I'm sure many of us have an accumulation of incandescent, halogen & CFL bulbs as our homes have reached 100% LED. Is there a use-case for these? Maybe as indoor grow lights for horticulturalists with solar plus battery? Or are they destined for e-waste and landfill disposal?
Pre LED era light bulbs, is there a use-case?
sumyungguy on 31/12/2023 - 13:17
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Just the other day I resorted my spare light-bulb box (yes, really, it was a tangent to sorting out my candles box…) and saw I still have a few too. I don't use them in any lights that are on regularly but will be fine for those occasional use places.
I gave away most of my spare CFLs on marketplace or Gumtree. I was glad to get rid of them.
IKEA and a few other stores take them for recycling.
Happy to give them away, just wasn't sure anyone would take them
Throw them in the
oceansaturated saline depository locale~~ with all the other rubbish that Scomo said he would clean up for his darling daughters?
Our “forbidden” lights are still halogen. Our lounge room is 20 ft tall at the peak and these lights would require a cherry picker to change them; we just don’t turn them on because we have enough other illumination. In hindsight not our best design move.
Otherwise the fluorescent in the garage that we will probably change over when the tubes die.
Thanks. Will consider if the lights fail.
Thanks for this! I currently do have a smoke alarm and some downlights installed in ceilings that are way to high to reach with my household ladder. I don't need to replace them just yet, but it's good to know I don't have to pay for a sparky to do it just because I don't have a tall ladder as a place to store one if I ever bought one.
No doubt a fabulous space with 6m ceilings, but surely tricky to clean, illuminate and temperature control?
That would be a “hell yeah”. Anything above the one storey mark in the void is on its own. We do have a long ladder than gets up there but it needs to lean on something and is scary as hell to climb. The closest the ceiling fans get to being cleaned is when we turn them on and the dust flies off.
We converted a warehouse and we still have the original beams. They float as free standing at the first storey level and their main function now is a cat gym. Successive cats have loved to run up and down them and chase flies at the peak. We keep explaining to them that Vet bills are expensive.
Illumination is proving not as bad as it used to be. When we started we had these halogen lights that actually fried moths. You could smell them burning. Now you can get LED panels that are pretty good at providing light. We have one hanging from the beam. We got LED replacements for the halogens. Not as good but reasonable for day to day.
The place is triple brick and we’ve oriented the biggest windows North facing. It takes a few days for the void to warm up. We have huge radiators to provide hydronic gas heating but now we have solar panels we have to consider the options. Right now we’ve created a snug in an area that was, originally, under an open concrete platform. With air con, and the thermal curtains I made in lockdown, we can heat/cool this area very efficiently. The biggest pain is heating the big area in winter. We might only have people over five or six times in winter so finding a good bang for buck solution is proving problematic.
The whole thing is Boomer first world problems. We certainly realise how lucky we ‘ve been.
Here's a couple of recent listings with similar challenges:
https://www.realestate.com.au/property/221-bonney-ave-clayfi…
https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-innisfail-1…@sumyungguy: The first one looks like a church. The holy grail of conversions. (Pun intended).
You can get hydronic heat pump systems but they cost about 20 grand. Then again heat pump hot water cost 3k to 6k.
You can hold them above your head to let people know when you have an idea
Just wait until your fancy ass LED lamps with promised 25,000 hours start failing one after another at 4,000 hours so you can plug the old ones back in
I gave away a bunch of flouro tubes on faceache recently. Old spares from a major LED upgrade.
Others might find a usage if you give them away free, but probably only worth it if you have a decent amount. Not worth it for 5 or less or a bunch of random different types.
Yes, I use the old bulbs in places that won't be accessed often enough for it to make a difference (the hallway closet gets used for a total of half an hour per year)
They are also useful in electronics testing inline as a current limiter.
Note that these are fringe cases, so when it came time to switch over to LED I tossed most of the bulbs and just kept a handful.
My LED lights slowly lose their brightness. They are all Phillips branded which used to be very good. One of them sits in open air so I don't think heat is causing this.
I've slowly moved everything to LED, mostly because of the brighter and whiter light that I get.
Power savings is nice.That comment on 25,000 vs reality… yep. In theory that's nearly 3 years of being on 24/7 or 8.5 years of 8 hours a day… Not.Even.Close.
Of course it doesn't help that most light fittings are enclosed and LED bulbs don't like that… like the ceiling fans in all my rooms.Thees bulbs fit nicely, but don't get near their rated life:
https://www.bunnings.com.au/osram-b22-led-1000lm-daylight-st…At $3.33 each it's not terrible value given what they do, even with the reduced lifespan.
It's a shame no one has made something like this as a plug in option for the many many ceiling fan out there.
https://www.instructables.com/LED-Retrofit-for-Quartz-Haloge…That said, who knows if these things would last any longer or not that bulbs which can easily be swapped out.
Incandescent globes make great over-current restrictors as well as loads for power supply testing. Another use is temperature maintenance with home brew beer when used in an inverted tea-chest covering the fermenter.
They can be used in the backyard dunny to provide light which assists in spotting the redbacks.i have some voice-activated smart switches that require at least a 20w load. for most rooms there's 4x 5w LED downlights or more, so thats fine, but in one room i only have 2x lights on a circuit and cant get to the 20w with LED lights. So i use 40w halogens for those. That's my use-case.
Bunnings still sell boxes of 10x screw-in halogen bulbs for like $10 or something.
Keep the home brew warm in winter.
Make a lava lamp work.