60 watts to illuminate just one room used to be the norm. Now it sounds insane. Maybe losing the perfect color rendering index was a worthwhile tradeoff after all.
60 watts to illuminate just one room used to be the norm. Now it sounds insane. Maybe losing the perfect color rendering index was a worthwhile tradeoff after all.
We also used to build houses to ‘breathe’, specifically encouraging air flow through the walls, etc. to carry away the water leaking in through all the unsealed holes, and allowing any efforts in heating and cooling to go out that same way. In the days of yore, the gas lines that fed English streetlamps with coal gas were allowed to just flow, even when not lit. It’s a wild thought to wonder how much longer the end of fossil fuels could have been put off if efficiency had been a priority from the start.
If efficiency is key, burning things is out of question decades earlier.
Because burning is never really efficient
Efficiency is always dependent on the variables chosen as your metrics. Burning can be a very efficient way of getting rid of garbage under certain metrics. Burning wood is very efficient in terms of startup costs for heating up an area. Burning coal gas released because you want to make coal coke is materially efficient in thermal output per tonne of coal. I do have to wonder what the timeline would look like if some of the more efficient designs for vehicle engines had been in use all the way back when Benz was starting up.
Mincing words…
Going from heat to motion might be a relatively simple way but at least with common heat engines its…not efficient… by any metric.