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Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs
While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil, the world's largest retailer has committed to get compact fluorescent lightbulbs into 100 million homes this year. CFLs are found in only 6% of households today. These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use. Wal-Mart seems determined to use its marketing prowess to do what hasn't successfully been done in the CFL's 25-year history: to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.
Good move by Wallmart.
I'll assume the extra cost vs regular bulbs is just a happy side effect? That said, I buy 'em because they last longer.
...does it take to change your light bulbs?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
They're doing this for the environment. Not because it's a profitable business to sell billions of fluorescent light bulbs.
So they make lots of money up front on light bulbs—money they can invest and earn returns on—instead of a little money all along. Plus, if Wal-Mart uses their buying power to get these light bulbs for pennies on the dollar and make more money off of them at the cash register, plus get to use "We're environmentally friendly!" in their ads, they stand to greatly profit from this move.
I'm not seeing how this makes them any less evil. If they sell the bulbs for less profit, then I'd say maybe a little less evil. (Which I assume they're not, correct me if I'm wrong. TFA is a registration site.)
It seems to me that the only people who are less evil are the people spending a lot of money up front to buy the bulbs, not the store that's selling them. And even then, since the bulbs are cheaper to use in the long run, even that's debatable. I switched to these bulbs throughout my house years ago, and I've never had to replace one, and my power bill went down pretty dramatically.
"While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil"
What is that? Sure, the majority of people don't like Wal-Mart, but why do you feel the need to mention it in an article where Wal-Mart is doing something good?
As for the article it's mostly a "duh" thing. It's main points seem to be that Wal-Mart's trying to sell a lot of these bulbs, the people who make money off of incandescents don't like it, and then it goes into the history of the light bulb.
I'm glad Wal-Mart's doing this, too many people refuse to buy them, if Wal-Mart does what they always do (cheap) then their plan should work and power consumption should drop.
((Why do I see myself losing Karma here...?))
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Is this a big surprise? CFL bulbs may cost more up front but they are still only a few dollars each. (Cheap.) Notice that WalMart didn't have any special emphasis on these bulbs before they were proven on the market and being made by many companies. If WalMart is pushing them now (aside from the PR benefits) it is probably because they will make more money selling them than regular bulbs.
and i do hate to admit it - but with their buying power this really could actually help drop the cost of these sorts of lights for everyone.
in any case, good for wal-mart. this, along with that $4 RX deal they've started (in some areas? dunno if it's company-wide yet), and we've got a few small steps in the right direction. now if only wal-mart would use it's buying power to get a good deal on gas...
I've found that replacing my 100watt bulbs with the equivalent in CFLs was ok, but light coming from them somehow seemed dimmer due to it being a colder temperature light. What I would like to see is really bright CFLs, like 150W equivalent, which would use about 30W. I think this would encourage people to buy them more because as well as only using 30% of the electricity they also get bulbs that produce 50% more light, not to mention the immediate wow factor of having brighter bulbs. Unfortunately things seem to be going the other way, as at my local store I can now only buy 18W CFLs.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Haven't had to change a bulb all year long.
I even changed the bulbs outside around my house, and installed some solar powered LED lighting.
I hear that there are LED based light bulbs coming that use even less power and last longer than CFL. Maybe I'll switch to those in a year or two.
When will these things become dimmable? Or get good LED "bulbs" dimmable? I've got dimmer switches in 4 rooms of my house which means I'm not able to use these things there. I do have a few elsewhere in the house, and I'd love to use them exclusively, but they don't freakin' work in some things. If they don't freakin work, I don't freakin use them there...
I'm more than happy to pay more for something I like. If a fluorescent bulb works the best and costs more than I'm more than happy to buy it. If an incandescent works the best then I'll buy that even if it costs more. Isn't that why people usually pay more if they have a choice? It's because they prefer something. Right now I prefer incandescents because they have a better white spectrum and they don't require warm-up time. The fluorescents have a dull spectrum and require warm-up time. Cost is the last decision point.
Now don't be silly, if the incandescent cost $1,000,000 and the fluorescent was $12 then obviously cost would be a primary decision point - duh!
It all depends on what the bulbs sell for, and whether they will fit in every place that a normal bulb goes. Yes, that's correct, sometimes they don't fit.
If they sell those compact energy saving light bulbs for 99 cents, hey, I'll bulb (although not from them). If they sell if for $5+, it's not worth it, especially since you throw them away before they're dead (yes, dimming is a huge problem over the lifetime). Some stores do have sales on them, but it really matters as to what brand. Shop smart, and do the math.
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night.
most people (me included) can hear the annoying high pitched hum of most flourescent lights plus the UV light that's excessively emitted makes people's skin look uglier. I prefer computer monitor light :) And for rooms without computers, there's just no beating LED lights. They take WAAAAAAAY less power and are just plain cooler. But I suppose Walmart isn't cool or wise enough to know that.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
We've just gotten a couple recently to try them out.
Positives.. well everyone knows the supposed positives. The bulb near my computer is on 24-7 because someone is generally using it 24-7, so I'm waiting to see whether it lives up to the claims. (I think I assumed it would last 6 months or a year at this rate)
Negatives... the thought of having mercury gas a few feet bothers me. Why, after figuring out just how bad mercury is, are we putting the stuff in more products that can expose people and especially children to it?
When I actually do turn it off and several hours turn it back on, it seems to be much dimmer at first. It definitely seems less bright than a normal 60-watt (which is what this one is rated to replace) It's adequate for my computer area.
There are 3 other bulbs in my house currently. Two in the kitchen which lights it well enough. One in the living room but it's less than satisfactory as well. Perhaps simply because we need more lights in there.
If any of them are still working by next december (or well if they even last 6 months) we will probably replace the majority of bulbs (except some which are on dimmers) with them.
One of these days I'd like to try the LED bulbs though.
Wal-Mart started this at least as early as last summer. The main reason I'm using these light bulbs is because last summer I came across a promotional display in their store. They were offering these bulbs at great prices, an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm slowly converting all my bulbs. When one of the old style bulbs burns out, I replace it with a compact flourescent.
This is just smart. Car companies do it too. They sell to people who want fuel economy. If a car company could make a powerful safe car that ran for 500 miles on 1 gallon of gas, they'd do it.
Walmart has no vested interest selling electricity or energy. Since CFLs are more expensive up front, they get a greater slice of profits. The more expensive the item, the larger profit margin. Warmart is still a company that's only interested in profits, and I'm not ready to slap the saintly tag on them, but this is purely capitalism at it's best. The invisible hand will see where the profits are and follow the money, and when it comes to light, the money is in saving energy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs contain mercury. Most localities are not prepared to intercept this waste, so the net result is more mercury pollution, not less. Burning coal to generate electricity disperses mercury into the air, but widespread use of compact fluorescent bulbs will not save enough electricity to offset the increased mercury pollution unless the mercury is recovered when the bulbs die.
I've seen the master documents behind this and Wal-Mart is planning to halt global warming only so they can sell over-priced heaters and bulky knit turtle necks designed by Al Gore and made by sweatshop labor. And make the cheap laborers sweat even more with the heaters and turtle necks even though it remains quite cool outside.
Three in a fixture on a dimmer, the ones that I never use, can't use those in a dimmer, plus two in the bathroom. Turning the ones in the bathroom on heats up the mirror just above the dew point making it easier to shave without leaving towl streaks. All the rest are compact florecents.
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Sorry for the typo. I wish slashdot had a way to edit within the first 3 minutes if there are no other comments as of yet. "hey, I'll bulb" = "hey, I'll buy"
Nice to see at least some effort for energy efficiency, even if its Wal-Mart. I've been using CFC bulbs like this for 2yrs now and they are great. I'm guessing it will probably be about 20yrs before LED bulbs become cheap enough and powerful enough to replace 100w bulbs in our homes.
:p ).
I'd like to see the US Govt support the 1 Watt-Standby Power Initiative, the way Europe is now doing so.
I'd also like to see any new houses/buildings required to use solar power cells or solar furnaces. Especially if you are in the Sun Belt. I know they aren't "clean" to create but we have to start somewhere, the technology is here, we can't wait for it to be perfect.
While I'm at it, why don't we require any city with a population over 500,000 to have a mandatory recycling program.
One thing that has also never made sense to me is why so many houses in the Western US don't have basements. Its hotter in the SouthWest than anywhere else in the Nation.
Any government official can feel free to steal these ideas, I can't do anything with them, I have no power (pun not intended
I get mine through second hand retailers such as Building 19. or through special discount programs.
Sadly, I find that they do not always last as long as the warranty says, and returning a discounted broken bulb is not worth the price.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
- they still have that deathly white sterilizing glow that traditional fluorescent lights do
- they take 60 seconds to achieve maximum brightness, which means that by the time you've found your clothes in the closet, the lights are finally bright
- on the flip side, you can't use them with a dimmer switch, so if you want to achieve mood lighting, you can't
We're going to relegate these bulbs to the garage and stick with incandescents: we'd rather pay the electric bills for lighting we enjoy. Is is just us? Do most people just not notice the difference in lighting, or are they willing to put up with it for the cost savings? (Yes, we bought two different brands: GE and HomeBest. Similar.)From TFA:
Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice president for strategy and sustainability:
"We start with the premise, that customers make good choices."
I was already used to buying CF bulbs at Wal-Mart. But now they've switched their entire product line. I went to buy one of their new bulbs, but ended up with a stark cool-white that contrasts with all of the warm white CF bulbs in my house. I ended up trashing them.
I'm going to have to take a closer look when I go back to Wal-Mart, but I hope that they put some effort into marking which ones are:
1] Instant On
2] Cool White vs Warm White
These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use
Don't let the marketing fool you, I don't see any comparison with LED bulbs. This is probably because they know there is none.
The retailer is determined to push energy-saving light bulbs with the help of some unlikely partners.
Even when you factor in that LED lights cost a little more to buy, don't you actually save more money on your power bill and have longer lasting bulbs if you use LED lights? LED bulbs such as the ones shown here claim to be able to use the same light socket. In addition to the useful facts listed on the page here's another tidbit directly from the page:
National Energy Savings:
If every U.S. household replaced just one standard 60 watt bulb with a CC Vivid LED bulb, we could save 24,184,400,000 watts or 24,184.4 mega (million) watts per day.
National savings information based on 103,000,000 households with an average use of 4 hrs per day per house. Based on gross watts.
Go ask - women do not like the light they throw off.
My entire apartment, save the kitchen and bathroom, uses dimmer switches. Most of my lamps use 3-way bulbs, which with incandescents made it easy to use one lamp to either read by or light an entire room. Has anyone seen CF bulbs that can do either of those useful functions?
to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.
Why is this seemingly logical proposition such a hard sell? Because we are so used to being scammed!
Pay more now, save in the long run! What happens in general across all types of products is that I pay more now, then it breaks, the company goes out of business, tastes change, it is found to be harmful, etc.
Not to spread FUD, but I bought a bunch of CFLs a few years ago, and found that:
In short, I got totally bamboozled on the deal, thoroughly pissed off, and there's no way I'm going to trust Walmart that things are better now. Nope. I'm going to pay 30 cents a bulb for cheap chinese bulbs that incidentally last longer than the expensive name brands at the grocery store.
P.S. They were from a reputable manufacturer, cost a lot of money and I didn't abuse them in any way.
I've been using CFC bulbs like this for 2yrs now and they are great.
Are you trying to single-handedly be responsible for global warming?
I laughed out loud. Nice job.
I became hooked on incandescent ones. They make home, very inviting and livable in. Very comfortable. Yellowish glow of fluorescents just doesn't cut it. I'd wait until full range ones are sold. They are hard to find, and most full range ones, are just extra white. I guess it'll be alright for shed and outside lights.
Most of the supermarkets I've waked into recently (in Australia) don't have any of the "normal bulbs". I've been gradually working them in to my house, but it's very strange when one bulb comes on instantly, and the other takes half a second to light up.
Finally a win/win for the company, consumer and environment, unlike the usual win/screw you situation. Of course this is profitable for them, plus free publicity to boot. It is also profitable to everyone who buys them, they cost a little more at the counter but save a significant amount of your power bill and last longer. Everybody wins, yet Wal-Mart is evil for this? A strange world we live in.
People don't buy CFL's because they:
1) Don't look as good. Even the "warm" CFLs aren't nearly as comfortable to look at as an incandescent bulb.
2) Are generally incompatible with dimmers (there are some dimmer-capable CFLs, but they're few and far between)
3) Are ugly as sin in any fixture where the bulb is visible.
I find that with my solar powered walkway lights, CF porchlights and the 1KW sodium (security) lamp over the driveway, I can afford to completely prevent my neighbors' kid from using the telescope he got for Christmas.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
cfl contain mercury. household hazard as well as a junkyard pollutant.
Could people please just get this silly dumbed down internets word out of their tubes?
A much better use of my money has been to buy *real* flourescent ballast and good old fashioned flourescent tubes. The oldest ballast came with the house and is 30 years old. The oldest ballast I've installed is 12 years and counting. The tube bulbs last nearly 10 years. The CFL stuff, on the other hand, is junk.
The CFL products need to cost *more* and put more quality into the mini electronic ballast so that it lasts as long as the bulb. Or maybe this isn't really possible, and the only reliable way to do flourescent is with magnetic ballast. I've noticed a similar problem with LCD panels. I have an LCD monitor sitting behind my desk with perfectly good a LCD and perfectly good flourescent backlights - but the electronic ballast (high voltage supply) is shot (died the day after 1 year warranty expired). I've replaced the ballast, and the monitor runs another 6 months before the high voltage dies again. After a while, you can't even buy replacement ballast for the LCD because they use some funky custom job for every model. What a waste. I can't bring myself yet to throw out a perfectly good LCD monitor for lack of a decent ballast. I'm sitting at a CRT because it has kept working for 7 years.
I'm a big fan of CFLs, but they don't seem to produce as good a light as regular incandescent bulbs. I have a teeny tiny living room in my apartment (split in half to make a 3rd bedroom) and 1 60W incandescent bulb lights it up nicely. However, the 13W CFL I replaced it with doesn't light it up as well, and it produces what I can only refer to as a more "yellowish" light than the incandescent does. that could be in regards to the type of bulb I picked up, but it was the only type of bulb home depot seemed to sell (in multiple different size packs).
These bulbs contain mercury.
Pure metalic mercury isn't all that bad. We don't absorb it all that well. Romans used to drink it as a supposed cure for baldness.
Out in the environment though, there are bacteria that process mercury. The mercury ends up in a super-toxic form called dimethyl-mercury. This washes out into the ocean. Critters get mercury into them. Their bodies concentrate it. As critters eat other critters, the mercury gets way more concentrated. We happen to think the larger critters, such as tuna and swordfish, are quite yummy.
Mercury does nasty things to your mind and to your immune system, among others.
Walmart ruins most meat by injecting 5% to 15% of some weird "broth" to cheat on the weight. I guess they couldn't ruin the fish that way, but now they've managed to ruin the fish too! Damn them to Hell. Fish used to be good to eat.
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
Indeed...
However, I think many people would be upset at a company that pays its employees as if the company never made a profit when it in fact does fairly well...
In Texas, there is a store named "H.E.B" , (Howard Butt). Its prices are similar to walmart, but slightly higher... But the culture inside the store is entirely different. The store is actually clean, the employees not worn out, and the whole thing is a privately owned company!
Profit+Greed = Evil
Narragansett Electric (part of National Grid) has been offering these through retail chains in Rhode Island and Massachusetts for a VERY low price, anywhere from $0.50 to $0.99 a bulb depending on the retailer. It may still seem expensive when you can buy a 4pack of regular light bulbs for $0.99, but when you consider they lost 4-5 times longer (8000-10000 hours vs 2000 hours) and use a quarter of the electricity, it really adds up. There are CFLs that are dimmable and 3way also that use less electricity, but they generally cost a lot more ($5.99 is the price I've been seeing) so I don't know if it's worth it at that price.
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Given that profit margins normally work on percentages, that should roughly octuple 28% of their profit margin on lightbulbs.
They should be making 2.96 times as much selling light bulbs, of course they want to push this.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
My Girlfriend is what I might consider a bit of a hippy.
Her brother is definitely what I would consider a hippy.
They (of course) introduced me to these lights a while back. My girl has them all over her condo, and I found out from her (and from seeing them in action) that there are different color lights available. She has the typical white light in her closets, but there are some more yellow bulbs out there too that give more natural light.
I have them all over my condo. Bathroom, living room, dining room, and basement. I keep my house a bit cooler, and there is about a 1/2 delay between switch and turn on. Also, there is about 15 seconds of 'warm up' time where the lights get brighter. I may have older gen bulbs, but I have yet to have an issue with them, and I can tell you that they've just about paid for themselves already (I've had them since summer). I love these things.
And parent is right since the LED would instantly put off customers that are thinking 'cheap light.' It's quite typical... And I'd know, I was like that. I could easily see CFLs being a gateway light though. If the CFL works as advertised, and the end customers are happy, or even *really happy,* 5-6 years down the road they might be keen on switching to an LED, even if it's $40. I'd rather see the price on something like that come down a bit further. That might happen too, especially if the manufacturers can find enough demand from the flashlight industry to start really producing them.
It's not that Walmart is suddenly "good" for selling compact fluorescent bulbs.
It's that compact fluorescent bulbs are now irredeemably evil.
The world has been dying for this sort of energy-reduction initiative, and when it comes along, it's from Wal-Mart... This reminds me of when PETA wanted everyone to go out and buy a BK Veggie sandwich. Just a whole big ethical mess.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Whereas I've been converting my bulbs to flourescent from incandescent, I have a major problem with Wal-Mart once again strong-arming the public to do Wal-Mart's bidding, when it should be the other way around. This is no different than Wal-Mart's previous tactics of {MOB VOICE}Hey, if you wanna sell your music CDs youz gotta get rid of da nasty lyrics. An' if you wanna sell your DVDs ... well ... you gotta go through the headaches and expense of offering a full-screen version for us to force on our clientele. If youz got a problem with that ... well ... dat's your problem to figure out.{/MOB VOICE} This time, the target seems to be the customers, not the manufacturers.
As I said, I'm converting to flourescent replacements from incandescent bulbs, but at least it's of my own choosing. It's not Wal-Mart's place to force their customers to buy what they want them to buy. They're supposed to be responding to the demands of their customers, not vice versa. Regardless of whether or not this will be a good thing in the long run, Wal-Mart is pulling another "You're too f**king stupid to know what's best for you" tactic. One more reason for me to shop at local, mom-and-pop stores, even if I end up paying more.
