12 Volt Screw In Light Bulb Say Adios...In California

profdant139 wrote:
And I would add to Phil's observations -- as much as we like to whine about Calif., we are still here. We eat three meals a day on our patio, no screen room, for most of the year, no bugs. I drive a few minutes to an excellent surf break, at least once a week. Those two "lifestyle enhancements" are really valuable to me, despite all of the other frustrations of urban living.

Dan, I'm biased (and blessed) because of where we live. We don't live in Regular California ... we live ~1800 feet up in Another California.

In that California: We do get some dark enough and smogless enough skies to actually see some stars. We can BBQ outside all year around with no bugs. Our local full service grocery market is 2 miles down a two-lane country road with almost no traffic to get to it and the clerks know us by first name. We have 11-12 wild turkeys in our forest at times and other times we can have 7-8 deer grazing in our meadow, with 2-3 of them being bucks. But ... Another California is only an island of serenity ... just a few miles off the island is the sea of chaos of Silicon Valley and it's traffic with high-strung people trying to drive and survive.

Since we live among beautiful trees, we don't necessarily need to RV camp in treed areas. We often camp in the desert for the longer range views and the serenity of rockhounding out in the middle of nowhere. After staying a bit in Quartszite this upcoming January, we plan on doing some additional exploring in Arizona.

BTW, Lopez Lake and Jalama Beach provided some great RV drycamping over the Thanksgiving Holidays!

Now here's a beach! Las Penas Michoacan.

This article, published today, is fascinating (albeit very dense) reading. The author does not do a good job of explaining congestion pricing or the revenue device involved, but it sounds like a futures contract for a commodity. This issue plays directly into Mex's comments about the inefficiencies in the Calif. grid system:

Energy speculators profit off of congested transmission lines, says the LA Times, not some conspiracy theorist

This article will require a strong cup of coffee -- very hard to follow, but it is a big deal.

Aside from one's involuntary admiration for the speculator who figured out how to game the system, this article causes me to repeat Napoleon's maxim: Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. The Cal-ISO folks did not really understand what they were getting themselves into. They are not master-minds. They are muddling along.

And I would add to Phil's observations -- as much as we like to whine about Calif., we are still here. We eat three meals a day on our patio, no screen room, for most of the year, no bugs. I drive a few minutes to an excellent surf break, at least once a week. Those two "lifestyle enhancements" are really valuable to me, despite all of the other frustrations of urban living.

But I do miss the seasons, and I miss seeing the Milky Way, except when we head out to the Sierras.

California's "problems" are ALL related to it's too-high population density ... and guess what it's too-high population density is due to?

Here's some possible reasons:

1. Outstanding weather for whatever you want to do outside without having to bundle up.
2. Lots of jobs.
3. Vehicles that don't rust.
4. Gardens almost all year.
5. Warm beaches and cool ski areas at the same time a few hours from each other.
6. No winterizing of RVs.
7. No need for snow tires to go grocery shopping.
8. Fresh seafood caught close by.
9. Exercising outside all year round.

I lived here in California when we had all of the above WITHOUT a too-high population density .... and it was Utopia on Earth back then.

Reasons 1. through 9. still exist ... but just try to keep on providing those simultaneous with a too-high population. It then takes outside control to protect too many people from each other because humans always do to each other what humans always do to each other. The "market" can't do it because the market is controlled by humans and their greed.

I was raised in a low-population lousy winter weather state at the time ... and they can have it.

It all comes down to this...

A carpenter's house is collapsing...

A shoemaker's children run barefoot...

And if you trust a failed lawyer to do more than pad his hours, you risk all.

The "climate" has been changing for four billion years. It has never remained steady or predictable. Choose one - Tropical swamps or mile thick ice over Canada and the northern USA. The CO2 level has been much higher than it is today and the earth yawned and went into an ice age.

Bonding carbon with oxygen produces chemical changes which are extremely destructive. It has nothing to do with Al Gore's $28,000 electrical bills, nor flooding his new Monticelo seaside mansion.

It has to do with poisoning the ocean and rendering the south China sea and Sea of Japan nearly sterile.

Polluting anything is extremely stupid, especially when it can be cured. Stopped. Eliminated.

In 10-seconds, the sun introduces more energy onto earth than mankind has produced since Lucy.

We are custodians of our environment. Mommy isn't going to come along and wipe our spilled Maypo and runny nose.

But sanity has met politics and political manifestations, Prestidigitation's, Machiavellian peer pressure, and simple stupidity has taken over the public consciousness.

I use my battery charger shut-off timer as a perfect example of how failed lawyers handle a technical issue. Double digit legal IQ prevented "lawmakers" from requiring producers of Pennyroyal Oil from comprehending the role of a bittering agent to be added to the safest and most effective bug repellent on the "planet". Because single digit IQ California druggies started using Pennyroyal Oil to induce abortions, California banned Pennyroyal Oil outright. Dengue and West Nile virus must be far more preferable. Please show me a N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, flower.

It goes on and on and on. California government is TOO STUPID to improve revenue collection sites. Motor vehicle offices collect MONEY not friends. Yet the offices have lines of "customers" spilling out the door down the sidewalk and into the parking lot. The last time I tried my seat neighbor who had a ten AM appointment was still waiting at two in the afternoon.

One and one half million dollars a day INCREASED revenue 1 Nov "Cannot possibly touch California's highway crisis" according to governor BROWN. INCREASED revenues. They use gasoline tax and federal monies.

The money is going for TAX AND SPEND projects that have absolutely nothing to do with roads, motor vehicles or anything else. California has embarked on political abstractions that endorse wacko fetishes and political correctness.

