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I had pretty much this exact thought recently after a couple of LED bulbs failed in fairly close succession in my house, despite a purported 20/50K hour lifespa

I had pretty much this exact thought recently after a couple of LED bulbs failed in fairly close succession in my house, despite a purported 20/50K hour lifespan (I can't recall which exactly, but neither reached). They're own-brand ones, sold by a major supermarket chain here in the UK (Sainsburys), so I'd expect them to be 'ok' at least. Certainly not 'cheap'. Compared to ye olde incandescents, the complexity and material make up is significantly less recyclable and looks to my eye to require a lot more invested energy to manufacture. - I've wondered this about so-called 'smart meters' too - how much energy does it take to make one, and how long to 'pay off' that investment?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Were smart meters about saving energy? I sorta assumed they were just there to make things easier on the power company. Although I suppose if it means that a person doesn't have to drive a car to every meter every month, that's probably a win.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  I think they can help with saving energy indirectly: by letting power companies give customers more detailed information about their usage. But I don't know how often people take advantage of this. I've shaved off around .15 kwh of energy that was used 24/7 ($25/month in California) based upon usage information from our energy company.
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    My 'smart meter' is Zigbee enabled, and I own an adapter that spits out data from the meter in XML format. I can see power consumption with ~400 Watt resolution every 10 seconds without messing around in my breaker box attaching things. Downside is that we're a decade into net-connected thermostat and HVAC systems and none of them support any of this.
- joosters 7y ago
  Smart meters in themselves don't do anything to save energy. However, they make your energy consumption level more visible, which in turn might encourage you to use less electricity.
lopmotr 7y ago
A crude way to estimate embodied energy is just from the cost. It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. That might have been something cheap and polluting like heat from coal, but it's still not much. You could look up the cost of that in India or China or wherever it's cheapest to get the worst case amount of energy or CO2 emissions. Alternatively, plastic takes about 100 kJ/g to produce. So if the bulb has 1 g of plastic, that's about 0.03 kWh of energy. Nothing compared to the savings in electricity using it.
- larrik 7y ago
  > It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. Not always, they could be subsidized to get people off of incandescents.
  - rcxdude 7y ago
    Yes, but they aren't (in most of the world, anyway).
- makomk 7y ago
  Where this gets interesting is when governments decide that if LED energy efficiency is good, more LED energy efficiency is better. There's a push for minimum energy efficiency standards to be really close to the cross-over point where consumers just barely save money compared to less efficient bulbs if they meet the nominal lifetime specs, on the pretense that it's helping out consumers who are too stupid to realise that the higher upfront cost saves them money - at least in the EU and the US pre-Trump. Given the combination of more complex designs and more incentive for cost-cutting, I can't see those bulbs meeting the lifetime specs, and I do wonder if it'd actually save energy.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

Were smart meters about saving energy? I sorta assumed they were just there to make things easier on the power company. Although I suppose if it means that a person doesn't have to drive a car to every meter every month, that's probably a win.

bcrosby95 7y ago
I think they can help with saving energy indirectly: by letting power companies give customers more detailed information about their usage. But I don't know how often people take advantage of this. I've shaved off around .15 kwh of energy that was used 24/7 ($25/month in California) based upon usage information from our energy company.
- joezydeco 7y ago
  My 'smart meter' is Zigbee enabled, and I own an adapter that spits out data from the meter in XML format. I can see power consumption with ~400 Watt resolution every 10 seconds without messing around in my breaker box attaching things. Downside is that we're a decade into net-connected thermostat and HVAC systems and none of them support any of this.
joosters 7y ago
Smart meters in themselves don't do anything to save energy. However, they make your energy consumption level more visible, which in turn might encourage you to use less electricity.

lopmotr 7y ago

A crude way to estimate embodied energy is just from the cost. It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. That might have been something cheap and polluting like heat from coal, but it's still not much. You could look up the cost of that in India or China or wherever it's cheapest to get the worst case amount of energy or CO2 emissions. Alternatively, plastic takes about 100 kJ/g to produce. So if the bulb has 1 g of plastic, that's about 0.03 kWh of energy. Nothing compared to the savings in electricity using it.

larrik 7y ago
> It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. Not always, they could be subsidized to get people off of incandescents.
- rcxdude 7y ago
  Yes, but they aren't (in most of the world, anyway).
makomk 7y ago
Where this gets interesting is when governments decide that if LED energy efficiency is good, more LED energy efficiency is better. There's a push for minimum energy efficiency standards to be really close to the cross-over point where consumers just barely save money compared to less efficient bulbs if they meet the nominal lifetime specs, on the pretense that it's helping out consumers who are too stupid to realise that the higher upfront cost saves them money - at least in the EU and the US pre-Trump. Given the combination of more complex designs and more incentive for cost-cutting, I can't see those bulbs meeting the lifetime specs, and I do wonder if it'd actually save energy.