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This is basically the same news item originally covered in the September 2006 issue of FastCompany Magazine and reported to Slashdot in late August.
I have a bunch of LED lights, and they are not a replacement for CFLs or regular light bulbs quite yet: too dim and not really full spectrum.
I've been pushing these things on everyone who will listen for almost ten years now.
It's amazing to think that in all that time, I've only lost three bulbs. Two of them burned out after 6+ years of regular use. One of them met an early demise thanks to a kinetic incident involving a toddler and a toy.
The initial investment may seem high (and when I started buying them, it was easy to spend around $20 on a single bulb) but over the years you more than get your money back.
The only real gotchas I've found is that they don't work at all with dimmer switches, and they may require a warm-up period if you use them outside and it is quite cold out. Indoors they are instant-on now. The old ones used to hum, flicker, warm-up to full brightness, etc. but those problems have pretty much been overcome years ago.
On the upshot, a relatively small desktop lamp can usually accommodate an incredibly bright CF bulb. To achieve similar brightness with a conventional bulb would no doubt destroy the lamp. If you like to read by a strong light source, you ought to try this.
No skunk smell coming from symbolset's basement. Nope. Wouldn't even suggest it.
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I cut it open and found that two resistors had melted at quite a high temperature. This was a Feit 13 watt Conserv-Energy unit.
Until this happened, I was quite happy with the Feit bulbs - they start fast, have a decent color, and fit in all my fixtures! Here's the schematic of the unit that died - the resistors are on the bases of the two transistors.
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That's the only reason anybody has basements.
You have to put the footing of the foundation below the frost line.
Once you've done that it's a no brainer to build a basement.
You think the builders anywhere are more altruistic?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Here in California (east bay), the local Albertson's has 4-packs for $1. Yup, $1. A label on them says they are subsidized PG&E of Cali. I bought a ton, and gave some of gifts.
I've been using these since 1997, when it was an awesome deal to be able to get some for $8 each instead of $15 at Sears.
They have been wonderful. Pretty much everything in my house is flourescent; there are a couple of exceptions, but very few. They come in a variety of different color temperatures, and if you mix a couple of different ones, you can get a very bright and vivid light.
I've had a couple that started dimming from old age. For instance, the 20W we put in our kitchen overhead light when we moved in, in 1997, takes about five minutes to warm up; I just can't be bothered to replace it yet. Lifespan seems to run between two and seven years, depending on usage patterns. Our power bill went down by about $80/month (3-story house, plus basement, lots of night owls) over the months we spent replacing everything that burned out with CFL.
Overall, absolutely excellent, and I'm a big fan. Now that you can get small ones cheap, they're even better; the days where CFLs were way bigger than ordinary bulbs are long gone. I like the light better, and the money savings are excellent, to say nothing of durability; I haven't had to buy light bulbs in over a year, despite this being a large house with lots of people.
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That's in addition to the fact that they're a lot warmer than the fluorescent lights I've experienced in the past.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
One of the main criticisms (by consumers) of the CF bulbs is that they're funny-looking, which leads people to prefer the more familiar-looking incandescent bulbs. Why couldn't CF bulbs be made with a frosted outer bulb-shaped shell, to hide the funny-looking part? Sure, it's functionally pointless, but that's hasn't stopped marketers from adding nonfunctional door-close buttons to elevators, or super-saturated gaudy dyes to breakfast cereals, or breast implants to perfectly ordinary women (you'll have to google that one yourself).
Oh wait a minute...it already exists. Why don't they just sell those then?
Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way.
After shelling out a bunch of bucks to silence my PC. The noise from the CFL drive me nuts.
The cost per BTU of heat from your gas furnace is probably a lot less than the cost per BTU of heat coming from your incandescent light fixtures. (If it wasn't, you'd be better off ditching your gas furnace and just using electric baseboard heaters.) So by using more efficient light fixtures and running your furnace to make up the heat, you're still saving money. How much depends on the cost of gas and electricity where you live, but if you google around and find an electric-heat versus gas-heat calculator, it'd be pretty trivial to figure it out.
It's not quite as much money as you'd save in Florida, where in addition to the electricity that CFLs save, you also save the cooling cost of moving the heat they produce out of your home, but the savings is still there.
Also, unless you have a house with very strange lighting fixtures, I'm going to bet most of the light bulbs are probably at head-level or higher: that's not where you want your heat to be produced. At best, most of it is probably rising up to the ceiling where it's not a major contributor to the felt warmth in the room. I suspect a far greater percentage of the heat produced by incandescent bulbs is wasted, versus the heat produced by an appliance that's designed to warm the room, simply by virtue of their location.
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My only gripe with these is that the noise they put on the power line seems to interfere with X10 home automation systems.
I have replaced all the incandescent lights in my house with CFLs light bulbs for over 4 years now. And in that time I see 2 problems with CFLs. 1. CFLs indeed last longer than incandescent lights, but NOT as long as what they were advertised on the packages. There were enough of these gone bad that I stated to keep them just to track their cost/benefits (yes, they are name-brand bulbs such as GE and Sylvania). I however keep these dead bulbs outside of my house because of the second problem with CFLs. 2. All CFLs contain mercury and should not be disposed with our regular garbage. When these CFLs bulbs dies, they seem to crack at the base of the glass tube...letting out the stuff that we call Hg vapors. This can't be good! Does anyone know how if the mercury in these light bulbs is harmful, given that there are more of them inside our house?
First time I saw one for sale. I bought it. Put it in the most used and most switched socket I had. It lasted 11 years! Use them everywhere except with dimmers.
NB: Contains mercury! Like your LCD panel light. Take it to your household toxic waste centre.
Astro
"The cost per BTU of heat from your gas furnace is probably a lot less than the cost per BTU of heat coming from your incandescent light fixtures."
Actually with fuel prices so high, electric heat is break-even, possibly even cheaper, than gas or oil heat. I did the math last year (BTUs per KWh, BTUs per gal fuel, considering furnace efficiency, etc), and electric was slightly cheaper for me. Bummer that replacing my gas furnace is itself a major expense, so the cost benefit would take many years to balance out.
LEDs are here. Even MythBusters did an episode on lights and costs. In it, they created a testing device to simulate the abuse a light takes turning on/off with it cycling every 2 minutes. After 2 weeks in that, only the LED lights still worked, traditional, florescent, and CFL's all stopped working by that point, with traditional going first, the regular florescents and the CFL's going approx the same time (the edge went to the CFL's). The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption as well as used the lest amount of energy to turn on, whereas the traditional florescents had a 7x power spike for turn on, and the traditionals had a 1.5x spike, even the CFL's had a power spike. Everything says to use LED lights now.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The amount of mercury released into the air because of burning coal to make electricity is far larger (about a ton per year in Oregon) than the amount of mercury in the compact fluorescent bulbs. The bulbs use 1/4 the electricity, which means 1/4 the mercury released because of providing electricity for lighting.
Somehow, you got two different types of crappy bulb.
Most brands include both crappy and non-crappy types.
You can get CF bulbs with that icky yellow incandescent
look if you really want them. Ever notice the GE Reveal
bulb though? That's an incandescent bulb with a blue
coating to make it more like a nice CF bulb! Next time
you are out at noon on a clear day, please note the
color of natural sunlight. It's like a CF bulb.
60 seconds is an awfully long time. Mine are instant
as far as I can tell.
You can use a dimmer, if you buy the CF bulbs that
are meant for dimmers. Read the labels next time.
BTW, the cheap CF bulbs also flicker at 50 or 60 Hz,
depending on your country. The good CF bulbs are up
in the tens of kHz, far beyond what can affect humans.
(the very fastest nerve cycle time is 1 kHz)
I changed all my regular to CFL - and electric bill monthly is now only $19!!!
and $15 goes to the transmission line !!!
Beat that !!
Not going over well in my house.
The crushed remnants of five incad bulbs take up less space than the (much less crushable) ballast of a CFL.
:)
And, as others have said, you're supposed to recycle them.
But you're on other than that.
Don't forget your computer.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
A colder light will generally appear brighter since it is close to neutral. Outdoor daylight varies but on a clear day is usually in the realm of 5500-6500k. Compared to a normal incandescent, which is around 2800k, is very warm by comparison. The normal problem with fluorescents is that their colour spectrum sucks. They don't have a very even distribution of power across the light spectrum, at least compared to the sun and incandescents. However, you can buy much better fluorescents if you look. The term used is generally "full spectrum". Also they may talk about color index or CRI or the like and it'll be above 90 (incandescents are 100 by definition). These generally seem much brighter than normal ones as they have better colour spectrum. Only downside is they tend to be more expensive, like $12 per bulb.
o rescent_32_ctg.htm). I've not done much shopping around so there's probably cheaper options out there, but I buy infrequently enough as to not care, and I like their lights. Very neutral light (cold compared to incandescents) and they claim quite a high CRI.
I personally buy mine from BlueMax (http://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/compact_flu
I think if you pick up a good CFL, you'll find that it's not the temperature that's the problem but the spectrum. However, if you want warm CFLs, they are easy to get. Check any Home Depot or similar store, and they should have them for sale. That's what I used prior to discovering the full spectrum variety (which I can only find online).
As long as we're explaining general viewpoints for karma, here's how I see things:
RIAA is evil. They're suing their customers.
Microsoft is evil. They lock people into their products and make my job difficult with obscure licensing requirements and feature omissions.
SCO is evil. Sure, UNIX(r) was great and all, but we got over it years ago.
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service. Just like Newegg, Amazon, or any of most of the other faceless online entities who are struggling to charge as little as possible in an attempt to get ahead. This might hurt the local specialty merchants, but then, so does Newegg limit the market of a brick-and-mortar specialty PC parts store, who stands no chance at all at matching the pricing, availability, or product diversity such a beastly online merchant.
That said, I'm an informed sort of fellow, and I don't really want to pay someone to hold my hand while I make a purchase, anyway. The decisive lack of knowledgeable sales representatives at Wal-Mart and Newegg is, to me, a clear advantage, because I don't have to pay extra for supposedly-clued people to stand around and bullshit me.
Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop.
And so, at the end of the day: I could either pay less for those cheap Chinese goods, or I could pay more. Obviously, I'd rather pay less. Just like I'd rather get a raise, than continue toiling away undercompensated. Just like I'd rather sit, than stand. And I'd rather lay down, than sit. And so on, and so forth.
So now, they're making a concerted effort to boost CFL lighting, so as to cause people to spend less money on electric lighting instead of more money on more money on electric lighting. A boon for everyone. Cool!
Kid-proof tablet..
You may have to look a little harder to find them in the compact (screw-in) styles, but there are a lot of color temperatures available in fluorescent bulbs. The "cool white" (CW) that you are probably imagining is one of the most common ones, but it is by no means the only color available.
Typical CW fluorescents actually produce a slightly greenish light, not blue (and if you look at a spectrometer's output, you'll see a big spike around 550 nm, which is green), and have a correlated color temperature somewhere around 4000K. I say "somewhere around" because, since they are really producing a number of fairly distinct wavelenths rather than a continuous distribution, they don't have an exact black-body radiator equivalent. But the general consensus is that it's somewhere around 3400-4200K (depending on phosphor), with a greenish cast. It's this green cast that's the real killer, and makes CW fluorescent light so unflattering to most people's skin; the color temperature itself isn't the major issue.
If you want warmer (lower color temp) light, it is possible to buy "warm white" fluorescents. They have a correlated temperature of somewhere around 2950-3000K, or about the same as a 100W bulb. To most people, it looks a lot like an incandescent. They're still spectroscopically different (again, fluorescent produces peaks and valleys at various wavelengths, as will anything that's not actually heated to several thousand degrees), but they're designed so that the human eye perceives them as a warm 3000K source, rather than the usual green.
To be honest, I think "warm" lighting is vastly overrated. I agree that the CW fluorescents are obnoxious, but what I discovered is a far better option than trying to approximate the 3000K yellow glow of a bulb, was to jump up in color temperature, rather than trying to go down. Personally I've found that the high-temperature (5000K) "Daylight" fluorescents are the most pleasant. They don't have the green cast that the 3200K CW ones do, but they also don't have the false yellow tinge that the 'warm' ones do. They really are the closest thing to sunlight, if you get the right bulbs. (Some people also find them very handy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, in fact they're the key component of those pricey therapeutic lamps.)
Until I changed to 5000K lights, I never realized how yellow incandescents made everything appear. Walking from a room lit with the high-temp fluorescents to incandescent bulbs is like going from the outside into a cave; it's really striking. Rather than trying to produce crummy imitations of what are really a limitation of incandescent bulbs (their low color temperature), I think fluorescent light manufacturers should really be extolling their high-color-temperature, "full-spectrum" bulbs, because once you've lived with them, there's no going back. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while to rid people of the idea that 'high color temperature' means the cruddy, unflattering, green light they've grown accustomed to in office buildings and other institutional locations.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"reading the internets"? am i missing out on something here? i've only seen one of them.
At 6AM in the morning, the delay is a welcome "feature".
Yep, you're quite right. I blame a brain spasm. Landfill was something that occurred to me just before posting; I threw it in. Bad idea. I humbly stand corrected.
Yes, they should be recycled... will they be? There's the rub.
I agree LED's aren't quite ready for prime time yet... much too hostile and cold (blue) a spectrum of light (they make CFL's look warm and bambi-like). The poster above who complained they weren't bright enough has a point; I find they're very good for directed tasks like light for reading or providing background for a room in which one is watching TV/movies. They're horrible for lighting up a room (e.g. kitchen) in which to work, especially if colors matter.
No question though, LED's (or some hybrid thereof) are the wave of the future, or so my slashdotty side says.
Good discussion.
Cheers all
Holmwood
...that can't stand these bulbs?
Fluorescent light makes everything look so stark. It's bad enough that we all have to bake under these things in our offices day in and day out, let alone allow them to creep into our homes. I don't particularly care for the inside of my home to look like a doctors office or retail store.
I just purchased a new home from a builder who installed CFLs in _ALL_ of the house's fixtures. The wave of the future, no doubt - but I for one will be phasing most of them out rather quickly for plain-old incandescents with their warm, natural light. Power bill be damned.
I'm hoping that the advances in LED lighting will cure some of these evils and someday soon render these expensive bulbs that produce ugly light obsolete.
This is great! I already get my CFL bulbs from Walmart, particularly the "Lights of America" brand which of course it made in China. Doh.
But Walmart sells them at a decent price which will only go lower if they start buying in bulk.
Most of my house is now converted over to CFLs. What convinced us was the savings we saw from things like the three-socket bathroom fixture and one hallway light. Those four bulbs cost around $12 and we saw significant drops in our power bills right off the bat. They paid for themselves in the first month. We went on to convert most of the house to these things and managed to make it through the summer with air conditioning but without the huge cost we used to see. In other words, the CFLs saved enough to nearly balance the AC cost. The house was also cooler because we didn't have hot incandescent bulbs wasting energy as heat.
In the past year, we have had none of them burn out. In a typical year, we'd have gone through dozens of incandescent bulbs so that's another couple bucks we saved.
Yeah. We're sold on the things. Well... as long as I'm buying the bulbs, we're sold on them. The bluish color does take some adjustment, I admit.
That's really the only problem point: these bulbs produce light that is different from old bulbs. Every brand -and even different types within brands- have somewhat different colors of light. You really need to shop around to find the right CFL color that you and your SO (if any) can tolerate. It can be tricky to do that without actually buying some samples, and beware that the different wattage bulbs can produce different colors. You cannot assume a "Brand A" 40-watt CFL is going to be the same as a "Brand A" 60-watt even if they're on the same shelf and have similar packaging.
Basically, it's down to buying a pack and just trying them. Once you find one you like, buy a lot of them. It may not be available next time due to all sorts of market changes. Walmart particularly changes suppliers at the drop of a hat.
The best 100W incandescent light bulbs I have found produce 1750 lumens. CFLs which are advertised as equivalent to a 100W bulb produce only, if I remember correctly, 1100 lumens, so part of the power saving is from producing less light.
Also, anyone knows what's up with ceiling light sockets that only accept 60W bulbs?
All I can say is you have incredibly bad luck (or are buying from a bad supplier). I've been buying from people like Phillips (no great outfit) since about '92 and I've still got some 13-year-old bulbs (and ballasts) going.
It seems likely to me that you've got a power problem if your LCD monitor electronic ballast is frying as well. I'd say check with the local power company, get them to check transients, spikes, dropouts, phase issues, etc. I had a similar (though obviously less severe given that my bulbs were surviving) problem and it was repeatedly frying my TV. Power company fixed it and I put a UPS on the TV.
Holmwood
I recall reading an article a few weeks ago that noted Walmart was planning to migrate to more efficient lighting in all of their new stores. They're primary concern being money saved from lower electric bills not ya, know, earth. Could this new green campaign be related? ie, We'll promote the hell out of your lights, if you cut us a break on new light for our stores?
Let's face it, this is Walmart. If anything "green" happens at Walmart is usually some crazy accidental consequence of trying to make a buck or censor a 50 Cent CD.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
http://www.centennialbulb.org/photos.htm It's a bulb in a Livermore/Pleasanton fire house. It has a carbon filament that is much thicker than modern bulbs and also burns much cooler/darker. (105 years old)
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Actually with fuel prices so high, electric heat is break-even, possibly even cheaper, than gas or oil heat. I did the math last year (BTUs per KWh, BTUs per gal fuel, considering furnace efficiency, etc), and electric was slightly cheaper for me. Bummer that replacing my gas furnace is itself a major expense, so the cost benefit would take many years to balance out.
If this is really the case where you live, the immediate solution isn't to go ripping out your furnace, but just to supplement your gas heat with electric spot heat. You can go down to WalMart (or the socially responsible big-box retailer of your choice) and pick up a 1.5kW oil-filled electric radiator for about $50, last time I checked. Prices might be higher now that it's winter. Places like Job Lot often have them on sale for even less.
