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Comment by burntwater | Hacker News Reader

Personally, the reason I don't run out and replace all my existing incandescents is because I don't want to waste perfectly good bulbs; I would rather for them to reach EOL and then replace. The energy used to create a good is usually significantly more than the energy the good itself uses. I'm OK paying a little more for the energy used by the incandescents when it's overall less wasteful.

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More than 99% of the total lifecycle energy of a incandescent is in its use.

Let's just repeat that.

More than 99 percent of the total lifecycle energy of a typical incandescent bulb is in its use. That includes raw materials, manufacturing, and transport.

Source: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/10/f27/lca_factshee...

> The energy used to create a good is usually significantly more than the energy the good itself uses.

Not when you're talking about a cheap consumable product which mostly converts power into heat. A 75W bulb is about $2.50/yr worth of energy consumption per hour of daily use at $0.09/kWh. An LED equivalent is +/- $0.35/yr at a cost of $3-$6.

Maybe 5%-10% of my home's bulbs weren't worth replacing out of cycle, but LEDs are so cheap and the overall savings so high that it's not even worth thinking about.

But I'm not concerned about the money, I'm concerned about the wastefulness. The existing bulbs are completely functional until they reach EOL, at which point they will be discarded into landfill. The less frequently things are replaced, the less waste ends up in landfill (and is consumed in initial production).

I think you're looking at this wrong. Using an incandescent lamp until it burns out consumes far more resources than making that lamp did.

We can readily quantify how 'perfectly good' incandescent bulbs are no longer perfectly good in terms of energy consumption costs, to which you might also factor the environmental and health impacts of consuming more energy than you could be.

But quantifying the wastefulness of prematurely sending them to the landfill is much more difficult. We can suggest that LEDs longer expected lifetime is another benefit to the environment but that is equally challenging to quantify for the premature replacement scenario.

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