lights turned on at the same time will require 30w. Before we went through all the lights, a single lightbulb would use 45w.

        Just by replacing the old light bulbs, we reduced energy consumption and the number of lights required to light a room.

    • Jacobp100@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think to update the string of lights you’d need to change transformer. Household bulbs have a driver in the bulb that converts the 230V to the ~12V the bulb uses. But for that string of lights, they’d need to get an electrician (or someone who knows what they’re doing)

      • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        While you may need to replace the whole strand, and can’t just swap in individual bulbs, the strand itself has the resistors needed to let the LEDs function, instead of the individual bulbs.