But if you take one of those and park it bedroom, or better yet get a few of them and place them strategically throughout the house, you can probably keep your gas furnace from running on all but the coldest days, and still be comfortable. Or heck, get one with a thermostat and set it higher than your gas furnace's setting, and you'll effectively have an electrically-heated home (probably requiring more than one, depending on the size of your place). The bottom line is: there's no need to have a single energy source for your heating needs. You can easily have electric rads with a gas furnace as backup, just like many people in northern New England use wood for heat, but still have an oil furnace as backup. Diversification is probably a good thing in any event, economics aside, and electric heat is one of the easiest things to add, because you already have the "fuel" coming into your house.
Back to the light bulb issue, using electric radiators is still probably preferable to heating using incandescent light bulbs, because the heater will sit closer to the floor (heating more evenly), and will be cheaper in the long run as heat-producing appliances -- a $50 heater that produces 1.5kW of heat and lasts for years is a lot cheaper per watt-hour than a $1 bulb that produces 100W and lasts for 1,000 or so hours. Plus, you're not contributing nearly as much waste, and all the externalities that it implies.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wal*Mart does more for poor people than every government welfare program. Maybe that's why liberals hate them so much. They're addicted to failure and lip service.
Apologies, sir, but I have LED based indoor lights.
I am quite confident in telling you that if you've got an LED bulb that you paid $50 for, and it consumes 5-9 watts of electricity, then it is going to be nowhere near as bright as a 100W incandescent bulb. LED technology will get there, but it isn't there today.
I record every light bulb used: brand/model, where installed, when installed, how long it lasted before being replaced.
The most common brand of bulb used was "HomeBrand 100w" of which we've used 25 with an average lifespan of 510 days. Next most common was "OSRAM/Mirabella 1000hr 100w" of which we've used 12 with an average lifespan of 209 days. These figures can't really be used to judge the relative quality of the brands (the purpose to which I originally wrote the database) because the lifespan of the bulb seems most directly related to how much it's used, and I can't record that. We have bulbs which are little used - only for a minute or two at a time, which have been with us since the beginning. And bulbs in heavy use (day and night) have lasted as little as 43 days.
About 3 years ago I started replacing all incandescent bulbs with flourescent equivalents. Each time an incandescent bulb burned I put a flourescent back in its place. Since that time I have replaced only one flourescent: the light in my study, which gets the heaviest use.
So the flourescents are a big win for me. I used to be replacing 1-2 bulbs a week.
Recently the NSW Government had a scheme whereby electricity retailers would receive kickbacks by promoting flourescent bulb use. The result to consumers was a free 6-pack of flourescent lights. I got a pack, but it came after I had replaced almost all the incandescents. Consequently I still have 4 flourescents awaiting installation. I heard that the take-up of the free flourescent bulbs was so big that more free bulbs have been delivered than the estimated number of sockets in NSW, likely due to people receiving multiple boxes.
The freebies are GE, and they take a second to turn on. That's disconcerting, as all my other flouros are Philips and they turn on immediately.
There are three possibilities:
1) You've been extremely unlucky and have gotten a number of duds in a row. Duds are about as common as any other consumer manufacturing industry, which is to say not more than about 1-3%.
2) You have a wiring problem. CFLs are sensitive to getting a low voltage or feedback on the line from things like microwave ovens. You might check your circuits, because this is the sort of thing that can also damage electronics in general.
3) You turn your lights off too much. CFLs have a limited number of power-cycles. They're cool enough and they save enough power that it's best to just leave them on as long as you're awake. If you normally have a bulb on about two hours a day, you'll use the same energy having it on twelve hours a day. You'll also have the convenience and safety of a better-lit home.
If you're the kind of person who turns lights off every time you leave a room you'll wear them faster, especially in a multi-person household. Sorry to stereotype, but that's exactly the kind of personality I'm sensing from reading your post. (Un)fortunately, almost all Americans are not this kind of person. CFLs are a very good response to the way most Americans work. They're already leaving bulbs on twelve hours a day. For them, this saves a lot of money.
So if I were you I'd check my circuits to protect the other stuff I have, and if they're fine, I'd do the same thing you're doing. Don't buy them, they don't fit you.
Fiet bulbs seem especially bad at this. My father pronounces them "Pffft" as in the sizzling sound they make when they fizzle and die. Generally I've had fairly decent luck with CFLs and have replaced many of the lights in my house with them. They're especially cheap here, with 4 packs of 100 watt equivalent bulbs at the grocery store (not Walmart) costing $2.
The only drawbacks are that they don't work as well in cold temperatures and some of them take a while to reach full brightness. Also, you need to check the color temperature of the bulbs.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
"Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop."
And that Andrew Marc leather jacket is made in China, and it costs $400 _on sale_ (this past weekend) at Nordstrom.
It's no longer just the "cheap stuff" being made in China.
--
BMO
HomeDepot has both...
I have to return some videotapes...
1) 100 watt equivalents aren't (look at the light output printed on the package, they are ALWAYS lower output than the wattage incandescent they claim to be equivalent to).
2) They hum.
3) Don't work with dimmers.
4) Can't use them outdoors because they don't work when cold.
5) Can't use them outdoors or in bathrooms because they can't handle humidity.
6) Can't use them in enclosed fixtures.
7) Often don't fit in fixtures because they are bigger than their supposed equivalent incandescent.
9) They come on at about half brightness in a cold house, and take several minutes to reach full brightness.
10) Colors have not been standardized, so you end up with a mishmash of colors.
11) They contain mercury, and are therefor hazardous waste when they fail.
12) They claim to last longer, but the failure rate I have seen is about the same as incandescent.
13) You certainly can't replace the incandescent bulb in your oven with a compact florescent.
14) Not a point source, so they don't work well as projector bulbs.
15) Limited selection of shapes, bulbs not intended to be visible, so you can't use them in decorative fixtures (chandeliers, wall sconces, artistic fixtures etc...)
The very same Mythbusters episode said that the amount of power actually consumed during the spike was negligible since the duration is so short.
The people at WalMart are not stupid. Doubtless they have noticed this possible loss of revenue before embarking on this scheme.
I suspect that they expect to make up the loss of revenue by working both ends of the revenue chain: they'll squeeze the producers to manufacture them for less (since they'll be able to point to their commitment and say 'hey, we're going to be selling x percent of the U.S.'s CFL bulbs next year...do you want a piece of that or not?'), and because they're selling a product that people know costs more up-front, they'll be able to get away with a higher profit margin than they do on conventional bulbs.
Overall, I suspect that they'll figure out a way to make back the lost revenue. I doubt that conventional bulbs are really high-profit items for WalMart as-is. They could try to twist their suppliers' arms, but I suspect it's like squeezing blood from a stone at this point (they've had 100 years to perfect light bulb manfacturing, it's not going anywhere) -- and there's a lot of competition. Lots of places make, and more people sell, conventional light bulbs. It's hard to get a big piece of the market. At best, light bulbs are one of those products that get people in to WalMart, where they hopefully then go and buy some other things while they're at it.
With CFL bulbs, I think WalMart sees an opportunity to get in at the start of a market that still has some expansion to go. And it's when markets expand that the real opportunities for profit happen.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I went to a website and researched which bulbs have the best color reproduction, the longest life, etc etc. Then I went shopping and found out that each store only carries one brand. So I went to a bunch of stores like Home Depot, WalMart, Shaw's Supermarket, and Hannaford's Supermarket, and tried all the various brands of bulbs at home.
The bulbs I used were 60 watt bulbs. Higher wattage bulbs may give you better results, but I could not test those since the next highest wattage in CFL bulbs is generally 100 watts, and I couldn't use those in my light fixtures.
Anyway, the Home Depot brand if I remember correctly, were the worst of the lot. The "natural light" bulbs put out very dim blue light. While the "white" bulbs put out a greenish light. The WalMart brand bulbs weren't much better.
I don't rmember what brands those were, but the other two brands I got were Sylvania and GE. The GE bulbs if I remember correctly were the closest to white. But the Sylvania bulbs didn't have a delay like the GE bulbs. They did however have a pinkish hue to them. If I was going to buy a CFL I would try those two brands.
But I wasn't happy with any of the bulbs. I use regular Sylvania daylight bulbs which put out a very clean looking light that isn't too blue, and the CFL's couldn't even come close to comparing. They had delays starting up. Of the brands I tried (there maye have been one or two I forgot) the color of the light was either off, or the light just didn't "feel" right. Also the 60 watts were way dimmer than the 60 watt bulbs I have now. Also, the higher wattage bulbs you can't place inside enclosed light fixtures, which kinda makes it hard to use them in say, your kitchen. That assumes they even fit inside the light fixture too. If your light fixture is just a one foot wide dome, then they probably won't fit.
Anyway, don't bother with the WalMart bulbs if you must have CFL. Try GE or Sylvania.
They are unsuitable for use around HF radio gear due to their interference. Since I'm starting to work HF again, it means I can't use these in my shack area. Oh well. As far as pricing goes, Costco and Home Despot seem to have the best price around here. Besides, Costco's return policy is much easier than dealing with WalMart.
It'll be fine as long as Wal-Mart tells us where we can dispose of the bulbs. I changed the Xenon bulb in my car and I struggled for weeks to find a local place that could take the bulb.
The dealer changed the other one a few months back when the car was under warranty. I suspect they just threw it away.
I bought a box of 42 75W cfls and gave them away to people for xmas. There were a few people that thought I was weird, but at least 30 people thought it was a brilliant idea, and some of them are gonna do the same thing next year. On average those presents are gonna save about 500W for the next 6 years. That's about 26 MWh. Not too bad for a 140 euro investment.
johno
872835240
Wal-Mart is competing with other vendors for their customers' paychecks. In this case, it is the local electric company. Customers that use CFLs will not spend as much money paying electricity bills. Wal-Mart can safely assume that a percentage of those savings will be spent at their stores. Personally, I would love it if Wal-Mart continued to "steal" money from the electric companies by aggressively promoting energy-efficient products.
My SO hates the winter months. She says that she needs lights. We just bought 4 CFL bulbs from 1000bulbs.com. It was 2 42 W(~150W inc) and 2 55W (~240 W inc). The important thing was that I got the "color" as full spectrum. We ended up putting just one of these in the living room and the other 3 in the basement. She is now very happy. In fact, we are dropping all the halogens and remaining incandescents (we have only about 15 left).
These really make a difference in the electrical bills. Your AC will drop (but your heat may increase). But your electrical definitely goes down.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, but you're probably in the minority. Most people really don't care that much. I can't tell the difference, and none of my guests has ever said a thing.
If you think the light from a new devil bulb is going to make your house "look like a doctors office or retail store", it was beyond help already. A new light bulb does not turn a home into a Walmart.
I'm going to guess you're over 35. Don't look now, but incandescents are equally ugly. It's just that you've been around them so long, you're used to them.
Look at any area of technology ("anything invented since you were born"), and you'll see the same thing happening. Many people are the same way about CRTs, for example. "It weights 75 pounds, takes its own desk, and sucks down 150 watts, but I know in my heart that CRTs Are Better Than LCDs. Cold Dead Hands." Does anybody under 20 prefer CRTs?
There are probably old people out there who still prefer gaslight. Fortunately they'll die off, as will the incandescent people, and within a generation nobody will imagine producing light so inefficiently again.
Yes, the bulb contains mercury. But the coal and oil that we burn for electricity spits out MUCH more. And the lose mercury is not cheap to recover whereas the bulb is fairly easy to recycle.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sigh...these things are going to be dimmer than the packaging claims; many of them are, already. Bet the ballasts fail pretty fast, too. And they're going to create one hell of a disposal problem; that much mercury in landfills is going to be a quite serious toxics problem.
CFL buying guide:
Multiply the wattage of a CFL by four to get an approximate incandescent equivalent.
Recommended brands: Philips, Panasonic, Feit Electric, Technical Consumer Products. Steer clear of Lights of America, my opinion.
It surprised me how well 42w 5000K CFLs work in our kitchen in daylight--they don't look yellowish at all.
Dimming a fluorescent depends on the ballast; dimming ballasts are, alas, expensive. (Note to hardware hackers: a fluorescent lamp power supply--a "ballast"--is a current regulator which provides an initial higher-voltage pulse to strike the arc through the lamp.)
All fluorescents dim as they age; honest manufacturers state when their light output is measured.
All fluorescents age more quickly when they are turned on and off frequently.
All fluorescents have limits on their operating temperatures.
Some CFLs require vertical, vented mounting: that is, in a conventional fixture, under a lampshade. Check and make sure before you purchase.
How about cost? Singular high-bright LED's tend to be pricey. Not sure if the mass-production would reduce them that much, but they main drawbacks I've found is the cost and that they tend to be much more "directional" (i.e. the light is brightest up front) in comparison to regular bulbs.
I have just one of these -- it was sent to me as a PR tchotchke -- and I installed it as my front porch light. My girlfriend finds it to be harsh and over-bright. If anything, I think it's dimmer than the 60W it replaced. Has anyone done even informal research into this? I suppose it's not impossible...
Breakfast served all day!
Fluorescent light gives me a headache. I dont care that the incandescent bulbs are more expensive in the long run, that they might ruin the environment, etc; their color is pleasant to the eyes.
Dimmable CFLs are available: http://www.google.ca/search?q=cfL+dimmable
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'd like to see some real world (non-manufacturer) data that shows this. My experience has been that CFBs don't last nearly as long as their incandescent friends. My only evidence is anecdotal: I bought all CFBs to replace my incandies as they die. The old incandies next to the new CFBs have outlasted at least one set of CFBs. That is to say I haven't even replace all the incandescent bulbs and the new CFBs are already burning out.
The bulbs I've been using are by Lights of America, GE and Philips. They've all been used in household applications like Night Lights and Room Lights which are switched on and off at least daily.
Has anyone had the same experience? Anyone had the bulbs perform particularly well? What brands are you using?
After all, if the actual cost/BTU of heating with electricity is possibly cheaper than gas where you live, then using fewer BTUs by heating less of your house is definitely be cheaper.
Which is one real good reason not to use CFLs.
We moved into a brand-new house in July 2006. We started replacing bulbs almost as soon as we got here, completing the changeover to CFLs some time in September. Having never established a baseline by running incandescents for a year, we'll never know how much it may be saving - but comparing the power bills here (~1500 sq. ft., high-efficiency dual-fuel heat pump, extra insulation, very little tree coverage) versus our old apartment (~950 sq. ft., crappy old heat pump, hot and cold running air, no trees at all), we're pretty sure we're seeing a substantial savings. We're hardly conservative with our usage, with 6 PCs running 24/7 and such, but the power bills are downright reasonable and are less than they were in the other place.
The light output is okay... I could stand for them to be a bit brighter in some situations, but for the most part they're plenty bright enough. We even replaced the 100W spots on the outside of the house with 24W fluorescent spots, and there's a 7W yellow CFL "bug light" on each porch. Some 50-odd bulbs went in a box that we gave to a neighbor. Throughout the house, the difference in heat output is stunning. Sitting in a recliner in front of the TV, the torchiere in the living room was noticeably hot from a couple of feet away. With equivalent CFLs in the same fixture, I can't feel the heat from 6 inches.
Over the sink in the master bathroom, our builder put in a fixture with eight sockets and proceeded to fill them with 100W clear globes. Do women really need to step onto the surface of the sun to apply make-up? My wife unscrewed six of them the first day (which looked goofier'n hell) and agreed that we should tone it down a notch, so we replaced them with eight 9W (40 watt equivalent brightness) diffused globes. It's plenty bright, and uses 3/4 the energy of ONE of the original bulbs.
The minuses? Only two come to mind:
The spots seem to have to "warm up" before they're at full brightness. At night when it's cooler, they can take 20 seconds to come up full. Also, I'm used to having at least the outdoor lighting on X-10 remote controllers. Switching to CFLs required using more expensive X-10 switches with relays instead of dimmers. I can live with both. Less money spent on lighting means more electricity can go to the toys!
You can't take the sky from me!
Is there any brand of CFL, yet, with a narrower base so it'll fit into a smaller-base fixture? I have floor lamps & ceiling fixtures that simply won't fit the CFL bulb because of the wide base (and they get wider as you go to higher wattages) - are they ever going to be closer to "normal" sizes?
I've also found that in the lamps where I did manage to fit a CFL, the coiled bulbs tend to stick out because they're taller than the traditional equivalents. Now, is someone going to make a more conforming energy-efficient bulb, or do I also have to replace all my lamps & fixtures in order to use CFLs?
Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption as well as used the lest amount of energy to turn on, whereas the traditional florescents had a 7x power spike for turn on, and the traditionals had a 1.5x spike, even the CFL's had a power spike. Everything says to use LED lights now.
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l ighting.html
Unfortunately we live in a market economy. The cost is a real factor. My average lamp is 900 Lumens. My 1 watt flashlight is only 32 lumens.
If I live another 30 years in my present home, what is the cost to outfit a 6 bedroom 3 bedroom home with LED lamps and will I have any savings over CF bulbs I now have installed?
LED lamps are about 20 cents / Lumen.
Refrence PDF alert. http://www.aceee.org/pubs/a042_l11.pdf
At 5 lamps in the kitchen overhead, 2 under the microwave, 5 in the dining room, 4 in the living room, 15 in bathrooms, 12 in bedrooms, 6 in porch and drive, 4 in the laundry, 2 in the hallway, and 5 in the rec room. Average size 60 watt equivelant. Total numbers of lamps is 60 for a total of 54,000 lumens needed.
To make matters of finding a proper replacement, many LED's are not rated in Lumens but intensity. I don't need a spot of light on the celing above the light. I want the room lit up. Remember there are aproximately 1,000 Mcd to a Lumen. Using that compare this bulb to a typical 14 watt CF lamp.
http://item.express.ebay.com/Home-Garden_Lighting
I don't think a 16 lumen lamp is a direct replacement for a 14 watt CF lamp of nearly 900 lumens.
The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption
http://members.misty.com/don/lede.html
"The better usual modern white LEDs (as of September 2006) produce about 29-45 lumens of light per watt of electricity
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/makingithappen/no_regrets/
"while the fluorescent produces over 50 lumens per watt"
The high effeciency LED's just are not on the market yet for most white LED's.
I'll stick with CF's as the additional cost of LED's don't yet produce a measurable savings. I have been watching the lumens/watt and cost race for some time. It's getting close, but the average modern white LED is still not as effecient as a typical CF lamp.
A laboratory prototype of a white LED achieving 150 lumens/watt has been announced on 12/20/2006.
Wake me when these are on the shelf at a competitive price.
The truth shall set you free!
