Magnetic block heater mounting?

[John_Mc]

Not to get too far off but I am having trouble convincing my neighbor that using a 100 watt equivalent CFL bulb (14 watt) is not the same as using a 100 watt incandescent to keep his pump house from freezing, said it worked and did not freeze......sometimes you just beat your head against the wall.

Kind of the whole point of using a CFL or LED bulb: much more of the energy you put into them gets converted to light, and far less energy wasted as heat as compared to an incandescent. An incandescent bulb is about 2% efficient (if you define efficiency as light output): 2 watts of the energy you put in goes into light, the other 98 watts is lost as heat. A 100 watt incandescent bulb is basically a small heater that "wastes" 2% of its energy putting out light. If a 14 watt CFL is putting out the same amount of light, then it's producing only 12 watts of heat.

It's a basic law of Physics: Conservation of Energy. Energy can't be created or destroyed, just converted from one form to another. SO if a 100 watt incandescent is using 86 more watts than a CFL and producing the same light output, where does he think that energy is going? For a hands-on demonstration (literally), have him unscrew his 14 watt CFL bulb barehanded after it's been on for an hour. Then do the same with a 100 watt incandescent bulb.

For a good source on this, check out Watts, Heat and Light : Measuring The Heat Output of Different Lamps

 

[4570Man]

I’ve found that a single 100 watt bulb puts out a lot more light than two 50 watts. And a 300 watt throws a lot more light than three 100 watts. Why is that?