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From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4630508.stm

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The government is considering an extra tax on energy inefficient light bulbs.

Costlier compact fluorescent bulbs use a fifth of the energy of incandescent ones, those with a filament, and last much longer.

Chairman of the all-party group on climate change, Colin Challen, is asking the Treasury to gradually raise the tax until they both cost the same.

Making people switch would save them money in the long run and cut carbon dioxide emissions, Mr Challen argues.

The Treasury have said they will look at the Labour MP's proposal carefully.

Are they kidding? Isn't the 17.5% sales tax plus the 5% tax added to the electric bills enough?

Note the part about increasing tax until an incandescent bulb is the same price as a fluoro. They want a 25-pence filament bulb to go up to several pounds just by heaping tax on it? That would make our light bulbs even more heavily taxed than our gasoline. [Linked Image]

If they wanted to introduce an incentive, why not make the compact fluoros tax-free instead? I guess that would reduce the government's income though, and we can't have that, can we? [Linked Image]

STAND AND DELIVER!

[Linked Image]
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If they wanted to introduce an incentive, why not make the compact fluoros tax-free instead?

That would be the smartest proposal. I know here in the 'States, some the electric companies also offer rebates to home-owners using fluorescent lights.

They've even GIVEN OUT the blasted things to get people to use them.
That's typical politicians. Tax grabs where ever they can. [Linked Image] [Linked Image]
It should be up to the user to decide what type of bulb they use.
If they want the standard bulb, they use more power and pay already through the roof for over inflated powerprices anyway.
These so called high efficiency bulbs are too expensive, and it's better to remove the tax on them as already suggested.
I have my doubt over the so claimed hours on them. I have 2 at home, which I meter with hour meters. They have done about 8000 hrs and there is considerable blackening at the ends. ( these were supposed to last at least 15000 hrs ) see if they make it [Linked Image]
Not to worry! Just one more thing to smuggle in with the tobacco, cigarettes, beer, whiskey, wine and a tankfull of French gasoline/diesel on return from our vacations!
Holland for the 'bulb' festival anyone?
[Nudge, nudge, say n'more!]


Alan
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Just one more thing to smuggle in

That thought occurred to me too after I posted. Those folks who live in Kent and go on regular shopping expeditions to Calais will just add another cargo to the list!

There shouldn't be any need to smuggle though. It's all supposed to be duty-free between EU countries now, isn't it? But we all know what H.M.C.E. (Her Majesty's Criminal Extortionists) thinks about that when it comes to folks loading up with cheap French wine........ [Linked Image]
Funny how quickly we have accepted 'cross border' buying freedoms since 1992- I well remember getting stopped at Pompey one wet night in late 1991. Customs guy approaches trailer in a downpour and lifts a corner of the tarp.
"'Ello, What we got in 'ere then Sir?"
"Domestic stuff for the house in France."
"'Ere!", he staggers back, "You've got a ruddy Dumper Truck under there!"
"Gulp! Yes, we need it to move rocks and concrete and stuff about on the site- er, it's not a new one."
"You should have gone through the proper chan... Ere! I'm getting blinkin' soaked out here- Clear off out of it! I ain't seen nothing- best of luck the other side!"
[ We were well away before the Douaniers had finished their breakfasts!]

My mate John and I still use it occasionally! Its a pig to drive, the steering wheels are at the back. Here's a pic of one.
http://www.redletterdays.co.uk/experiences/experience_details.asp?ExpRef=XDUMQ

Of course, we don't need no stinkin' anti-roll cage on ours!

Alan
They still make incandescents?? haha
Really I like the idea of at least pulling the tax on the compacts.. They seem to give off MORE light and for less power and last a long time usually..
I would not be surprised if these compacts get replaced with LED in the near future, but in the meantime those are all I use and they tend to work well as long as you do not put them where they are turned on and off all the time, or in a completely enclosed fixture and left on for hours at a time... That seems to kill 'em!

A.D
Remember socialists do not want you to have any money to spend as you like, but rather as they like.

Hence new stealth taxes under the guise of
saving the planet/cooling down the planet/cancelling corrupt regimes [mainly in Africa] unsustainable loans.

Saw in press today that 25% of local Rates Bill is purely to pay for the gloated public sector in local government's generous pensions. This at 60 of course on a generous scheme that those of us in private sctor can't aspire to even at 65 or older.

And who knows what the % is for those in National/Regional Government.