I don't know how often this problem comes up, but I am in a small apartment with a district heating-connected radiator. Right now, I have way too much window area for my own good, and my radiator cannot keep up. Unfortunately, earlier this year, I replaced all the bulbs in my apartment with compact fluorescents to keep from having to replace them all the time. The room is considerably colder. I had no idea that just how wasteful incandescent light bulbs were until I needed their heat. Additionally, because the apartment is so cold now, the CF bulbs take an eternity to get bright.
Do you or anybody know whether or not there is a minimum amount of time before we start saving money? In the 80s, we used to need to leave them on for 3 hours before we started saving money. Have things changed?
Guesses are fine, but I want the facts, please. I use these lights already. I just want to save as much electricity as possible.
testing out my trending skills
Overall I've been pleased with CFLs. I have one I bought about ten years ago still going strong (looks like a globe). The other is a 100W equ. for the porch, and it does take awhile to come to full brightness (but it's brighter than all my neighbours anemic bulbs:) And the last two are in my living room lamps, doing a good job on lighting things up. The only bad experience was that they didn't last long in the bathroom with the constant on off (that kills most fluorescents).
Home Depot carries a nice line of CFL's - they come in "white", "Warm", and "Daylight" bulbs. They turn on immediately, get bright just about immediately - if they're cold, they take, oh, a second longer.
I had a problem with two about a week after I bought them... Since they have a 7 yr warranty, I called the company - they took down the serial #'s, sent me some replacements a few weeks later (I wasn't in a hurry or I would have just brought them back to Depot)...
Overall, I'm happy with them. I use them as much as I can.
While Depot usually has them on sale or at a decent price - I do hate the price of "speciality CFL bulbs". There's no way I'm paying $19.97 for two "flood light" style CFLs (CFL's hidden inside a flood light shell)... It's not worth it to me to shinny up the ladder and fuck with bulbs that are working... Maybe when BOTH bulbs in the flood lamp burn out and I have to replace them I'll buy some - if they're on sale...
LED's would be nice - but they're fucking insanely expensive ya know? so ummm, I'll just say no right now...
That said, WalMart's idea is decent - but they'll fuck up the whole industry and we'll end up with some shitty CFL's that have all the bad features and none of the good ones because they'll sell the damn things for 99 cents when they cost $2 to make...
First off, the power spike is so short, it is basically irrelevant. LEDs are so expensive that the payback is much much longer than the payback for CFL. Plus you can't get LED lights as bright as regular lights. We may be going LED in the future, but CFL is the best choice for most people today.
Sorry for the language but it's a load of crap to say the delay is a thing of the past. I have bought a lot of compact fluorescents and what is so annoying is that it is impossible to tell what the fuck kind of bulb you are going to get before you buy it. The claims on the packaging seem to be just made up out of thin air.
I've got some 6500k bulbs that are "instant on" to maybe 15% brightness and finally get fully bright after 5 minutes (can watch the dark part of the tube slowly get brighter so am sure it takes that long). I have others that come on after 1 second at pretty much full brightness, others that come on after 1/2 second at partial brightness ("instant on" sometimes mean 1/2 second btw). I've got new bulbs that come on quick but are "thin" where I can see flickering for a few minutes... the overhead 60 hz lights make me sick and I can tell 120hz light from the 10khz ones so I am a little more sensitive than average. But still.
And then on top of that the electronic ones say *don't* use it in a completely enclosed fixture. Well too bad that those are exactly the lights I want to leave on the longest. And it's dumb to say "oh buy the $2 more costly brand its worth it" -- you shouldn't have to shop around to get a freakin' light that isn't defective. I've never had an incandescent from any manufacturer have any quirk other than varying lifetime. They are just solid, instant light. I *want* to use CFL, if only they didn't suck so much.
I replaced the four incandescent lights in my bathroom with CFLs... they quickly became yellow and dim, and they all died within the year. The same thing happened to the replacements . I'm guessing the moisture was too much for them, though the fixture design probably isn't helpful either. (It seems to trap moisture and heat.) CFLs elsewhere seem to last forever, though the older ones seem to be yellower than the new ones...maybe the old ones I got were just of a cheaper make, though.
Here in San Diego, the electric company (SDG&E) subsidizes these bulbs at the retailers so you can often find them extremely cheap. Costco was selling them here for $1.97 for a 6 pack. Home Depot had them for $1 per bulb, and just last week the local Albertsons had a 3-pack for a $1 as well.
A couple years ago when they started this program, I replaced every bulb in my house. Even the canister lights. You don't need to use the reflector-lights in the canisters since the bulbs run so cool anyways...they work and look great. They turn on instantly at about 50% to 70% of max brightness (depending on brand...the Duralast ones turn on at 70% and warm up very quickly), then within about 40 seconds warm-up to full brightness. It's a touch annoying if you want full light instantly, but it is nothing like the old flourescant bulbs where it took several seconds before you saw any light at all. It's actually quite nice when you wake up at night to have the lights come on part-way then warm-up like that.
Anyways, I have a fairly good size home with lots of lights and I figure it has probably saved me $30/month in electricity costs...easily paying for itself in a couple months. The bulbs last a long time too...I think I have lost maybe 5 out of the 60 or so that I have installed.
Bottom line, if you live in San Diego country, look around at various retailers for the subsidized bulbs (different retailers are participate in the SDG&E program at different times). At the prices you get them for here, you simply can't go wrong.
As for Walmart, I suspect their plan is to sell these bulbs VERY cheap...wouldn't surprise me if they managed to get the price to under $1/bulb. Manufacturing costs are coming way down for these things as volume starts to really ramp up.
Its nice to see Walmart entering the CFL race. With them the price will be pushed down even lower. But without IKEA, the CFL revolution would probably never have started. They have pushed the use of low-power consumption light sources very far. One advantage with CFL that tends to get overlooked is the wide colorspectrum. Its a better light for humans, animals and plants compared to normal lightbulbs.
"Never EVER mess with a jumper you don't know about, even if it's labeled 'sex and free beer'." - Dave Haynie
They don't have any problems getting illegal aliens to work for them. Heck, they can even work them seven days a week and lock them in overnight. It's not like they're slaves, so it's a-okay, right?
I like to say that if you want to do your friends a big favor then go over to their house and break all their light bulbs. They might get mad a first but if you show them the numbers then they'll probably forgive you because you'll save them hundreds of dollars. It helps if you take a few CFLs to replace what you break and that'll probably be the best gift you've given them. Seriously though when you remove your old incandescent bulbs don't just set them aside in case you need them later. The temptation is too great. Break them. It seems terribly wasteful but if you find yourself short on bulbs and put that incandescent back in then you might forget to replace it with a CFL and that could cost you a lot more than you'd save by keeping those old bulbs. Don't think of them as being worth 25cents each, think of them as having negative value. When shopping for CFLs keep a few things in mind. First be sure the bases on the new bulbs aren't too big. Exterior sockets seem especially tight fits. Also I haven't seen many cheap CFLs over 100watt equivalent so you may need some Y adapters so you can put two in a socket where you need more light. If you need to leave a light on all the time or even all night every night then it may be worth it to get one of the very low power CFLs that only use 4watts. They cost significantly more but will probably be worth it if you don't need the extra light. Heat may kill the electronics in CFLs so they may be a bad idea in an enclosure with no ventilation. Light fixtures that turn on automatically at night usually have circuitry that turns on gradually which wont work with CFLs. When buying light sensing fixtures check for fluorescent compatibility.
I put CF's in the basement in pull-string fixtures. They were the 1-second delay kind. So I pull the string and nothing happens. So I pull harder and the string breaks. D'oh! Then the light comes on.
OMG!
Are you freaking serious? The delay was too long? Have you become so immersed in the current culture of Instant Gratification, that when you weigh the individual bonuses and global bonuses of using these bulbs, against the minor annoyances of how long the bulb takes to achieve brightness and the exact color of "white" light that the bulb throws off (Ok, that wasn't YOU, but I'm replying to other freaks who agreed against the bulbs.. sue me)
Come ON! Let's see.. the bulbs use an incredibly small amount of electricity compared to regular incandescent bulbs.. so you get to save money there. Don't need to save money? I'll give you an address you can throw money at. I'm only one of the MILLIONS of people who could use that money you are throwing away by not switching to CF bulbs.
Don't like a "whiter" light? You prefer the yellowed light from incandescents? Ok, sure it is a "warmer" tone.. that is because it is created by a glowing filament... it is a "white" light born of a red light... you know... red as in infrared, red as in burning, red as in fire and heat.. remember playing with metal and campfires, getting a piece of metal glowing brightly orange, or even white hot (if the fire was hot enough). Seeing a common theme of wasted energy here, thrown off in HEAT that is unnecessary to the process of providing light? I say unnecessary, because if you want heat, use a blanket. Not a light bulb.
You bathe your head in more radiation coming from your cell phone. You are in no danger from your CF light bulb.
I just can't believe people are whining "But it takes soooo long for it to light up. WAH! Mommy! Make the bulb light faster!" It takes longer for a web page to load with broadband, than it takes for the light to come on. Christ, it takes less than a second. Time measured in Microseonds. Why aren't you whining about how seconds it takes your car to start between turning the key and actual ignition? WHy aren't you whining about how long it takes the BIOS to check your drives before booting begins off the harddrive? Why aren't you whining about how long it takes your OS ((Linux or Windows) to boot? My God. Is 30 seconds just way way too long to melt butter for you as well?
As far as the color of the light goes... get a life. There is more variation in the shade of white in the background of this freaking web page, from computer monitor to computer monitor, than there is in the difference between regular bulbs and CF bulbs. And if you are complaining about the color, and you DON'T have a specific color profile set up for your monitor, as well as the exact INF file for your monitor, and programs like Adobe color correction running, AND an accurate, less than 4 month old AFGA color chart nearby to check your monitor color reproduction against.. you have no right to talk about the shade of white.
Stop burning paper money and get with the program. And go buy some damn CF bulbs. At Walmart!
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
They are REALLY expensive. Color Kinetics makes a line of good looking white LED lights (I think they actually do it by using red/green/blue mixing) but they are in the "If you have to ask you can't afford it" category and are sold only as fixtures, not bulbs. Nice, but not something you'll see in homes anytime soon.
Well, perhaps it is new in the US, but here in UK you can buy them cheaply - and they turn on instantly too. I have nothing but energy saving light bulbs, and not only because they save energy - when I buy an incandescent (ie 'old fashioned') light bulb, it only lasts for a month on average, whereas the last for over a year. Tesco (a large supermarket chain in UK) sell them for about 75 pence as far as I remember (it's been that long since I looked for them).
I think what has happened is that WalMart have realised that here is suddenly a potential for making money, that's all.
Now I am starting to question the cost savings as well. Because of their inefficiency, incandescent bulbs do put out heat and that does lower my cost of using natural gas to heat my place.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
How would you do the three light, three switch brain bender without incandescent bulbs?! ;)
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CFLs popped up in Germany in the early 90s under the name of "energy saving bulbs" since Germans are allergic to fluorescence. They cost 8-10 times as much as traditional bulbs and were prone to break up at the socket when screwing them on. You see, they were all wrapped up in a tiny glass bulb to look like the old ones and filter the 'cold light' in reverence to public allergy.
They also failed in the advertising department: their life was only long in a remarkably random way, their brightness would soon vacillate and then go back a lot. They were slow lighting up.
They lumbered on for 10 years with insignificant market. The two major players (Phillips, Osram) would sell nothing but Chinese junk, no need for Wal-Mart. Me and other good-doers lost plenty of money on this energy saving, meaning we were wasting energy. Then it happened: prices went down, quality improved, the advertising department started delivering. They cost now 2-3 times the old bulbs, they do not break so easily, the wrapping bulbs have disappeared, you can see the tubes, they are not depressingly white. And they last long enough to be economically sensible.
The only issue is: where will I get a source of heat for my self-made yogurt machine when the incandescent bulbs are gone?
I'm a big fan of these bulbs.
Another advantage I've come across is that you can put a brigther bulb in a light fitting only designed to take a low wattage bulb.
e.g. if the light fitting says "40W Max" you can put in a "100W equivilent" CFL bulb since this is really only 20W in terms of actual power, and it is the heat that they are worried about.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Given that profit margins normally work on percentages, that should roughly octuple 28% of their profit margin on lightbulbs.
They should be making 2.96 times as much selling light bulbs, of course they want to push this.
Wrong, and certainly far from Insightful. Your calculation assumes that the profit margins on CFs and incandescent bulbs are the same. I don't know if they are or not, but because CFs last 10x longer their profit margin would have to be 10x higher just to break even for the manufacturer. I very much doubt that this is the case.
Anyway, who cares? The cost of the bulb is negligible compared to the cost of operating it. It costs about $23 to run one 100-watt equivalent CF bulb for 10000 hours, compared to $100 to run 10-13 standard bulbs for 700-1000 hours each. The CF bulb costs less than the armload of standard bulbs it replaces, and saves you many times that much in electricity.
The newly refurbished middle school in our neighborhood boasts a sophisticated lighting system that dims the lights when the natural light from outside gets brighter. No doubt this was sold to the school district on the premise of lowering the electric bill. I wonder if they realize that simply switching bulbs would save many times more electricity cost, without paying for a spiffy control system.
There are significant advantages to LED bulbs: progressive failure, almost infinite lifetime, low heat emission. How do the compare with CFLs in terms of efficiency and impact on the environment? Yeah I know, they still cost a bundle. What I'd like is a cheap way to create an illuminated floor à la 2001. OK that probably isn't the most efficient way to light a room but you have to admit that it is really relaxing.
Tell me about ballasts...
A few years ago I observed the ballast in one of my CFLs running far outside its operational parameters, to the point that it might have burned my house down if I hadn't smelled the smoke in time to do something about it. After switching off the socket I had to wait several minutes before things cooled off enough to unscrew the CFL bulb and what was left of the smoldering lump of plastic containing the ballast.
I replaced it with a POIL (plain old incandescent lightbulb), which also gets very hot, but which I've never seen melt or pour forth acrid smoke.
Appropriately enough, the awful little picture that I have to try to read in order to post something, says "reject."
I live in Hong Kong in a typical home - i.e. tiny small room compare to most western's. I don't have an exact figure but I think over 90% of home are using CFL or FL. May be because dimmer is not common here, another factor I believe is that a brighter light source would make your room looks much much bigger. Give a try to 100W eqv. and you can feel it!
Talking about the start up time, I am more annoy by the startup time of other modern electronics: like TV, DVR, cell phone, PDA...oh nevermind, may be because I replaced my PDA with a Windows-based one
I fried a couple of brand new compact fluro's while I was wiring up a second light fixture. I accidentally bumped the switch leg and hot.. zap. The bulb never came on again. I microwave got fried by my electrician in a different part of the house too. In my mishap, only the compact fluoro fried. 1 other normal incadensant was fine. Microelectronic stuff is so touchy when it comes to power surges. My fridge was on the same circuit as the microwave and it was fine. So I guess I am saying to not leave the electronic stuff like those light bulbs plugged in when doing any kind of electrical work, or if you get frequent power surges. It would be cool to back-ups every light bulb, especially for 10 minutes of light whenver a strom knocks out power.
To anyone who thought this sounded a tad dubious, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and the Consumer Electronics Group of the Electronics Industries Association (EIA) have actually investigated (and confirmed) this issue. A detailed report is available:
http://www.neptunlight.com/files/IR-and-CFLs.pdf (PDF warning)
It also provides a helpful primer for anyone who doesn't actually know how one of these things work ;-)
In the UK & Ireland, there is a common "bayonet" style bulb and compact CFL bulbs which fit that kind of socket. I imagine that even a 50p tax on a conventional bulb would be enough to convert people over. The energy savings to the individual and to countries trying to meet Kyoto targets would be enormous. Better yet if LED bulbs were to take off.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The main poison problem with fluorescents is Be (beryllium, spelt wrong here, using your spell checker), which is used in the phosphors. It is very poisonous if it gets under the skin. So - be very careful handling broken tubes. There are few poisonings, (somebody look up the number please), so it's not publicised enough.
Ok I can spend 17p on a cheap 60w or 100w incandescant bulb.
Or I can spend 5 pounds on one of these energy saving bulbs (well I have seen them as low as 1 or 2 pounds I will admit)
In theory they are cheaper to run... in theory.
Incandescant bulbs "waste" a lot of the power put into them. But what form does this waste take exactly? Heat.
So I can either have a 23W bulb which generates little or no heat, or a 100W bulb tht generates say 25W in light and 75 in "waste" heat.
But is this heat actually wasted? I don't know about you but I live in the UK - In the summer we have nice long light evenings (most of my american friends commend on how long it stays light) so the need for indoor lighting is limited. The rest of the year its cold. you have the central heating on. I don't have any gas heating, its all electric, its also on a thermostat.
So if the 75W of "waste" heat don't come out of my light bulb... then it is going to come out of my heaters - there really isn't any savings here.
Add this to the fact the the CFLs are more expensive to produce, contain heavy metals that are environmentally damaging to dispose of and, unless you buy the more expensive ones, have the anoying warm up delay and frquently don't have the same quality of light output. Incandescant bulbs on the other hand are very simple to produce and to dispose of.
Ok I'll concede running incandescant bulbs at the same time as running an air con is just plain wasteful, but I don't and doubt I ever will. The suposed savings of these bulbs are not always well thought out as a household is a lot more than just a light bulb.
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Here in Sri Lanka our energy companies give us substantial compensation for buying CFL bulbs, in the form of reduced electricity bills. I have been using them for over 10 years, and I have to agree with most people here; the really cheap brands are a waste of money, but good stuff from Phillips, Osram, Orange etc are very well worth the investment. I use Osrams throughout my house and I definitely feel the reduced pressure on my wallet. Plus these bulbs come with a 10 year warranty should anything happen to them. The warm-up time is literally nil, maybe at the most half a second, but that actually affords your eyes a little time to be prepared for the brightness; I never find myself blindly blinking tearful eyes. The light emissions do drop gradually over time, the bulbs which I bought in 1996 are quite dim, but working never the less. How many filament bulbs do you think last that long? The intentions of Walmart maybe less civic minded than that, but still, CFL really is an excellent alternative. Here are some estimated wattage comparisons to give an idea of their power consumption: CFL - Filament 10W = 40W 15W = 60W 20W = 75W 25W = 100W
I buy the Phillips open coil bulbs (the ones with no glass dome), and I find that they come in instantly. There is a slight warmup time, but they are almost at full brightness without any warmup.
