We urgently need some standards over electronics longevity, like the ones we have over power consumption.
I've gone in and returned probably a dozen such bulbs without any receipt, just saying "hey, these are your bulbs, you say 10 year warranty, this is broken and they only came to the market 5 years ago".
Of course this only works now in the early days. If the date of manufacture was printed along with the store name, it'd be problem solved forever.
> EU law also stipulates that you must give the consumer a minimum 2-year guarantee (legal guarantee) as a protection against faulty goods, or goods that don't look or work as advertised. In some countries national law may require you to provide longer guarantees.
If the package says something like "10,000 hours" and you haven't run it for that many hours and it dies in 2 years you can get it replaced by EU law
Yes, and that mean an incandescent bulb is 100% efficient: all power used is converted to light+heat. But other systems can be more than 100% efficient - they can add more heat than the power they use. Or, in the case of central heating from waste, unused heat will probably have to be pumped off anyway, so using it is energetically free.
Yes.
> What is the other source of inefficiency that makes them inefficient for this by-use?
Heat pumps are more efficient at heating than resistive elements because they take advantage of already existing environmental heat, whereas resistive heating has to generate all of the heat directly.
To increase efficiency, many cities run cogeneration plant, where the waste heat from electricity generation is piped into municipal heating system. In this scenario, the incandescent bulbs are wasteful way to heat the house, because it only uses 20-40% of the energy of the fuel, while municipal heating uses only waste energy to produce eletricity.
Hmm.