[This message has been edited by fires (edited 01-22-2006).]
Just give a VAT (sales tax) break on CFLs...

Stealth taxes are just regressive, nasty and hurt the poor. Rich people don't notice them, poor people get hurt. They're anything but socialist!
A couple of years ago I could see something like this would happen. As a result I hoarded away about 2,000 light bulbs just after the Elma plant in Newcastle (the factory where every Australian light bulb was produced)closed down. I did this so I wouldn't have to use inferior 3rd world lamps or compact fluoros. I can see incandescent lamps going the way of dial telephones and black and white televisions, so I got in now before they become collectors items. Besides, I collect unusual and old light bulbs anyway.
You'll all think I'm nuts for doing that, but
I've gone right off compact fluoros and have been putting incandescents back as the CFL's have died...the RFI is appalling from some of them and the delicate solid state components can't take a voltage spike on the mains that an incandescent can. I also have a biassed opinion of course, favouring ancient technology. Modern compact fluoros look way out of place in a bakelight light socket hanging from cloth covered flex in a 100yr old house. So, no I won't be giving up on my 100+ year old method of lighting. Even all my solar/wind lighting is incandescent...12V GLS B22 & E27 lamps, some in porcelain and brass light sockets.
The thing with incandescent lamps is to use them sensibly. When I moved into my house, there were 75 and 100W bulbs in most sockets where 15, 25 & 40W would have been quite sufficient. The 'short life' aspect of incandescents has been a non issue for me. One lamp gave me 10yrs, three I put in over 10yrs ago still haven't blown, and the rest of the lamps in the house have only been changed 2 or 3 times over 10yrs....bit less than some of the CFL's I used to use!
Having said that I will be keeping a CFL in a hand held lead lamp...it survives being constantly dropped unlike a filament bulb.
As for LED lighting, the colour is just awful.
A good CFL bulb will produce pretty excellent lighting. I don't know about outside of the EU, but within the EU they do generally comply with RF interference requirements.

Also, I haven't really seen any of these really poor quality lightbulbs that you guys seem to be getting in Aus/NZ here in Ireland.

They're still all philips, GE, solas (local brand), Mazda etc.. or supermarket ownbrand, which to be fair generally seem to be quite good quality.

Perhaps the 240V system in Aus/NZ produces very high peaks for bulbs that may be designed for 220-230V ? hence the popping CFLs?
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Remember socialists do not want you to have any money to spend as you like, but rather as they like.

Yep, the way this lot is going, pretty soon it would be easier to just to legislate that all earnings go directly to the government and they'll give us back any small proportion that's left over after taxes, if any. [Linked Image] [Linked Image]

In my current trade catalog, a 60W GLS Osram bulb is 24 pence (excluding VAT and in quantities of 20+). An Osram 12W compact fluoro is £2.99 in similar quantities.

So if the government is going to apply tax to bring that 60W filament bulb up to the same price as the 12W fluoro, that will mean adding £2.75 tax to a 24p. bulb! That's a tax of over 1100%. [Linked Image]

That's before the Voracious Administration Tax as well. When VAT gets added, it's to the final price including any other taxes and excise duties (yes, a tax on a tax). So the 17.5% VAT won't be on just the original 24 pence, it will be on the full £2.99 of which £2.75 is tax in the first place. 2.99 x 17.5% = Another 52 pence.

So, for a bulb which started out at 24 pence, on a non-commercial purchase where the buyer has to pay VAT, the government will have collected a grand total of £3.27 in tax!

That's all based on trade prices. For the average person buying in the street, it will be even more of course.

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A couple of years ago I could see something like this would happen. As a result I hoarded away about 2,000 light bulbs

The way things are going, there's a whole list of things we need to hoard quickly. Proper tin-lead solder is another.
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As for LED lighting, the colour is just awful.
In my opinion the same is true for all kinds of fluorescent lights. They are ok for offices, maybe residential hallways or other rooms you don't really live in but I wouldn't want to have such a thing in my living room or bed room, no matter how "warm" they try to make the light. And apparently most people in Austria still think like that - compact fluorescents aren't really common. Besides they're awfully dim after being switched on! All CFs we have take several minutes to heat up.

@Paul: would that lead to more E27 bulbs in the UK? [Linked Image]
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would that lead to more E27 bulbs in the UK?

It could well do, although France uses BC as well.