The bulbs with the glass dome around them take far longer to warm up. I'm not sure why this is so...perhaps the open coil bulbs can handle more startup energy because they dissipate heat better than the closed bulbs.
We have replaced almost all lightbulbs in our house with compact fluorescent bulbs, and the effect on our electricity bill has been noticeable. The color of the light is almost indistinguishable from regular incandescent bulbs in most applications. I have found that it makes a huge difference what type of bulbs you buy. Do NOT buy the cheap Ikea bulbs, as their color is terrible, and their warmup time is excessive. I have found that Phillips is the best brand. GE seems ok, but I haven't bought many of them yet.
At the very least, buy bulbs that are Energy Star rated, as this guarantees certain performance characteristics, such as color. All fluorescent bulbs are NOT created equal.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Then you must not be looking hard enough. Perhaps they haven't any problems hiring people, but getting people to stay there is another story. Walmart's turnover rate hovers at around 50% (in 1999 it was 65%). Industry average is around 15%.
The turnover is precisely because walmart is so terrible to it's employees. The high turnover works out well for walmart since employees only receive healthcare coverage after 6 months (2 years for part time).
The reason *I* refuse to use flourescent light bulbs is because of the mercury in them..... that will spill if they are broken. No, it's not in some kind of holder or something that prevents it from spilling, I have checked this out. Why don't other people realize this is a hazard?!?!?!? There's what, 13 mg of liquid mercury in there, that's a fair bit of mercury, and it will spill out if you break the bulb. It only takes a few *micrograms* of mercury getting inhaled each day to pose a serious hazard.... like brain damage. Just look up some stuff about mercury toxicity, even a very small spill will slowly evaporate, poisoning the air in an entire house over a long period of time.
I don't know why there isn't more concern about this.... Just check out the instructions for if you break a flourescent tube, they say to scoop up the mercury with a peice of cardboard and throw it out..... then try to get the rest of it by pouring sulfur powder on the surface and cleaning the powder up. Okay....... What if it's on carpet? IF YOU MISS A DROP??? Totally absurd. I don't want these things all over my house, they're bound to get broken sometimes. I don't use normal flourescent tubes either.
If you get chronic mercury poisoning, you can't just sue somebody, you just lose. Is that worth the 15$/month in energy savings?
If people are worried about mercury amalgam fillings (though I am not, though I have some), they should be much more worried about flourescent tubes.
Microsoft lives by it's own rules; forces company out of business by stealth and theft...they change globally-accepted standards to make the actual standards-compliant machines look bad. They leave holes wide open, so that you might receive advertisments you don't want, and let Russians use your machine without penalty. With Vista they intend to lock out multimedia for only people who pay for the media, several times.
But somehow they're not evil enough to kick'em off your desktop.
Wal-Mart does precisely what the business schools have always taught, putting companies out of business ONLY by doing a better entrepanurial job than the others (and incurring the wrath of unions, hungry for their money). Somehow WalMart's evil.
Kinda like comparing Bush to Hitler; Hitler was literally an evil genius- changing the government so he could take over, then killing the people that put him there (the "night of the long knives"). He talked Austria into "annexing" into Germany. He set up a rouse to make it look like Poland was trying to attack a German radio station. He very nearly took all of Europe, other than Russia. And somewhere along the line to killing 100m+ people he took the time to allow, perhaps even foster, the wholesale killing of something like 10 million "unwanteds", 6M of whose only crime was being of Jewish descent.
Bush gets slandered buy the media, who desperately wants you to think the economy sucks and the TINY number of annual deaths in Iraq is a huge gash, hemmoraging the youth of our country, all so the Democrats can retake political power, and put us back into a recession. (Economy: best ever. War: losses that rival staying home, 1200/year!)
How does anyone manage to make 49.99% of America think that *AMERICA* is the bad guy? We stopped Hitler...Tojo...Mousillini. We were the first to outlaw slavery, we're first to the scene of tradgedy with the big bucks. And the only country that warns people eith leaflets, then bombs them, then drops food and rebuilds cities for the survivors. How can this be evil?
What this country needs is to see TRUE evil, probably the nuking of a city, to learn what evil can really do. But the next time you watch the news...THINK. Cross-Check. Make your own decisions. Try not to hate Walmart until you have actual reasons of your own. And while you're at it, try Linux.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Profits aren't inherently evil. It's how you come by them.
The average walmart employee's wage is under the poverty line. 40% of employee's families are on government assistance. The majority of walmart locations are built almost entirely from taxpayer dollars because in addition to and receive enormous tax breaks from local governments (Walmart is one of the top recipients of corporate welfare dollars, a bit of a rarity for a fortune 500 company posting record profits). Oh, did I mention the cleaning staff at non-24 hour locations are locked inside the building to prevent theft(sorry, "to ensure cleaning staff safety".
I'm sure I could handily undercut the local Bashas if you built my store, I paid no rent, and I treated my staff inhumanely. Walmart's profits are artificial -- they rely upon the upfront costs and recurring expenses being paid for by somebody else.
I'm surprised that you didn't read the links I provided. Yes, the tons of mercury released by burning coal is carried around the globe in the air, in the entire atmosphere.
Quoted from the article about mercury in Oregon:
"In Oregon, about 89 percent of the mercury in the environment comes from global sources -- for example, power plants in China, said Andy Ginsburg, head of DEQ's air quality division.
"PGE's Boardman plant, averaging about 200 pounds [of mercury] a year, is Oregon's second-largest industrial contributor of mercury in the environment. The state's largest mercury contributor is the Ash Grove Cement Co. in Durkee, which emitted an estimated 1,538 pounds in 2005."
Sadly I'm unable to use CF bulbs due to the radio frequency interference they give off. I'm an Amateur (Ham) Radio operator and all fluorescent bulbs cause a ton of RFI. So I'm waiting for the nice and quiet LED replacements to drop in price. In the meantime, I'll be using my good old incandescent bulbs.
In terms of fossil fuel emissions, gas furnaces are far more efficient than electricity for this reason alone-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
Note the 30% efficiency number. We'll round it up to 33.333...% for this discussion.
For every 1 BTU of electric heat you generate in your house, 2x that same amount gets dumped out into the atmosphere by your friendly neighborhood Coal-fired power plant. Nuclear is just as bad if not worse in some cases, only it doesn't produce fossil fuel (CO2/CO/etc.) emissions, just heat.
Whereas with a gas furnace, for every bit of fossil fuel exhaust emitted (albeit this does NOT include energy expended in transporting the gas...), almost all of it goes towards heating your house, not heating the atmosphere.
the real at&t mix
My first CF bulb from *13* years ago is still going on my front porch, having been exposed to the elements all that time.
Of course here in So Cal we don't get many, er, elements. Hey, how's that weather, Colorado?
And mood lighting via dimmed bulbs is, like, urban gay. Real men know the power of candlelight.
You realize that these light bulbs contain mercury and should be treated as hazardous waste, right? In a couple of years the news media will be screaming about all the mercury in landfills from CFLs. If you buy these things then take the time to make sure they are properly disposed ath the end of their life.
Home Depot sells the Commercial Electric and nVision tubes. No delay. They work really well.
www.wavefront-av.com
I'm having almost everywhere CFL's, already, but it is very difficult to find nice lamps which allow you to use CFL's. Most of them simply do not have the space, and many are halogen based. My living room usually has only two 11 W CFL's, but on the ceiling there is a nice looking but energy eating 150 W halogen lamp.
I'm looking forward to buy an LED based lamp to replace it. Unless somebody comes up with a nicely designed lamp for CFL's.
Funny when you search for "cfl" at walmart.com all you get is: 265 items found for "nfl". Yeah they're really trying hard. Sams club on the other hand brings up a cost savings calculator for cfl vs incandescents when you search for "cfl".
nothing
I have been using CFL's for years. In fact I have been using the same CFL bulbs for years. 80 percent of my house lighting uses CFL bulbs. Most I got for free from PG&E and their free service for helping your house save energy and others I picked up on special for a very cheap price. Not one of those bulbs has gone out over the years.
The one place I would really like to use a CFL is on my front porch light but I have not found a bulb that will fit it. Until they come out with a CFL that will fit in the exact same space as a regular light bulb it will be hard to make people keep around several sets of bulbs.
I started using CFLs in the 80s. They are actually really expensive - I no longer use them. Most of them fail before you can recover their cost. Also, consider the high cost components that go into them and the toxic substances. I subscribe to the conspiracy theory - how can you suck money from the masses? New higher cost junk technology replaces age-old reliable very low cost mass produced light bulbs. Sales Pitch - it is cheaper in the long run"
Or ask if they realize that. Then you'll know. Simple as that.
I use these bulbs in my house because of the cost savings over time to operate them. Now I have found that they take a small amount of time to light...maybe half a second. I have found that they work very similar to a long white floresent bulb meaning that they are dim while they warm up and after a few minutes they put off their full amount of light. I have never had one burn out or give me any trouble. I like these bulbs and am very interested in what LED technology will do in a light bulb for my lamp.
Geek, audiophile, and gearhead all rolled into one....whoda thunk it
We got some a few years ago. Replaced an old bulb with one to see how it worked. It blew up and caught fire. Killed the lamp and we were lucky there was not a problem in the wall. Never again.
I transitioned to CFLs a few years ago and have successfully convinced a few friends to do so.
Some bulbs do seem to take a minute to reach full brightness, but I can deal with the delay in trade for saving energy. You will not always get everything you want, right now. If a little patience is the fee for "doing my part" - then so be it.
Also, I am active military and move every three years or so. As a result, when we move somewhere new, I remove all the regular light bulbs that are in place and store them (I have a plastic container with some cut down Guiness 6-pack boxes that I store the bulbs in). Then I put in the CFLs. When we move, I reverse the process and the CFLs all go into the plastic container, along with some tissue padding.
My experience with the CFLs is that ones that are turned on and off very often (multiple times a day) experience higher failure rates than expected. Longer than regular light bulbs, but after three years I had replaced 3 out of 4 bulbs in a kitchen light fixture that takes "normal" 60 watt bulbs (replaced with 13 watt CFLs). The white globes used in bathroom vanities saw the same failure rate.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
I have the 100 watt equiv. versions in my garage which is rarely above 40 degrees this time of year (I live in Maine) and is frequently close to freezing. I see a delay similar to what I see with the 40 watt and 60 watt equiv I use in other parts of the house.
There are places they work, and places they don't work.
In my kids' bedrooms -- especially their closets -- they work wonderfully. The kids constantly leave on lights and I get slightly less pissed off about it this way. In places that need a lot of light, the slower startup to full light output can be annoying. In many places with multiple bulbs, I'll use one incandescent bulb and the rest as CF.
The CF "natural light" versions are just as bad as incandescent so called "natural light" bulbs. They may be technically better about spectrum, but aren't the light you expect for the room so they don't meet expectations. That makes convincing your family that CF are a good idea more difficult because you're changing two things at once.
The #1 problem I have is that the equivalent light output bulbs are still slightly larger than the incandescent ones they replace. As a result they don't fit well (or at all) in many fixtures.
Startup times are 1/4 to 1/2 a second in most of mine though it can vary. I don't notice a flicker, and I'm someone who can't use a monitor at 60hz because of the flicker so I tend to be sensitive to such things.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
As good as CFL's are, they need to get better. I am using them now
in about half of the lamp sockets in my house. I can't use them in the
other half until dimable CFL's are available. In several rooms in my house
I have dimmer switches (some X10 controlled) that only work with incandescent lamps.
The other problem with CFL's is that they take so damn long to warm up. When the
bulbs are brand new, this problem isn't so bad, but after only a few hours of
use, they no longer light up full right away. Why?
At least you can now buy CFL's that look like normal bulbs. I have normal looking
globe CFL's over the counter in my bathroom that are dead ringers for the incandescent lamps
they replaced.
This is the problem. With the old bulbs I know what I am getting, now that I pay $10 for a pack of bulbs and don't know what I am getting returning them until I get what I want is annoying. I bought a 3 pack, the bulbs only fit in 3 of my lights. They don't fight in my overhead lamps, or my desk lamp or the lamp on my nightstand. Yes I could get the small ones but they are more expensive and according to my figures not worth the upfront cost. I have the GE bulbs, I don't find them to be bright enough, I could by brighter ones but there is a huge price gap between the 75 watt equivalents and the 150 watt equivalents. I am going to wait a bit before I recommend them to many people.
If someone is willing to accept a specific wavelength (preferably red or green) would the gap between CFs and LEDs get narrower? Where to laser diodes fall in the mix? I read they were insanely efficient.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The second time it happened, I freaked me out, because my wife was out of town, and the idea of my lights changing the channel never occured to me. I had to do a complete check of the house with a golf club to make sure there wasn't someone in the house.
LOL!
The incidence of home entertainment intruders (people breaking into houses to randomly change their TV channels) is on the rise!
Seriously though.... is the first thing that came into your mind when the TV started acting funny REALLY "did someone break into the house with a universal remote and start playing games with me?!?!?"
Ok - enough of that. I have the entire house blanketed with CFLs - and my living room light has a dual socket so there are two in there. I have 6 IR devices in that room and I have never ever seen any problem with them getting weird signals. Maybe the problem is with your set not filtering the frequencies properly.
It wasn't out of cost, energy savings or anything "enviromental".
I HATE CHANGING BULBS! Those darn things always go out at the
most inopportune time! LOL
I live in the UK where our mains is 230V and our light bulbs have a 22mm. push-and-twist base, and I have always found that CFL bulbs start up immediately (though they take awhile to reach full brightness; but isn't that why eyes have irises?) The spectrum is noticeably not the same as daylight; but then, neither is filament bulb light, nor candlelight for that matter.
.03 amps / 2 3.1415927 50 Hz * * * 1000000 get answer in uF r / p
LEDs would be better, obviously. You can light LEDs from the mains if you wire two in opposite directions (so one will light up whichever way the current is flowing) and use a capacitor rather than a resistor for a ballast (the excess voltage charges the capacitor; when the mains polarity reverses, the capacitor is discharged, effectively into the national grid). You do need a resistance (and it must be a metal-film type, which invariably fail open-circuit; not a carbon-composition type, which can fail short-circuit, unless you also include a fuse) in series with the capacitor to limit the inrush current (a discharged capacitor looks like a short-circuit), and it's sensible to wire another resistance (470K ohms is fine) in parallel with the capacitor, so that it doesn't stay charged when unplugged. The series resistance (and the LEDs) will feel the full force of the mains for less than half a cycle, so it needn't be rated for this dissipation continuously; just select it to get an inrush of about 1A if turned on smack-bang in the middle of a crest or trough. To calculate the value of the ballast capacitor, use the formula Xc = 1 / (2 * pi * f * C) where Xc is the reactance of the capacitor in ohms, f is the frequency in Hz and C is the capacitance in Farads. White LEDs drop about 3 volts apiece; any 5mm. LED should be able to withstand 30mA of current indefinitely. There are specialist LEDs with more metal inside the envelope which can handle up to 50mA. In calculations, you can safely ignore the parallel resistance. Pretend the series resistance is multiplied by j; in other words, use Z = sqrt(R ** 2 + X ** 2) to get the combined impedance.
At 230V / 50Hz, you would need a 390nF capacitor to deliver 30mA to a single pair of LEDs (actually 415nF; 390 || 22 is closer). With the greater voltage drop of several LEDs in series, you'd get away with the more-readily-available 220 || 220. At 120V / 60Hz, use 2*330nF in parallel. As this is Slashdot, I'll use dc to work it out:
10 k set no. of fractional places
230 volts
Note that as you use more LEDs in series, and especially on a lower-voltage supply, you do need to take account of the LEDs' own voltage drop. Also, LEDs are zeners in disguise; so it's better to wire several inverse-parallel pairs in series (so limiting the reverse voltage across any individual diode to the forward voltage of its partner) than two series chains in inverse-parallel. There must be a current path in each direction. If you really need an odd number of LEDs, you can make up the figures with a rectifier diode.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
When the manufacturers started putting better ballasts inside the bulbs, the delay went away. Also, I find that outside in exterior use (outside the garage and my front door), flourescents last longer, and really save me tons of electricity. I switched everything that wasn't on a dimmer, and saved approximately $18 in electrical useage per month. I combined that with a programmable thermostat, and saved approximately $100 on my heat bill, and $75 on air conditioning.
Acting like a luddite isn't going to help you save any money.
Good luck sitting at home with your incandescents.
I just thought of something that would make a great patent. A light switch that only stays on for a specified period of time, say 10 minutes. Most of the time, I turn the light on, and often forget to turn it off. I think lots of people just forget. So, if you could just flick the switch, and know it would stay on for 10 minutes, then you wouldn't have to remember to turn it off. Maybe have a special button you press if you want it to stay on for a while. It would be great for just about any room in the house, but especially hall lights, bathrooms, and closets, where you don't really spend too much time.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Very interesting to read this about CF ls LED. The problem is LED availability and lack of awareness. I knew if I scoured the coments long enough I might see something that may prove my experience true. CF is not the panacea it looks to be for green living. I am a general contractor who installs lots of new fixtures and have been pushing CF pretty hard mostly based on the longer life cycle claims. Its not as big a deal now but when the bulbs used to be 4x incandescent costs I would get call backs for dead bulbs. Not a big problem since I always said I would replace if people found they didn't like the color or feel (never heard delay complaints) but more often the not it was for bulbs that died shortly after installation. In fact having replaced all the bulbs that aren't on dimmers or other electronic controls in my own home last year when the prices first really dropped I would guess about 20% have since been replaced. I am leaning back towards high quality incandescents in better fixtures that light the right places well since seeing is a pretty high importance is most peoples lives. If we want to reduce power shouldn't we find ways to turn off idle adapters and large home electronics in stand-by mode? If what I am lead to believe is true this would be a huge savings but most people have no idea it is even happening. Please post links to LED bulb and fixture suppliers. I have literally resorted to trying some custom mods of old outdoor fixtures as prototypes for super-low consumption solutions.
Some cheaper "soft white" incandescents give off a yellow or even pink-ish light.
That should have been CFL's, not incandescents. That's what I get for not using the preview button!
