Convenient incandescent inefficiency - on sale!

Incandescent light bulbs are very inefficient, which is why they get hot.  That's a lot of energy turned into heat not light.  Nonetheless us plant collectors have made use of this inefficiency for years.  Our home-made "Acme" plant dryer operates using two pairs of 100W light bulbs that provide just the right amount of safe heat to dry specimens in plant presses.  When collecting plants you've got lots of drying plant material sandwiched between layers of cardboard, blotters, and newsprint.  You don't want to try to heat this to about 50-55C using any heat source that could start a fire.  At any rate once you have a light-bulb heated dryer, you just want to continue with business as usual, so when the local big box store puts 100W bulbs on sale, TPP could not resist buying a few dozen bulbs to get us through this season.  Bulbs don't last long when they are on 24-7.  After this batch of bulbs, well, some other heat source will have to be found.   

Energy-saving lights with biological theme

The library used to have tall, decorative (?) architectural fixtures studded with big, glowing incandescent bulbs that were expensive (and hard) to replace and as incandescent bulbs get phased out, impossible to replace. Since they were decorative in function, it's pretty hard to argue that they weren't a big waste of energy. So what do you do? This is no idle problem. The plant dryer, a box that holds plant presses, in our herbarium is heated by the tremendous inefficiency of four 100-watt incandescent bulbs. Now what? Trying to find just the right heating element is a problem. One tech suggested just buying a case of 100w bulbs and putting the problem off a couple of years. Given this type of committment to energy savings and solving technological problems, it was quite a surprise to see new what look like LED light fixtures being installed. And as a bonus, they were designed in a double helix, the shape of DNA, except for the lack of the paired nucleotide bases between the two strands in four different colors (a necessity). OK, so they didn't consult with a biologist, but it does solve the bulb/energy/decorative problem with more imagination than usual. We gots a whole aging building of bandaid fixes. Good old low bid planning.