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but I wouldn't want to have such a thing in my living room or bed room, no matter how "warm" they try to make the light. And apparently most people in Austria still think like that

And quite a few in Britain too, myself included. I have precisely two fluoro fittings in my home (not counting things like illuminated bench magnifiers). One is a traditional style fitting with twin 58W 5 ft. T8 tubes in the kitchen, the other is a strip light over the mirror in the bathroom which uses an 11W compact. Everything else is incandescent and that's the way I like it.

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Besides they're awfully dim after being switched on! All CFs we have take several minutes to heat up.

For sure. My bathroom one takes a good five minutes to get up to full brightness.
In fact the only reason it's in there is because I happened to have it left over from some other job, otherwise that would be a filament strip light, just like the ones I have elsewhere in the bedrooms.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-23-2006).]
The only place we have a CF is in the hallway where it is on close to 24/7. We used to have one in the guest bedroom too, but after I started using it for computer work I replaced the CF with a 100W incandescent bulb.

On the other hand there are some really inefficient fixtures too! My grandmother in Germany had a livng room light which was pretty much a 12"x12"x4" glass block, hollow, with four bulbs inside. Brightness was ok, pretty much like a bare 100W bulb. I figured there were probably low-wattage bulbs in it but didn't think much. When she moved to Austria one year ago I took down the fixture (to Austrian and German tradition I left the apartment with only bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings, an Austrian would probably have left the bare hot wires dangling) and couldn't believe my eyes - there wer four 60 Watt bulbs in it, making up a total of 240 Watts for an average sized room! Back in Austria I let that one quietly disappear on top of a tall cupboard...
Besides the thick glass makes it _really_ heavy and while it was safely attached to the poured concrete ceiling in Germany I certainly wouldn't feel too great attaching it to the lathes of our plaster ceilings. Screwing it into a joist like a decent fitting should is impossible since it doesn't have any means of centered mounting required for driving long screws into a joist.
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Proper tin-lead solder is another
Indeed...the stories I've heard and soldered joints I've seen with lead free aren't encouraging, hence the gradual collection of more than a few rolls of the real lead stuff.
And if the politically correct powers force that IEC standard mains plug and socket on us here I'll have a lifetime supply of proper aussie bakelite...actually it's a wonder the IEC haven't thought up an internationally standard lamp socket that will be compulsory for all new installations and will only will take CFL's or LED's.
But, going back to CFL's, and fluorescents in general, what of the UV output?
I keep my coloured plastic telephones and radios away from fluoro lighting for this reason....how often have we seen starters, tombstones, and other plastic bits disintegrate when working on fluoro light fittings?

[This message has been edited by aussie240 (edited 01-24-2006).]
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actually it's a wonder the IEC haven't thought up an internationally standard lamp socket that will be compulsory for all new installations and will only will take CFL's or LED's.

Seriously, I think that is a good idea. The newest LED's are unreal in light output.
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Indeed...the stories I've heard and soldered joints I've seen with lead free aren't encouraging, hence the gradual collection of more than a few rolls of the real lead stuff.

I don't know what the story is in Europe/Australia, but here in the Americas...we're still using lead/tin solder for electronics.

I don't know if it is ever going to be discontinued....but so far I'm not seeing any signs that it is.
Actually, the electronics industry is going lead-free, primarily due to European regulations. We are having a heck of a time with some parts only available leaded and some only unleaded - you need to run the oven at a higher temperature for the unleaded, and that is causing trouble with both the PCB materials and with older parts.

Yes, I also have a few rolls of good old Kester 63/37 stashed away :-)
LED's are cetainly the way to go.

A combination of yellow and white leds will give quite a good colour. certainly better than the blueish white in a lounge environment.

I have a lot of ideas but never enough time to built all the projects I want to do to a final stage. usually it ends up as a temp. rack up on a experimental circuitboard.

corrected for typo error. Ray

[This message has been edited by RODALCO (edited 01-26-2006).]
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I don't know what the story is in Europe/Australia, but here in the Americas...we're still using lead/tin solder for electronics.

There's some new EU directive in the pipelane which is supposed to be banning lead in solder completely from a certain date. Some suppliers seem to have already stopped stocking it already. [Linked Image]
Yup - I think that date is going to be quite soon too - remember something like summer of 2006. Three guys one year ahead of me at school did a project "lead-free soldering of solar modules", and they weren't overly impressed of the new stuff either I think. Though they mostly blamed it on the early stage of development of must of the stuff they had to use.
Yikes! I hadn't realized the deadline was that close, but it seems you're right:

DIRECTIVE 2002/95/EC

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Member States shall ensure that, from 1 July 2006, new electrical and electronic equipment put on the market does not contain lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) or polybrominated diphenyl ethers
(PBDE).

