Stop Trying to Save Us From Ourselves

Florescent and LED bulbs are a good idea, some of the time. But rules don’t apply some of the time. Lost Ground Can Be Regained. Who Knew?.

But centralized bureaucracy cannot abide “where it makes sense”. Rules are applied everywhere, all at once, with a sledge, by people who haven’t got a fucking clue. Examples abound: A dude in a swamp in Michigan has a low flow toilet because water is rare in Phoenix. My truck’s seat belt alarm goes off, when I’m driving firewood across my lawn. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Incandescent bulbs are theoretically inefficient. You know what their waste product is? Heat! You know what the temperature was this February? -42 Fahrenheit.

I’ve never been in conditions of -42 Fahrenheit. The coldest I’ve ever seen the mercury, was -31. (Temperature, not wind-chill.) Minus 20 was a common occurrence in Chicago. (Look on YouTube, you can find plenty of videos where people take a pot of boiling water off the stove, throw it in the air, when it’s -20, or colder, and it turns INSTANTLY to snow.) -31 meant that pets died. Hell people died. And just plain old frostbite is a serious thing.

A couple of cities, Minneapolis among them, swapped out all of their incandescent bulbs in traffic signals, and the snow stopped melting off of said signals. That caused accidents, and while I’m not 100% sure, I believe at least one death. Some savings. And so they added heaters to traffic signals. Every. Traffic Signal. How much money do you think they spent? How much heartache did they cause. But they are helping! (Oh, and learn the lesson from others? As I said, MULTIPLE cities, and not all in the same year.) Anyway, back to AC…

Especially in my chicken coop. I’m trying to keep it warm enough that the chickens don’t die. I don’t care if a bulb puts a few spare BTUs into the coop… it’s a good thing. But NOOOOOOOO. Some douchebag in D.C. who’s never hammered ice out of a chicken waterer with numb fingers and a screwdriver thinks they know better. I don’t give a fuck about saving $4 annually in electricity at the cost of $300 in dead hens. Stumbling around pitchforks and hay bales in the dim gloom of a fluorescent that can’t quite do the job is a special piece of hell too. Also, the damn things cost much more than incandescents and they don’t hold up nearly as well as they should.

As they say, read the whole thing.