Also, as well as using 75% less electricity, they give around 50% less light. Don't believe me? Check with a good light meter. Just to put the icing on the cake, not only do they have a hideous colour cast, but their colour temperature changes over the first few minutes.
g hting_spectrum_peaks_labelled.gife lectricity.html
Erm, if you're using a light meter that's designed to be used with incandescent bulbs, it won't read properly when exposed to the light being produced by a fluorescent bulb. This is due to the design of the meter, not to the bulbs actually producing less light. Fluorescent bulbs produce their light in well-defined peaks across the visible spectra [1], while incandescents produce a continuous distribution (which actually peaks somewhere down in the infrared). A light meter designed to work with black-body radiators (e.g. sunlight, incandescent / tungsten lamps), which includes most of those with CdS or silicon cells, won't accurately measure the light output from a fluorescent bulb (or an LED, or neon tube, or Hg-vapor), because they make assumptions about the radiated spectra that simply aren't true, namely that it is continuous, and that a measurement at a particular wavelength can be extrapolated out to give an idea of the light's intensity. With a fluorescent, if you don't measure the particular wavelengths that it emits light at, you will get a very low reading. Thus in order to accurately assess one's output, you need to measure intensity continuously across the visible spectrum and then integrate.
This is done using a spectrophotometer, which is a significantly more complicated piece of equipment than a simple light meter. Luckily for us, the manufacturers of light bulbs (both fluorescent and regular) do this at the factory and print the light output on the packaging, measured in lumens. Granted it's probably under idealized conditions, but since the numbers printed on incandescent bulbs probably are as well, it's good for comparison purposes. It is trivial to see, based on power consumption and light output in lumens, that fluorescent bulbs are far more efficient at producing visible light than incandescents. (And looking at the spectra of each [2], it's pretty clear why this is.) In general, fluorescents can produce around 60 lumens/watt, while incandescents are around 15.
While you have a point about the power factor of fluorescents versus incandescents, it's not a particularly significant problem. There are lots of large-scale deployments of fluorescent lights which have lower power factors than incandescent bulbs, and still manage to be far more efficient. Utility companies have been dealing with power factors for decades, and it's not difficult to correct for it, when it becomes a problem. (Also, high power factor (HPF) ballasts can have a factor higher than 0.9.) That power factor issues would completely eat up the inherent energy efficiencies of fluorescent lights is ridiculous -- if they did, you wouldn't see them as often as you do. Lighting represents only 8.8% of residential power consumption in the U.S. [3], about half that of air conditioning (which is a low PF load), and with fluorescent bulbs it would be even smaller. The impact on overall apparent power consumption, if not negligible, is probably very small.
[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fluorescent_li
[2] Incandescent and 5000K fluorescent spectra compared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SPD.png
[3] http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/electricity/
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Cheap pot growers use CFL, small power bill etc...
Sodium lamps are just too hot and pricy.
Now nasa has experimented with LEDs to grow plants, but that only works best if they are evenly spaced out and deliver
light very close to the source, rather than one source thats bright, its lots of small sources close to the leaves.
Whos going to install 1000 LEDs in their ceiling?
I bought my builders special of bulbs a few weeks ago, normal "caveman" bulbs. Being in Florida, the extra wattage is noticable, because I experience it twice, once to light up the room, and once to pump the hot air out and replace it with cold air... In air conditioned year-round places, the CF offers terrific promise.
The downsides are: 1) inferior light, measurably, it doesn't cover the full spectrum that incandescent bulbs cover, but it's getting better over time. 2) start-up delay.
Thinking about my out of control electrical bill got me thinking about CF. The drawbacks are: 1) lack of dimming bulbs... solved recently, they now exist, and 2) start-up time, which got me thinking about how we use light in our house. The bulk of our light/heat is in the main rooms of the house, where the light is on constantly when we are home. Well, if I hit a button when I came home to tell my house "I'm home" (part of the automation system), I could turn on those lights immediately. By the time you get out of the car, unlock the door, and turn the alarm off, all the lights should be on at full light.
I also think that I might come out ahead using CF in the bathroom and having the lights be on all the time than I do using incandescent bulbs when needed, but that's a further quest. I use a lot of fixture with multiple globe lights in bathrooms, so the heat/electrical needs are large, so moving to CF when CF globes are a reality is tempting.
I also think that inside of fixtures that are 1) a pain to change, and 2) change the light anyway, the change makes sense. OTOH, light quality matters. My electrician put CF in the high hat lighting we put in a room, and the light was painful, and the buzzing was killing me. However, I think that with the newer bulbs (this was almost two years ago), this has become less of an issue.
The main thing is, if you live in an area with heat, the savings are minor. The regular bulbs generate heat at near enough to 100% efficiency that the main difference is the comparable costs of electric vs. gas/oil for the heat, so while you'll save some money, it won't be the massive savings that those of us with year-round AC see.
Alex
We're slowly getting CFL in all shapes and sizes...:
I am guessing that the twist-shaped bulbs will be short lived, because they are "weird" and slow adoption, we'll see.
Alex
I didn't release these light bulbs were so good. When the lease runs out on my apartment, I'm taking these bulbs with me.
It's a good idea... so good that it's been on the market for a long, long time.
Go to your local hardware or electric store and look for a timer switch. The typical model has a mechanical twist knob like an old-fashioned kitchen timer. Twist the knob to the number of minutes you want the lights on, and it counts down. They're often used in bathrooms for vent fans or built-in electric heat lamps, but they'll work just fine with lights.
Better yet, install motion-sensor switches where appropriate, so the lights are on when you're in the room...
Mythbusters also claimed that the startup surge for some of those lights (regular, CFL, etc.) was something like "50,000 watt-seconds", which is ridiculous. I like the show overall, but they aren't perfect.
I've seen versions at my local home depot, but here is an example of one: 2-5-10-15 Minute Switch. There are also some that are 15/30/45/60, and some that you press once for 15 minutes, twice for 30, etc., until 5 presses (or press and hold) when it is on until turning off.
Alex
My home has been completely CF for 6 years now. Early on, I had purchased small lots from a wide variety of manufacturers to determine which ones were better, and it was quickly apparent that Home Depot's Commercial Electric brand outdid all the rest in terms of performance and cost, and I've been pleased with the lifespan as well. I do not have any problems with slow turn on, and they reach full brightness in just 20sec or so. The only bulb in the house with slow turn-on is a Phillips CF buglight on the front porch...
I saw a sizable reduction in my electricity bill, and changing a light bulb is now a relatively rare event in this household.
Now, in my shop, I use the 4ft T8 bulbs. Marvelous light output.
Minor note. Most ceiling fans with remote controls do not like the inductive load of the CF bulbs. The bulbs will flicker badly. In those fixtures, I put a single low wattage (20W) incandescent bulb along with the other CFs, to provide enough resistive load to keep the triacs operating. Same is true of most lights controlled by motion detectors.
Wal-Mart is doing this because either:
a) Some large incandesent bulb maker won't give them the deal they want
or
b) It increases there revenue(if not profits).
It is likely to be B.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The folks at http://www.onebillionbulbs.com/ are on a mission to encourage lots of people to try CFLs (using colored Flash maps and stats and things). It's worth a look if you like this sort of thing. (And they don't care if you buy your bulbs at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, or S-Mart.)
About half the incandescents in our house have been replaced. More to come.
I see a lot of angst in this discussion without a lot of careful thought. (Hey, this IS /. after all... I shouldn't be surprised.)
p ?t=104314
The performance of these bulbs does vary ***greatly*** with the orientation of their installation.
As a personal example, I bought some CFLs for my parents' house and installed them base-up in overhead recessed fixtures. They were very understandably unhappy with the startup time - almost a minute of dim light in a kitchen is very unacceptable. But those same bulbs, base-down, were fine in other places in the same house. If I'd thought about it ahead of time, we could have purchased CFL "instant-on" bulbs and gotten much improved performance in the recessed cans.
CFLs use various types of gas mixtures, and some use drops of liquid mercury like other big fluorescents. If it's a liquid mercury bulb, it takes a short time to evaporate all the mercury when it's first powered on. In this situation, a base-down bulb will probably brighten faster than a base-up bulb, because the drop of mercury will initially be condensed near the emitter coils. The so-called "instant on" CFLs use a different, non-condensing gas mixture.
Also, the brightness profile may have some effect on bulb lifespan: instant-on bulbs may last a shorter time for various reasons. If you're willing to tolerate a slower warmup, you may pay less over the long run for bulb replacement.
See the discussion on this link, or google for "cfl base-up brightness":
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.ph
Moral of the story: there are reasons for these differences, and you can use those differences to your advantage, IF you're willing to think thru the data and specs a bit. Don't toss the baby out with the bathwater just because the "Duh, CFLs are good, heh heh heh" line isn't the whole answer.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I have a bunch of different ones, purchased at different times (and naturally now I can't remember which I put in which fixtures). I have some that I got at Home Depot a few years ago, I think they might have been a GE product, which aren't bad. I just remember buying whatever said it was 5000K and was least-expensive for the lumen output. At the time I didn't know much about CRI, but I can't complain too much; to my eye, they're pretty good. Several of them are in up-lighting fixtures that reflect the light off of a slightly off-white ceiling, which lowers the apparent temperature slightly.
What I also have, and really recommend if you aren't bothered by the aesthetics of it, are using linear fluorescents. Once you go from CFLs to T8s, you have a lot more choice in bulbs. In my basement workroom I have a number of inexpensive 4' shop-type fixtures set up with 5000K 95CRI tubes. I think they are made by Sylvania (now about $10 a piece, although I think I paid more when I bought mine a while back; I remember paying more in bulbs than I did for the fixture). I have been looking towards the Philips PLUS brand for the future, but I'll have to take a look at the Bluemax ones. It's unfortunate that linear fluorescents are associated in many people's minds with unflattering light and dated interior decorating styles, because they really are the best bang for the buck, and particularly in areas like kitchens, I think people would be really sold on them if they're loaded with the right tubes.
In general I've been hesitant to order bulbs off of the internet, although I suppose it's silly (I've ordered things more fragile than CFLs mail-order before), and most of my choices have been based on whatever was currently in stock at Home Depot or Lowes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I would by a zero point energy creator at wal-mart for a nickle.
SOrry. Wal-Mart is a bad player, a bad neighbor, and just plain greedy. Scroodge greed. Yoou know, the type of greed where someone with a billion dollars would still feed their family cold porrdige is it saved a nickle greedy.
The a wierd set of circumstance that can only happen in real life, I know a 2 VPs of companies that deal with Wal-mart, some Wal-mart employees, and a former upper management corporate type that worked at wal-mart.
None of them have anything good to say, all of them are afraid to speak out.
So no, I wopn't shop at wal-mart for any reason.
Shop locally when ever possible.
There are much better corporation out there.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In my 3-year-old house, there's only a couple places I can change:
1 downstairs fan, 1 upstairs fan. Outside lights are on dimmer/timers, so they won't work there. Other upstairs fans use halogen, as does my torchiere downstairs. My chandelier uses a bunch of tiny bulbs - I'd love to upgrade those (can I?).
And for the two fans that we could use CFLs on, my wife says they look ugly and won't consider it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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Next time, read the fucking post before saying asinine things like:
Where did I say that selling things for a profit is evil? I didn't, you idiots, and I made a deliberate and conscious effort not to, because I don't believe it myself. What I said is that selling things for a profit doesn't make anyone less evil. Did I say it makes them more evil? No, you're reading shit into my posts that I didn't put in there, and they're evil for reasons, some of which have little to do with profit.
Since you're too damned stupid to understand simple English, let me spell it out in baby words: Wal-Mart is evil. Wal-Mart does something that makes them more profit that also just happens to encourage environmental friendliness. Wal-Mart is not less evil as a result.
Got it? I hope so, because it seems like a pretty excruciatingly simple concept to me. If Enron had embezzled millions of dollars of employee's retirement funds to run "conserve electricity, save the environment" ads to get some sort of green endorsement from environmental organizations, would it be less evil as a result? Hell, no! I see this as exactly the same kind of thing.
Wal-Mart stands to make just as much or even more money off of this kind of thing as they did before. What they're doing, they're not doing out of any sense of virtue, it's simply a business decision.
I was at the Costco by my house and they look to be partnered with APS for an instant rebate and the ones i picked up were cheaper than regular incandescent bulbs! (8 pack 60 watt (using 13watts) after INSTANT rebate was like $3.29 or so + tax)
For the life of me I can't decide whether you're trying to be funny, or are honestly unaware of the existance of timed light switches.
unsigned int question = 0x2B | ~(0x2B)
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As far as the bulbs, the 40watt bulbs seem to be working fine. I replaced every 60 watt bulb with them. Considering the price seems pretty fair so long as you can achieve a cost savings from the monthly electric bill and bulb life. Eventually, as more people purchase these bulbs, replacement bulb costs should get cheaper also.
They produce far less greenhouse gassses to light? Well DUH. If it uses 1/4 the energy it produces 1/4 the greenhouse gasses to generate that electricity.
I'm curious, however, as to how they are "greener" to manufacture? A flourescent bulb has toxic stuff inside, plus ceramics (which takes energy to fire) while an incandescent bulb has glass, tungsten, and alumanum, brass, or copper. How is a CF bulb greener to produce?
Note, I use CFs because I'm a cheapass. Being greener is an added advantage.
-sm62704
I've actually worked in a minilab (put myself through college, actually), and you're exactly right that people would blame the processor if they got green photos back. Nobody wants to hear about how fluorescent light is actually green, etc., etc. -- the photos people want are not what's accurate, but what they remember seeing. Thus everything is printed as if it were illuminated by 5000K light, and consumer films are hugely over-saturated: because that's how the human mind remembers things. But because of this, most people never realize that the light in their office is really green, nor that in their homes really yellow; it's only because of someone fudging the settings during the printing process that they all look the same. If they ever got back photos that accurately represented what the camera 'saw,' they would probably assume that something went wrong in the development process.
It's accepted practice to compensate for fluorescent light during the printing process by color balancing until the photo "looks right," which generally involves increasing the magenta and yellow a bit. (Magenta being the opposite of green, this removes the majority of the cast; then you just fiddle with it to get it right.) Most people don't realize how much of a subjective process photo-finishing is; two different printers (and I'm talking about "printer" as a person-who-does-printing, not a machine) could produce slightly different output depending on how they thought an image should look. This is particularly true since on older optical processing equipment, what the printer looks at when they're color balancing isn't the image as it will look when printed, but just the negative, illuminated by a well-calibrated source. You learn pretty quickly to 'read' a negative and tell the difference between a daylight scene and a fluorescent one (otherwise you end up redoing photos when they come out of the machine green, and nobody likes that).
I suspect (and I've been out of the commercial finishing business for a while now) that the newer digital equipment takes some of the guesswork out by automatically removing the film base color and showing you a positive image to balance, but ultimately it's still going to come down to a subjective decision of how to print the image.
On a digital camera you can tell the 'true color' of fluorescent light pretty easily; just lock your camera on it's 5000K white-balance setting (flash, or better yet white-balance to a piece of paper outdoors) and then photograph some white paper inside. It should be pretty immediately apparent, if the fluorescent bulbs are the 'cool white' variety, how green the light is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The point is, we need to be ready to flame corporations when they do evil/stupid things, but then not be afraid to encourage them when they do the right thing.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I recently switched from oil-fired water baseboard to forced air and had to choose between gas, propane, and electric. The existing oil boiler was the most expensive, primarily because the efficiency was 54% when it was brand new 40 years ago. Next was Propane, at about $34 per million BTUs with a 97% efficient gas boiler, then a new oil-boiler at $18.50 or so, then electric resistance at $16.50 or $16.75, then natural gas a $14.50. For me, I would have had to spend $3k to get the natural gas to the house. Also, with a heat pump, I can figure getting about 1.5-1.7x the electric in as heat out, over the course of a season (yes, techically the HSPF is 8.7 on my unit, for a COP of 2.5, but I derate those numbers). I use resistance strips in the rarely used bedrooms where the ductwork couldn't be economically run (the ducts were in for AC already).
So, in reality, heating your house with incandescent lightbulbs is only about 10-12% less cost efficent (in my area) than natural gas, and half the cost of heating with propane.
As for the ratios - my eyes will claim about 3:1 in light output on a good CFL over incandescent. Where I had 60W incandescents and swapped them for CFLs, I found I had to go up to a 100W equivalent (22W, iirc) lamp. I don't have a good handle on lifespan, but my R20s I have in the kitchen are probably the most abused, and I expect them to last 2 years, minimum. While CFLs will pay back in electricity, the capital cost, accounting for lost investment opportunity, is about even.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There is no way that bulbs containing glass, plastic and semiconductors take LESS greenhouse gas to manufacture.
If your RTFA, it only talks about the greenhouse gas used to POWER the bulb.
And, to continue my cynical rant, I've been extremely dissappointed with the lifetime of these bulbs now deployed across my house. I'd say that 30% have failed after 2 years, significantly less than the advertised 10 year life. It doesn't seem to matter which brand I try either !
Lurking in the desert
It's been pointed out that CF bulbs actually result in a decrease in environmental mercury if your electricity is supplied by a coal-fired power plant. The amount of mercury released by the coal burned to generate the power the incandescent bulb uses that the CF doesn't is greater than the amount of mercury in the CF itself. So you still come out ahead.
You must be one of those people who count from New York City or LA. You can't deal with all those stupid shotgun toting rednecks in fly over country. (Who the hell would live anywhere else than New York or LA?) Only stupid people live in flyover country. And besides its all those republicans that live in fly-over country that are the reason people are shooting each other in the democratically controlled cities like LA and NY. Once we get rid of them rednecks everything will be ok and global warming will end.
...but I only see in infra-red, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, the closer to natural light is an advantage for the seasonally affected, the lower-wattage compacts mean that you can put brighter bulbs in places like the 'fridge or stove, without damaging something due to heat, and you don't have to get up on the ladder and risk breaking your grandmother's irreplacable chandelier nearly as often. One of these days some NY designer is going to figure out how to use the spiral decoratively, and CFL's will be beyond hip. (at which point we'll all change to LEDs instead)
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
WalMart could bring down the cost of LED lights. That would be impressive but CFL is not interesting.
Perhaps a long post like this one is not a proper one for "instant gratification" people. We do like also not to read that much. Thanks for your effort though.
Florescent lamps leak prodigious amounts of UV light through their phosphor coating (it's what stimulates the phosphor to glow) which can cause skin cancer. I never thought about it until my skin doctor recommended wearing sunscreen at work and explained it.