One of the political corrections will be to harass you right out of your recreational vehicle. You can take THAT to the bank.

pnichols wrote:
Some of you can bad-mouth California till the cows come home ... but I'm still picking tomatoes in our garden and walking the dog without having to wear boots or ice cleats. We also pick the last of our apples in February.

It has nothing to do with the weather in California, but more with the folks who are writing and enacting laws and rules which ultimately WILL reduce ALL to nothing more than 15th century "peasants" (with the exception of the ones that wrote the laws).

And your lighting will be nothing more than this some day because you will not be able to afford the costs of electricity or even the special light bulbs..

A lot of it has nothing to do with "saving the Earth" but more to do with keeping RULING power within certain small groups.

IE control.

Over regulating for the sake of regulating instead of allowing the MARKET to determine what happens..

CFLs when they where brought to market were insanely expensive and had very little brightness (IE late 1980s a 18W CFL was the largest and cost $29), BUT they DID LAST, I had a few of those that with daily use lasted 10 yrs.

Fast forward 20 yrs (IE early 2000) and you can find brighter 13W CFLs for $1 EACH! The downside was they were cheapened up considerably and getting more than 3-4 yrs out of them was not happening.

Yes, it does take time but not all that long ago (5 yrs), white LEDs were introduced to the market, and were terrible.. A 3.5W LED buld was marketed as equiv to 40W incadescent and was purported to last 11 yrs..

In reality that 3.5W LED was no brighter than a 3.5W incadescent NIGHT LIGHT BULB and they blew out within weeks of use.. All for a tidy sum of $12..

Today, you can find 16W LEDs for $4 each that give off the light equiv to a 100W incadescent.. However, the jury is out on the longevity.. They do look promising since some of the ones I have bought have been in use for about 1 yr and only have killed one and that was because it got dropped in a trouble light fixture (IE not vibration or drop resistant due to power supply parts breaking off).

.

pnichols wrote:
Some of you can bad-mouth California till the cows come home ... but I'm still picking tomatoes in our garden and walking the dog without having to wear boots or ice cleats. We also pick the last of our apples in February.

That being said, nationally and internationally I wonder how the energy saved by LED-based home lightbulbs compares to the high profits that LED-based bulb manufacturers are making from the exorbitant profits they're raking in from those ridiculusly high priced LED-based replacement bulbs?

By the way, you can forget about the "approaching infinite lifetime" they advertise for those LED based bulbs ... the electronics required to support the LED chips inside don't last anywhere near "infinitely".

P.S. Right from the beginning incandescent light bulbs could have been made to last just about forever ... but the free enterprise system soon discovered that it had to intentionally limit incandescent lightbulb longevity in order to - you guessed it - maximize profits from incessant replacement by us peasant users.

I remember going to Edison office with my grandmother to pay the bill and exchange bulbs. You took in a dead bulb and they gave you a new bulb.

Pretty impressive heat sink, huh? For an obsolete Pentium desk top. Note the fan -- brushless. Ball bearings...the size makes it a real single hand full.

Well I ordered 80 of them a few years ago. Impossible to find other types of heatsinks with this btu capacity at anywhere near the price.

Now, take a SHARP brand chip. Maybe the best color rendition of anything I have yet seen. Just a noodge on the yellow side of white. Almost not discernible.

50 watt rated chip. Driven at proper current which is around 35.3 volts when warm.

Lumen output is impressive -- not quite National Lampoon Christmas at the Griswold's, but too bright for residential. The chip belongs 10 feet in the air and the incredible 160 degree dispersion is a real area lighter upper.

Even with a pound of extruded finned aluminum without the fan the temperature will rise and the chip will fail within hours. Not guesswork here.

Those glass face floodlamps -- the case is painted unfinned aluminum. And they use 50 and even 100 watt chips. Do they last? Wait. This gets better. The chips these guys use are garbage. Absolutely dry and clean between the chip and the aluminum housing. No heat sink compound -- still more! The chip mounting screws are almost 100% stripped. I had to fix these by the dozens -- sharp chips, scrape off the paint, drill through holes and re-tap the threads. New screws, and silver based heat sink compound. Wait! What about the heat sink size? Oh. That. Well you see, when the geniuses realized their cobbled together nightmares were catching fire, they backed off on the amperage. Way WAY back. A fifty watt chip being driven at 30 watts. Good and fine if you want thirty watts of light.


So,
When you decide to shop for Panda Soy Honorable Dragon Kite LED lights, I recommend a person first buy this...



Insert some under the tongue. Then start reading the "manufacturer's specifications".

The constant current drivers are of no better quality. Capacitors hate 180+ Degree environments. Careful, don't burn your fingers...

Some of you can bad-mouth California till the cows come home ... but I'm still picking tomatoes in our garden and walking the dog without having to wear boots or ice cleats. We also pick the last of our apples in February.

That being said, nationally and internationally I wonder how the energy saved by LED-based home lightbulbs compares to the high profits that LED-based bulb manufacturers are making from the exorbitant profits they're raking in from those ridiculously high priced LED-based replacement bulbs?

By the way, you can forget about the "approaching infinite lifetime" they advertise for those LED based bulbs ... the electronics required to support the LED chips inside don't last anywhere near "infinitely".

P.S. Right from the beginning incandescent light bulbs could have been made to last just about forever ... but the free enterprise system soon discovered that it had to intentionally limit incandescent lightbulb longevity in order to - you guessed it - maximize profits from incessant replacement by us peasant users.