Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.
The U.S. is pretty late with this, compared to the European Union. Only a few special bulbs are still sold here. Apart from that, the only allowed lighting technology is LED.
Tell that to the bar I was at last night in Palermo. They had a string of festoon lights going down the laneway and every one of them was incandescent. I noticed the same in Taormina. In fact, Italy seems pretty far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to environmental concerns…but that’s for another thread.
Are you sure they were incandescent bulbs and not just LED bulbs copying the incandescent style? They make a lot of decorative LED bulbs now with straight sections of LEDs to imitate the glowing wire of an incandescent.
They are not sold anymore, but whatever is left and working can still be used. Many people also bought a ton of incandescents before the selling stopped (tHe lIgHt is sO mUcH bEtTeR!!!)
Maybe they still run on “new old stock” bulbs until they are used up. But even if they do, they clearly didn’t do the math. I’ve upgraded all my lighting to LED and binned all my incandescent stock.
I’m sitting inside a house where, presently, all lights turned on at the same time will require 30w. Before we went through all the lights, a single lightbulb would use 45w.
Just by replacing the old light bulbs, we reduced energy consumption and the number of lights required to light a room.
I think to update the string of lights you’d need to change transformer. Household bulbs have a driver in the bulb that converts the 230V to the ~12V the bulb uses. But for that string of lights, they’d need to get an electrician (or someone who knows what they’re doing)