The cheapest ones I've found at Lowes (a 6-pack for $9.98) are all instant-on. I use 'em all over the place, and I've burned out a whopping total of two in nine years.
The light they make is close enough to regular incandescents that we can't tell the difference. They do stand stand out a bit if you mix them with halogens, though.
I had an outdoor CFL and it took FOREVER to get to full brightness when it was cold outside.
Perhaps the best thing Wal-Mart has done is make American manufacturers more competitive.
The holy grail in manufacturing these days is to get a supply contract with Wal-Mart. It ensures a huge market for the product and major profits. However, Wal-Mart doesn't just deal with anybody. Wal-Mart will force a manufacturer to get more efficient and cut costs before Wal-Mart accepts them. Examples I remember were when Wal-Mart made a company give up a high-rent Manhattan headquarters, and another an expensive corporate jet.
I've slowly been converting to CFL over the last couple of months. Besides Walmart our local city government here in Fort Collins, Colorado has been subsidising the cost making them very affordable. There are a few things I don't like, such as the warm-up time, but my biggest issue to date is the size.
Most of the lower priced CFL are not the same size as a standard bulb. Most of my closed in overhead fixtures are too small for the bulbs. I have a few 3-way lamps (the ones with 3 brightness settings) and the 3-way bulbs (50-100-150) are gigantic. The ones I bought actually had little extenders for the top of the lamp. This worked but is a bitof a kludge.
My house uses a lot of the R30 type recessed lighting and the bulbs work great for these. The only place I haven't been able to replace the R30 are in areas, like my HT, where I have a dimmer on the switch. I've read they have dimmable versions of CFL available but they are $$$.
When converting try and think of lights that you leave on the most first. I started by changing my outside lights. This was also nice because they normal bulbs seem to burn out all the time...
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
If you're bothered by the .5 second delay with the CF bulbs then you should just learn to flip the switch a half second earlier.
Problem solved.
I try to use CFL's whenver I can. I have a couple of problems.
I installed Dimming switches in several places, and while I've heard that there are now CFL's that work with Dimmer switches, I've not actually seen any at a store. Can anyone confirm that they do exist, and where you get them?
Also, the color of light they produce is a very stark white. My wife refuses to let me put them in because it hurts her eyes when she's in a room with them on. Again, I've heard rumors that there are CFL's that are softer in color. What "color" would you recommend, and where do you buy them?
The shape of the basic ones look kind of like a soft server ice cream cone. Again, my wife thinks this detracts from the decore of the house when the lights are off (yeah, I know frickin' ridiculous). I've seen some that wrap a normal looking cover over the top, but when the lights are off you can still see the bulb underneath.
So, basically, they're used in the garage and the unfinished section of the basement. Neither of these places are ideal environments for CFL's, so they last ~ 6 months. If I can't find a way to get more use out of them, or a better return on my investment, I'm not planning to buy anymore.
When you buy them keep all receipts and packaging, because you will need to get them replaced under warranty. They don't last the 5 years that they're garaunteed too, so while they may be better for the environment, they're not going to save you any money, if you just toss them and get them replaced.
It is disconcerting to flip on the light switch, and get that momentary feeling that nothing happened. It has been engrained in our head. When we turn on the switch, the light comes right on. If it doesn't, it is burned out. And for that first part of a second, you get that, "oh no" feeling. Now, I can override this feeling with my own logic. But the feeling is still there. And I have to deal with others also having the same perception.
Probably more important when I go to sell my home. I don't want any buyers to have a negative impressions if I can control it. Likely, if I still have any bulbs with on delays, I'm going to have to make sure those lights are already on before someone looks at the house.
Some things just have to take human preference into consideration.
I have tried these bulbs, and they suck. If you don't mind feeling like your in a cave then go for 'em, but I will stick with my good old energy guzzling indacesants... On a side note, I hear it's because they work differantly than regular bulbs. While indacesants produce light, CCFL's suck up darkness. (which maked them more effecient but not as good) Also watch them release all their darkness back into the room once you switch them off.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
I have also seen 30W ones as well here, although I do not know what the equilivent in incandencent is.
The dimmer issue is the only real problem with them at the moment.
I know you were joking, AC, but it would have been better if you hadn't.
It's very, very unfortunate, but in perhaps 7 years, Slashdot editors have not learned how to be editors. kdawson, the Slashdot editor for this story, chose a title that makes it sound like Wal-Mart is a drug pusher: "Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs".
That set the tone. A lot of ignorant people commented on the story, ruining the discussion. People began talking about mercury, showing amazing ignorance. See my comment below about mercury: "[Oregon's] largest mercury contributor is the Ash Grove Cement Co. in Durkee, which emitted an estimated 1,538 pounds in 2005."
Wal-Mart is selling compact fluorescent bulbs in this area for 99 cents each. They are excellent.
that the slight delay in turning on is intentional, as it warms up the filament in order to extend the life of the bulb? Don't quote me on this, but I'm thinking somewhere in the order of 2x the life by allowing a short warm-up time. You know how most bulbs burn out immediately after being turned on, right? It's because of the rapid change in temperature in addition to a degrading filament.
Couldn't find a price in the article (may have looked to fast).
...
For the last 2-3 years I have been getting them for less than $1 each.
Is Wally mart doing better?
The only things that are hard to find (at a low price) are the very small wattages, the CFL equivalent of 25W.
THe local drug store had 20w CFls at $.99. These are too big for most things but
Can't really see that WM is doing something , other than blowing their own horn.
MythBusters usually does a great job in dispelling urban myths. However in this case they completely dropped the ball in claiming that LEDs produce more lumens per watt than CFLs. As one already responded to this post with govn't web statistics, the CFLs produce approx 20-30% more lumens per watt than LEDs. The reason why MythBusters got this stat was that the CFLs have a slight 'warm up' and generate a power spike during initial startup; something not shared with the LEDs. So, if you are turning the lights on for only 2min intervals - the LEDs will have favorable stats. I normally keep my lights on for several deca-minutes/hours at a time.
Well, I'd love to support saving the environment, so for several years now I've been periodicly purchasing these and informally testing them. They never seemed to last very long or to produce the claimed equivalent levels of light.
:-(
The level of output light has definitely improved in the bulbs I bought in 2006 compared to those purchased in 2005 and earlier, but the bulb life has still been very poor.
At the end of 2005 I wired my garage with eight electrical outlets in the ceiling and put an adaptor and bulb into each of them. I put in two 100w-equivalent flourescent bulbs, two 75w-equivalents, two 100w "long-life" incandescents, and two "normal" 100w bulbs. All bulbs are on a pair of switched circuits controlled by one switch, so they're all turned on at exactly the same times. The garage isn't heated and I live in Indiana, so temperatures vary from 0 degrees F to 110 degrees F or so.
Two of the flourescents failed within a few months, one 100w and one 75w. One of the "normal" bulbs failed within three months. One of the "long-life" incandescents failed after about 6 months. The remaining 75w flourescent failed in about 9 months. The remaining 100w flourescent sometimes is dim, but is usually ok.
So the bulbs that remain are:
- 1 normal incandescent.
- 1 long-life incandescent.
- 1 100w flourescent.
The flourescent's cost about 7x as much as the normal incandescents, provided I don't go with the least expensive incandescents. The long-life incandescents cost about 3x as much as the normal ones. Neither seems to last longer (and the flourescents didn't last well at all).
In my (admittedly very poorly controlled) experiment, the normal incandescents come out as a very clear winner in terms of cost -- the cost savings in electricity (presuming there really is one) doesn't even come *close* to making up the cost of either the flourescents or the long-life incandescents.
Very disappointing.
I'm still curious why this was marked as funny, rather than insightful. I know I also hate the full brightness of lights in the morning. Heck, I walk around with the lights off when I get up in the middle of the night, just because I prefer it. Dim lights, even if only for the first 15 seconds, are very nice, IMO.
I used to use only fluorescent bulbs, both traditional and compact in my house, until I started recording my music again. I don't remember if the early CFL's were any better (the $20 ones made by the bigs, like Philips, rather than the cheap-ass ones made by the off-brands they sell at Lowe's and HD), but I got so much interference in my systems because of them, that I had to turn off all the lights in the house just to get anything done. This did not well please She Who Must Be Obeyed. So, I replaced all the CFL's with regular incandescents, and I'm back in business. The regular big fluo's I can live without, but they're noisy, too.
As an aside, as an Amateur Radio operator, I can tell you that many, many, household appliances are guilty of severe RFI these days. I really don't think that I should have to run around putting chokes and such on devices I paid several hundred dollars to own.
Now, where's that FCC when you need them?
Thats a great ideal. And I hope it works...
But in reality, what happens is that the extra time and luxury (aka: wealth) the worker is supposed to receive, is actually received by a few at the top -- and the worker winds up working the same amount that he always worked. Those benefits of extra time, money, and luxury are not realized by the workers -- they are realized by the owners, through lower costs. If there were more equity in the system, your ideal might be closer to realization. But as long as the "rich and powerful" control the system, the system will always be stacked against the worker and the benefits of cheaper costs will go up the chain, not down the chain.
Communism is about as close as you can get to addressing that inequality. And we all know how that worked out.
The long story short is this: there is a difference between owners and workers. Workers are contractors and receive a wage. That's it. And really, that's all there should be. Owners, on the other hand, take substantially more risk and therefore, stand to receive more of this wealth we are talking about.
(and I am not picking a side here. I am only laying out what actually happens when costs are lowered and efficiencies are gained)
There is a delay I would say it less than a second. It reminds me of watching a sitcom. When ever someone on TV turns a light on or off there is a half second delay as the studio lights ramp up or down. The only realy problem I have with CFL's is that when I have them plugged into an X-10 light module they blink. I assume this is because the X-10 module is letting a small about of electricity "leak" through so every half second the charge is enough to excite the florescent. Switching to X-10 appliance modules does fix this problem.
" That makes convincing your family that CF are a good idea more difficult because you're changing two things at once." Don't convince them, just do it. (changing to CF that is, not changing from warm to daylight). Over a 6 month period I change all the bulbs in our house to CF (about 60 bulbs) and my wife never noticed.
I would love to adopt CFL bulbs, but I cant get over how much better GE reveal bulbs look than regular old bulbs.
Are there any CFLs with the same color temp. as the GE Reveal bulbs?
That yellowish color is stomach churning.
That was the best post of the week. Thank you. Excellent sarcasm. If only I had points.
No Reg link to the article, courtesy of the New York Times Link Generator.
Here ya go. Of course, at $49.99/ea, they'd be VERY expensive to deploy over the whole house..
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
Even the compact flourescent bulbs need to be disposed of properly. They should not just be thrown in the trash. They contain (small amounts) of mercury...
I'll consider Wal-Mart as a source when they commit to taking back -- and actually recycling -- the old CFL bulbs.
Huh? Wal*Mart is a reseller. Can you imagine the duplication of effort if every reseller had to recycle everything it sold? Every convenience mart in the country would be driven out of business.
The better question is why doesn't your community have a recycling program? I can bring my used fluorescents down to the recycling center no matter where they came from, at least twice a week. Twice a year I can drive up to the hazardous materials center and have guys in suits unload my unneeded chemicals right out of my trunk. It doesn't cost the town much money at all (<$1/person/year).
If you want to talk about manufacturers helping to fund some of those recycling programs with built-in costs, then that's a discussion worth having. But to make every Wal*Mart a HazMat depot isn't the way to solve this.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just FYI, I bought a really cheap (73c) CFL made by Lights of America at WalMart a couple of days ago, and it broke after one day. That was even faster than regular light bulbs.
I would get that fixture repaired immediately. If the fixture is changing functionality based on temperature, it indicates that you have two wires that touch sometimes, and not others. This means that you very likely have arcing, and likely a lot of heat generation. This is a recipe for your having your house burn down, and people dieing. You really don't want yourself our someone you care about dieing because you just haven't gotten around to fixing an outlet.
CRT screens also strobe, and it has been shown that watching television quickly lulls a viewer into a highly suggestible state where the brain activity drops very low, into something called an 'alpha state'. It even happens with a static image on the screen. When in a highly suggestible state, audio signals can reach the core of your mind and stick there. This is by design.
Why on earth would I want to install that kind of lighting all over my home? Yuck!
Why do they put that kind of lighting in malls, offices, schools and public buildings? Oh, because it's so much cheaper. Oh, okay. That's a very convenient reason. I'll stop thinking about it then. --Even though if I were planning to affect the minds of an entire population, I'd probably come up with a tactic exactly like that. . .
-FL
I think the fixture size issue will just go away as the CFLs become more popular. I would have less issue with the toxic issue if we had the same kind of rules about collection in the US. Unfortunately, our current situation is that the solutions offered to us now for disposal are "Maybe Walmart COULD start collecting them", and "there are 50 or 60 different places in the US that collect them". This combined with the fact most people don't even know they are toxic and those that do, often don't care means that the vast majority of them will end up in the garbage.
Of course, perhaps this could be a good use of RFID. If the manufacturers would drop a non-unique RFID tag into the bulbs during manufacture, the garbage collectors could identify with a scanner if a can contained bulbs, before it even makes it into the truck. By being non-unique, there should be no privacy issues. I also suspect that most people would not go to the effort of finding and destroying the RFID tag, just so they can get the bulb to be taken in the regular garbage, and at the very least, it would make it absolutely clear that they should not be thrown away in the regular garbage. That would only leave the people who are doing it on purpose.
Does your shirt change to an ugly color when your monitor is not calibrated?
You have some valid points--or maybe I should say some of your points have a valid basis--but the color and nature of the light in one's home is a very basic environmental factor with which one should be comfortable. You might just as well write a scathing diatribe in support of an air purifier that stinks just a little, or a generator that only makes a little bit of screechy whine 24 hours a day.
Evil is the money of root.
I've been looking for these things in my local Home Depot for years and it is getting better, but still not really...
- they do finally have the three way CFL bulbs again, after a hiatus of several years, and they even come with plastic harp extenders to make it more likely to fit in your lamp. However, the harp extenders will not work with my lamps. The good news is they accepted the opened package for return without fuss.
- Dimmable, Ha! I wish. As of two days ago, the only dimmable CFLs they had were the candelabra base and they were way too dim or way too large for any of my chandeliers. The only chandelier I have with space for them currently has 40W bulbs and I think those were only 15W-Equiv.
Goddam that was great! If I had any points I would give them all to you. I too have lost patience with the human race and their constant whining. Thank you for ranting.
After we moved three years ago, I sucked it up and switched nearly every bulb in my new house (3500 sq. ft. or so) to compact fluorescent. My "budget billing" electric bill was reduced by about $35/month. I figure this pays for about a ten-pack of decent CFL bulbs, which is far less than I ever need to buy. There is only one bulb I haven't replaced - the enclosed ceiling-fan fixture fits a CFL bulb just fine, but the CFL light makes the warm "goldenrod" paint color in that room look a sort of sickly green. Even the "natural light" CFL didn't seem to help, so I put the incandescent back in. Yes, even a zealot like me can sacrifice a few watts for aesthetics so that one room looks nicer for the short period each day that it's artificially lit.
Since the transition, a few of the lower-quality bulbs have burned out. I stick these in a bag and swing by the city hazardous waste dropoff center every year or so. The rest have been burning for thousands of hours while tolerating frequent switching on-off-on-off-on-off (yes, I have kids). A couple of my bulbs have been with me since the mid-1990s. I anticipate that most of them will last long enough that LED bulbs will be cheap by the time the CFLs do burn out.
Do I stumble around in darkness enduring long start-up times? Is there any conceivable reason to switch back? Does anyone even notice my house is "different" when they visit? The answers are no, hell no, and no (but secretly I sometimes wish they would - meanwhile I'll settle for posting about it on Slashdot).
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
Moe: Oh, boy! The deep fryer's here. Heh heh, I got it used from
the navy. You can flash-fry a buffalo in forty seconds.
Homer: Forty seconds? But I want it now!
As a ham, I want to know what the RFI profile of CFLs are before putting them in the house. Normal flourescent lights are sometimes sources of RFI. If CFLs are likely to interfere with my radio operations, I'm not likely to use them.
For some of the rooms I use CFB I get more than enough light. I don't worry about what is equivalent, I just worry about what gives out the right amount of light for the room. In some cases I put in lower wattage CFB's for the room than what I was using. In other cases, I put in higher wattage ones.
For one big room I replaced a halogen torch lamp (300 watts) with a 68-watt metal halide from a company called Microsun (http://wwww.microsun.com). The are some disadvantages. For example, you can't turn it off and on right away. But for this room I usually have a light on for the entire evening. The 68-watt bulb is slightly brighter than the halogen and produces very nice light.
I have been switching all of my lights to CFL's as they go out.
I have always run 60 watt bulbs and am now running 13 watt CFL's
Lets do the math
13 watts x 26 bulbs = 338 watts per hour
338 watts x 7 hours per day = 2,336 watts per day if I leave them all on for 7 hours
60 watts x 26 bulbs = 1560 watts per hour
1560 watts x 7 hours per day = 10,920 watts per day if they are left on
lets see the money
2.336 kilowatts x 30 days = 70.8 kwts
10.920 kilowatts x 30 days = 327.6 kwts
70.8 * $0.142 = $10.05
327.6 * $0.142 = $46.52
mmm looks like I am saving money
All I know is that at 9.95 for 3 or $3.32 each it only takes 1 month and you paid for 6 of them
My bower bill (the non fuel surcharge part) dropped by ~ 80% after replacing all of the bulbs
Now if I can just kick the power company in the bulbs to get them to lower the fuel surcharge to be at least equal to the regular bill and not 3 times the bill...
--
Just floating around in the BSOD
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Let's say I decide to upgrade all my old incandescent bulbs to CFLs, because it's better for the environment, uses less energy, etc. Now I have all of these old incandescent bulbs (which still work). Other than simply throwing them away, what can you do with them?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I've got a couple of fixtures that I've put CFLs in, rated for 5 years and I've gotten *maybe* 8 months out of any bulb.
When they go out, is it normal for the bulbs to brown a bit at the bottom?
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
There is a bar in my town that has motion sensitive lights in the bathroom. It's nice to be able to walk into the bathrom and instantly get light - but it invariably goes off before you finish returning your beer to the water cycle.
Which leaves you waving your hands in the air like a Naughty By Nature fan while trying to keep your waist still enough to avoid calling in the mop guy. But, I'm going to put one in my hall and closet now...