There are some exemptions listed in the annex, and a temporary reprieve for lead in solder for certain applications:

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5. Lead in glass of cathode ray tubes, electronic components and fluorescent tubes.

6. Lead as an alloying element in steel containing up to 0,35 % lead by weight, aluminium containing up to 0,4 % lead
by weight and as a copper alloy containing up to 4 % lead by weight.

7. ? Lead in high melting temperature type solders (i.e. tin-lead solder alloys containing more than 85 % lead),

? lead in solders for servers, storage and storage array systems (exemption granted until 2010),

? lead in solders for network infrastructure equipment for switching, signalling, transmission as well as network
management for telecommunication,

? lead in electronic ceramic parts (e.g. piezoelectronic devices).

Time to start stockpiling as much of the good old 60/40 as possible!
Trouble is, if I'm to believe what I've read in popular electronics mags', that lead free soldered joints subsequently repaired with leaded solder will be weak and unreliable.

Anyone know if that's actually true, or is it just propaganda from the enviromental fanatics ?
Geoff, if I were designing a lead-free solder from scratch, I'd start with the basis of triple, quadruple or higher eutectic alloys of tin, adding perhaps antimony, bismuth, copper, lithium, etc. to get the melting point down. The problems foreseen would be conductivity of the solid solder, corrosive effects short and long term, liquid phases of the alloying metals appearing at the dendritic boundaries on solidification, mechanical strength of joints, ductitity, effective formulations for fluxes, actual melting temperature, clean melt with no pasty-stage as in plumbers solder; the list is almost endless. So if you re-solder a lead-free joint with tinmans' my guess would be it would be a poor joint, if only because the new alloy created would not be a clean melting eutectic but probably a wipeable joint! So, stocks of pb/sn will be ok for new work but for repairs .....

Alan

late ps. A quick shufti at my metallurgy books last night confirms that lead and tin alloy perfectly in all percentages without liquid phases of either metal appearing at the crystal boundaries, and that electrical solder [63/37] sits right on the eutectic- ie. the alloy percentage of lowest possible melting point, with a definite crisp solidification temperature similar to a pure metal. 176C/349F melting point, with good tensile, shear, elongation and creep properties.



[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 01-29-2006).]
I'm more concerned about compatibility the other way, i.e. how would the lead-free solders mix with traditional lead/tin solder on older equipment.
Alan, Many thanks. Your knowledge of metallurgy is way above anything I ever attained, (never mind remember!).
Does your ps indicate that modern lead-free produced gear will, in practice, be OK if repaired with standard old 60/40?
I'm mostly only a hobby electronician these days, and one aspect that concerns me is that we won't actually know what's been used in manufacture. I suspect there may be frequent doubts in the commercial repair world too.
Geoff,
From what I can glean from the Net, most lead-free solders are /will be alloys of silver-tin, copper-silver-tin and possibly bismuth. The melting points are generally going to be ABOVE 217C, quite a big leap from 63/37. None of the many alloys proposed/patented appear to be true eutectics and thus will have melting point ranges of a few degrees, say 217-220C. The fluxes used will also be different formulations. No need for despair, you simply have to clean off as much of the lead-free solder and flux residues as possible from tags, pins etc, [there are little suck-pumps available, and the old wireman's trick of wiping with a sponge] & cut-short and re-tin wires if possible prior to resoldering with 63/37. The new solders, being predominantly tin, won't generate any problems with 'take' or wetting. My earlier comments related to attempting a repair with a large quantity of lead-free left on the joint- in this case a new alloy would be created of unknown properties. At a cleaned surface interface, [with a tag for example], a tin-alloy will still exist, [which may not even melt on resoldering], so it has to be clean [which is normal procedure anyway]. A reasonably cleaned off joint should re-solder very well with 63/37, [as long as you stockpile enough when it isn't sold any more!]

Alan
I've read that some alloy of lead free "repair solder" is coming in. It is as good as the old one, but too expensive to use in mass production. Instead, cheaper solders with a higher melting point and less forgiving properties will be used for this.

We figured we might have chance at getting the industry to start welding instead of soldering. No such luck.
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