My question is: When switching to CFs, which is more economical, to throw away all your existing incandescant bulbs or change them over as the old ones burn out? It looks like my electicy rates are between 7.3 and 8.3 cents/kWh.
I talked with my cousin recently and he is doing the throw away method, while I'm doing the gradual switchover. Thanks in advance for any advice!
qbert
Yes, damn it, 5 minutes to reach full brightness is far too long. Especially if I only have to go into the room for a minute or so. Now, from personal experiance, the lower K bulbs (2700, 3000) come on much faster, but have a more yellowish light to them. The higher K bulbs (3500+) come on much slower (as much as 2 seconds to start producing light - which is slow enough that I used to reflexively flick the switch again) and take far longer to reach full brightness. A lot of consumers might not realize this and think the bulbs are junk.
> I have had problems with them interfering with IR remotes.
That's interesting when you consider one aspect; fluorescent bulbs give out *much* less infrared than conventional lights, which is one reason for their efficiency.
You can test this for yourself if you have an IR filter. Hold it in front of a webcam (these are typically IR sensitive). If you point the cam at a conventional bulb it will appear very bright, overloading the sensor and overspill "glow" surrounding the bulb. Do the same with a fluorescent bulb, even close-up, and you'll see a noticeably lit, but *far* dimmer object.
I believe this. I replaced some of my Christmas light strands with LED lights. I saved *so* much money this GE Christmas Season, that I'm replacing all of them next year. I got truer color out of them, too. Red ones were red, white ones, white, and blues, blue.
Ok, it's goofy, but it's one way to see the difference. FWIW... I have every light in my house rigged with CFLs, and while I dislike the sometimes yellowy color, eh, I deal with it. I'd rather NOT have a $200 light bill, thank you. My power bill went from $160 down to $50. Believe it!
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
People who say they cost significantly more than regular lightbulbs, we regularly buy 3 packs of these compact flourescent lightbulbs for 1 dollar (or 1 dollar each for a total of 3 dollars) we just look for them on sale (like at walmart).
over the course of a few months we swapped out all of the lights in my house for these lower powered bulbs and our bill has decreased by 40 dollars... quite the savings... and the difference in lumens is hardly noticable.
The only peculiar thing about these bulbs is if you plug them into a varible lighting source (like a dimmer) they will flicker horribly unless on the highest setting, I believe this is due to the frequency nature of flourescent light bulbs.. much like how CRT monitors have refresh rates, these bulbs do also.
While I support Wal-mart's CFL effort, the main criticism regarding Wal-mart is that when all of the costs are considered, they are not actually cheaper. Because Wal-mart does not always provide benefits, we're paying for some of their employees' health care. Because of Wal-mart's drive to the bottom line, they ship most things from China, there is higher demand for fuel, an increase in the trade deficit, and fewer manufacturing jobs here in the US.
For people who really need to save money (few posting here would be included in this group.. if you're that strapped for cash but still paying for an internet connection, reevaluate your priorities), Wal-mart is the way to go. For those of us that can spare a few bucks, it's wiser to shop elsewhere.
I keep seeing CFL articles on here. I don't like the CFLs I have used or seen used in other's homes over the years for the following reasons:
1) Color temp is all wrong. It needs to have a similiar full-spectrum output to the GE "Reveal" incandesant bulbs to be accepted by my wife or my self. The Reveal box does not list color temp, so I don't know what to compare it to. Does anyone on here know?
2) Turn-on delay. It must be less than 500ms and it must STAY THAT WAY. Even in the cold basement or garage. And after a few years of use.
3) Flicker. Though I understand from reading the comments that some new ones use 10KHz+ switchers. Those sound like they would work. 60Hz flicker will NOT be tollerated.
4) They must work reliably in recesed fixtures. Our new home has many "can-lights" and I'm not willing to replace them with surface mounted fixtures.
5) Noise. No buzzing will be tollerated. If I can hear it at 3ft, it's too loud.
6) Dimmers, I like dimmers. Yes, they make dimmable CFLs, see #7.
7) Price. $3/ea is about the most I will pay for a standard size light bulb/CFL.
8) Looks. For exposed bulbs, I don't want to look at the twisty shape. Put a cover on it.
If you know of a CFL that can meet those requirements, please post the brand and such. The posts saying "don't buy a cheap bulb!" are useless. I want exact models and a place to buy them. A URL to an online store product would be great.
Psst. I've got a secret for you.
I'll tell you if you PROMISE not to tell anyone else.
Do you promise?
OK, then.
Here's the secret:
Just because it's expensive does not mean that it is not cheap. Little or no additional money was spent on the manufacture of that cheap garment than that spent manufacturing any other item of similar material and form from that country of origin. (It would seem that seamstresses would all get paid about the same in a given geographical area, etc, etc.)
There is another annoyance when converting to CF bulbs that no one has mentioned ... at least in the posts I read minus the 600+ rated 2 or lower.
My wife and I painted our kitchen a light-yellow/gold color. With the incandescent bulb, the color is exactly what we thought it would be based on the paint strip sample from Home Depot. However, when you replace the incadescent bulbs with CF bulbs, the color changes drastically. Now it looks like tinted brown/yellow, and neither of us are too fond of it, nor the prospect of repainting our kitchen. So back in went the incadescent bulb.
I just thought of something that would make a great patent. A light switch that only stays on for a specified period of time, say 10 minutes.
You mean like the timer switches that are widely available?
sdb
Doesn't this go entirely against Wal-Mart's business model?
People buy shit there for the price, not for the value.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I've done some searching, but not a whole lot, and the best in selection I've seen is SuperBrightLEDs.com: https://www.superbrightleds.com/edison.html and http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/comme rce.cgi?product=MR16
You're best bet would to go with something that has a 3watt Luxeon LED in it that's designated "Warm White" which has a color temperature of 3400K. Check out either MR16-WLX1 or MR16-WLX3 on their Commerce site. I don't know about the number of lumens they put out. It will probably be a bit less than incandescent, but should work with a dimmer as intended. I'm waiting on some red 3watt Luxeon LEDs for an automotive application and they're rated for about 150 lumens IIRC.
"produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use" Nevermind all the mercury in these things.
So your issue is basically that you don't find it inconvenient and you think these things will save the planet, then you assume everyone else thinks the same thing and criticise them for not changing over right now.
Well let me point out a few things to you:
1) While they use less electricity, they offset that through the use of materials that are less than environmentally friendly (to the point where one poster complains he must go to the tip to dispose of these light bulbs as his local council considers them too toxic for the regular garbage system to take away
2) Claims about these things have been exaggerated by people who have a vested interest in making you switch to the light bulbs so they can seek a large profit. People have been disappointed by bulb life and claims at brightness among other things. Ever heard the phrase once bitten twice shy? If your first experience of a product is that it doesn't live up to its claims, are you going to push ahead and buy more, or stop and reconsider. Even more the case when it's something as basic as light - it needs to be reliable and no hassle because most of us take lighting for granted. Also does this make you wonder if claims about environmental friendliness may also have been exaggerated? Or do you trust and believe every piece of marketing you read? See point 1
3) While clearly you're not bothered by the disadvantages these things pose including a delay on cheaper units, other people may use them differently. There usage may indeed be SO different that the minor inconveniences become large enough a hassle to put people off switching. In some cases they may even make the light bulbs completely impractical.
4) When the item costs 8 times as much as your current solution, and you have a number of bulbs to replace, you have to think carefully before you act. Going out and buying a bunch of bulbs for a couple of hundred dollars is not something everyone who reads this board can afford. What would you rather do if you had children and were struggling to make ends meet? Go and buy a bunch of overpriced overhyped bulbs which may or may not be good for the environment (but you bet your sweet ass they're good for the companies that make, distribute and sell them) OR feed your damn family for the week? The only sane non-impulsive non-sheep-like way to change over is to change over one or two globes at a time and evaluate whether they meet their claims.
Instead of ranting and railing about how other people should or shouldn't act and telling them what to do with their life and their money, think for a minute what kind of pollution comes out of your keyboard. Suggesting that anyone who doesn't "get with the program" is either lazy, self centered or nasty is just ridiculous, insulting and reflects badly on you first and foremost. You remind me of south park and Cartman saying something like "hippies....hippies everywhere...they think they're saving the world but they just hug trees and smell bad"
And again something STUPID gets modded insightful here...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
But air purifiers DO alter the smell of the air in the area where they are used. Granted, most of the time it is for the better. However, we deal with different shades of light color all the time... from the sun, to a multitude of different indoor environments. And considering that very few people have daylight equivalent bulbs (grow bulbs, etc.), most are already using something that is NOT the same as sunlight.
You can get CF bulbs in shades other than the blue-white that we normally associate with flourescent bulbs.
Now, if that generator that gave a screechy whine (or alternator/serpentine belt that squeals, computer fan that is slightly loud, power inverter that is just a bit noisy, etc) cuts your electric bill in half or more, I sure would write a "scathing diatribe in support" of it.
"The search for perfection is all very well, but to look for heaven is to live here in hell."
The art of compromise is to GIVE up a little to GET a little. Existing in a world with other people means compromise.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Well, I had to stay somewhat on topic, so maybe walmart isn't the place to get the bulbs... as long as you get them somewhere else.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
I concede that the bulbs take time to achieve full brightness. But I won't accept your observation that the room stays in darkness for 2 seconds before ANY light comes out of the bulbs at all. Nor do they start at 10% and slowly work their way up. More like starting at 60% to 70% when switched on, then increasing on a curve to full brightness. However, by the time you flick the switch, walk to your chair, sit down, and get comfortable, the bulb will have been lit up to the brightness it should be at.
Thanks for pointing out the different temperature bulbs, and how they provide different shades of "white" light. Good points for those who think that CF bulbs all look the same.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
However, I personally view them as 'evil' and haven't shopped at one in over 3 years. It's not because of poor customer service or the few isolated examples of the abuse of employees' rights. I was an R&D engineer for several years for one of the world's largest consumer goods corporations (let's call it "PlastiCo"), and 25% of what PlastiCo produced was sold through Walmart. That's a massive dependency, and Walmart knows this. Walmart uses the same tactics as labor unions to extort those lower prices out of the producer, by saying "if you don't sell this product to us at x dollars, then we simply won't carry it." Often times, this means that PlastiCo is selling product to Walmart at a price lower than the cost to manufacture; that is, PlastiCo is losing money selling to Walmart.
So why keep selling to Walmart? Because consumer goods are based largely on brand recognition. For something like shampoo, or diapers, or soap, or laundry detergent, consumers pick a brand and tend to stick with it. What happens if the consumer happens to be in Walmart, wants to buy PlastiCo Brand Deodorant, only to find that Walmart doesn't carry it? The consumer is forced to try something else, often times severing that brand loyalty. So PlastiCo has to keep selling to Walmart just to keep the brand image alive.
Still, not too bad, we live in a market economy and I can see that as a natural byproduct of capitalism. I choose not to support it, and that's the power the consumer has, to not give them money. Where the deceptive practice comes in is that with Walmart demanding the low prices from the producer, the producer has no choice but to either take the full loss or to start cutting corners with what it sells to Walmart. Look at any appliance in Walmart, and often times there will be a "WALMART" sticker on the box or product, indicating it was designed specifically for Walmart. So the average consumer sees the patended PlastiCo Hair Curler 2500 at walmart for $15, when the seemingly same model was at Target for $17. So people view Walmart as cheaper, when they aren't actually comparing the exact same model, but one that was made with inferior components specifically for Walmart. It happens with appliances, cosmetics, toiletries, even pre-packaged foods (that red can of PlastiCo Columbian Ground Coffee is made with drastically inferior beans to the exact same can at your local grocer, with almost no indication on the label).
Everybody seems to look at Walmart as being this pillar of capitalism, showing that by focusing on lowering prices rather than customer service they can sell in volume and make money while undercutting competitors. But they aren't actually competing with anybody; shopping at Walmart is nothing more than paying less for an inferior product. Spend the extra couple of dollars at any other store and you get a product of much higher quality.
This is a late comment, but I have to reply:
The leather jacket was not cheap.
It was very well made, seams matched, with an eye to detail, with excellent quality components. There is shitty leather and then there is top-notch. This was "sleep in it" leather. I have seen "cheap" and this was not.
I have a Chinese made indicator micrometer, good to 50 millionths of an inch. The only thing that surpasses it, really, is my Etalon (Swiss) at over 800 dollars, US (one lives on the bench, the other is for setup). There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, and gives consistent readings time and time again.
The Chinese are no longer making just "cheap" knockoff products. It's the same thing that happened with machine tools in Japan from the 1970's to 80's (which brought the death of Brown&Sharpe), which was my point.
--
BMO
It means that the very dirty power plants in China release enormous quantities of mercury which become part of the atmosphere anywhere on earth. The Oregon plants contribute about 2,000 pounds of mercury per year to that pollution.
Every house has that one light bulb that you just can't reach safely. In my house, the last time that bulb went out an LED screw-in unit went in. It was worth the $30+ (now much less) to know that for the next 60,000 hours of operation I can use the stairs safely without ever having to change a bulb. It's dimmer than a 40W incandescent but it's more than enough to see hazards.
LEDs are bright enough for car headlights, we just need another order of magnitude improvement in lumens per dollar to make them practical for house lighting.
Well the plant in Oregon contributes about 1 ton/year, and the rest of the US coal plants contribute about 48 tons/year.
China's coal plants contribute an estimated amount between 200 to 600 tons/year. But how much of that reaches the US? I'm sure a fair bit does, but if it's only 10% (there are other countries around China the mercury can spread to as well) then the bulk of the mercury in Oregon probably comes from Oregon or the rest of the USA.
It is (or should be) widely known that Wal-mart saves money and makes people feel like they're saving money by buying and selling seconds from manufacturers. From slightly irregular jeans to half-filled fountain pens, I've witnessed Wal-mart's "savings" first hand.
Pushing the concept behind CFLs and possibly exposing to or causing people to research LED is a good thing.
Selling inferior products of the genre and giving consumers a bad taste in their mouth for the technology as a whole is not so good.
Suck it. Make the product perform well so that it attracts consumers. Don't ask consumers to buy your junky crap because it's cheaper / more efficient. Sorry, not good enough, come back when you have a product at least as good as the one you're trying to replace.
This is not altruistic, Wal-Mart gets the money that the electricity company would get. It just happens to be a more "green" solution, good for marketing.
Nevertheless, it's a nice move.
When I retrofitted my 1940s era home, I installed dimmers on every lightswitch.
The dimmers provide a slower surge of current when a bulb is initially turned on and bulbs are only used at the brightness level required for a particular job.
I don't know if that makes their lifespan comparable to compact flourescent but they last a lot longer.
I also purchase bulbs with filaments rated for 130v. They are inexpensive by the case and last longer.
"Have you become so immersed in the current culture of Instant Gratification, that when you weigh the individual bonuses and global bonuses"
All the freaking time dude, and so do you.
Because Wal-mart does not always provide benefits, we're paying for some of their employees' health care.
This is our own dumb fault for not having universal healthcare for all citizens, and continuing to elect government representatives who don't bring this to us.
Or, if you don't like the thought of socialism, it's our own dumb fault for having laws on the books which require hospitals to provide care to indigent patients.
Either you have universal healthcare for all citizens, and contain costs that way, or you have healthcare for only people who can afford it, and everyone else is out on the street no matter how much they require medical care for survival. By not choosing one of those routes, we wind up with the mess we have now.
Wal-Mart, and every other company that doesn't provide benefits for their employees (which is every company with part-time jobs), is simply following the rules to their own advantage.
I agree that Universal is the way to go. It would have avoided the huge problems facing our auto manufacturers and other sectors that is being swamped with health care costs for their older workers and retirees.
Well, I'll address your points as numbered.
1) The materials that are being used, are already in use widely throughout the globe, in exactly the same fashion.. IE Flourescent bulbs. So the cost of disposing of them is nothing new. Further more, they last longer, so they have to be disposed of less. Further still, the savings in electricity on a household level is GREATER than the cost of disposing of the same bulbs. Further STILL, the savings on a country-wide level, by reducing the amount of electricity consumed by the inhabitants, reduces the demands on electricity. Imagine no more brown outs in California...
2) Claims about these things have been proven over and over... by at least one person responding to my post, and countless others. Once bitten, twice shy? Shall I start to cite examples of where this technology we are communicating with has failed in the past? How about cars? How about the television? How about... you name it. The more people that get on the band wagon, the more the price will drop for the bulbs individually, and the faster the efficiency will be increased by further research and development. Do we give up on solar energy, because early solar panels were not as efficient as ones you can purchase now? Is that what you are trying to get me to believe?
3) If someone needs an INSTANT ON light for a specific purpose, then they should use a bulb that turns on instantly. However, the truth is that most people do NOT need a light that turns on without any delay whatsoever. By most, I mean the majority of people out there that use electric light. THOSE people, if they switched over, would save money on their electric bills, as well as reduce their country's electrical demand. See #1. Otherwise, let the minority continue to use their instant on bulbs for their instant on needs. The tecnhology will improve to remove the delay altogether.
4) When the item costs 8 times what it is replacing, and lasts10 times as long... guess what? the MATH says it is better to make that initial investment and pay the 8 times cost. DUH!
Instead of letting ignorance rule YOUR particular thoughts, do a little research, and try listening to the people who are actually using these bulbs wisely... If we listened to people like yourself and those who complain about the delay and color quality, then we would not have things like computers to have this argument on.. for people have been complaining about boot times, monitor quality, etc.. for years. But we didn;t give up on computers, now did we?
Sheesh. I can't believe you got moderated up either.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service.
The problem(s) with Wal-Mart:
- Their size makes it too easy for them to dictate conditions to suppliers. Which means that if a supplier takes on Wal-Mart as a client, it often is simply a slow-motion suicide for the supplier. Wal-Mart will demand price cuts year after year and then dump you when you can't make the mark anymore and still make a profit.
- They don't pay their employees enough, they don't offer health care (or not enough) along with other anti-union / anti-employee tactics. Again, they get away with this because of their size.
- Basically, they're not a good corporate citizen. Killing off small businesses by selling cheap crap.
I've bought maybe $100 worth of goods in the past 7 years from Wal-Mart. There are better companies to patronize with my business. Having one big retailer is not good in the long-run, I want 6-12 healthy competitors in the market.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?