Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
"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
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
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...
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night.
Don't forget the major source of mercury pollution in the US in coal burning power plants. Perhaps the energy saved with CFLs would mean less mercury in the environment even if they are improperly disposed of.
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
If you want to complain about Walmart, complain about their shitty service, or how their employees are morons, or the over all low quality of the products they sell, or how they treat their employees like dirt. There's no shortage of reasons why Walmart could be considered "evil", but selling things for a profit isn't one of them.
Everytime you get a paycheck that isn't negative, you've sold your labor for a profit. Get over it.
Maybe not
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"
It's a great move by WalMart. This gets them great press with people calling them "not evil" on Slashdot and everything, and it cost them practically NOTHING.
Go ask - women do not like the light they throw off.
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.
They're doing this for the environment.
... that's called a "side effect".
Technically
No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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.
It's not that Walmart is suddenly "good" for selling compact fluorescent bulbs.
It's that compact fluorescent bulbs are now irredeemably evil.
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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."
Don't know what ones you have, the Philips ones I have been using for over 4 years now (no, I have not replaced a single one) give a wonderful pure white light, not sure about camera tainting, but if you want something that is lit for photography, then, well, buy the old filament type globes.
As a side note, the one light I did not change (the outside porch light) has blown about every 3 months since purchase, after 3 years I eventually changed it for a CF light too.
...
At 6AM in the morning, the delay is a welcome "feature".
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."
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.
or how their employees are morons, ... or how they treat their employees like dirt
:-)
I think there's a correlation there
Seriously, I know several people who work at Wal-Mart. They tell me that most employees are the run of the mill employee who will never go anywhere. Just any any other retail store, duh. But many people do rise up the ranks, becoming sales managers, department managers, etc. One person I know went from high school dropout working folding clothes, to running an entire store. It may not be as glamorous or well paying as software engineering, but it beats the crap out of their retail competition.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/peckerwood.asp
Though I was personally unoffended.
Unfortunately, the electronic adapters that screw into a standard light socket last about 6 months before dying.
Time to check your electrical supply for noise and stability. Do incandescent lamps dim when the refrigerator starts? You may have power problems.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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.
- Ceiling-Fans__16000-MCD-P60-48-White-LED-110-V-Edi son-Type-Light-Bulb_W0QQitemZ220015435889QQihZ012Q QddnZHomeQ20Q26Q20GardenQQadnZLightingQ20Q26Q20Cei lingQ20FansQQcmdZExpressItem
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.
Clearly this is a move by WalMart to boost its holdings in the waning mercury market.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
My sister has worked at Walmart for years and loves her job. They sell the same products everybody else does, only cheaper, so I don't see how quality is an issue (is their Rubbermaid stuff worse than anybody elses? Do their PS2 games suck more?). I've never had Walmart refuse to take something back...customer service seems fine to me. Sure, there is nobody there to help me pick out the best TV for my needs, but then again, I don't trust the guys at Tweeter Etc either.
Seems to me that most of the bad-press Walmart gets is generated by the political-left who can't stand that Walmart (the largest retailer in the world) is a non-union shop. They bash walmart to make their union buddies happy. Seems to me the unions are just pissed that most of the Walmart employees are perfectly happy with their pay and work conditions, without having to pay the union extortionist tax.
Quite frankly, Walmart has done more with their affordable prices to help the poor of the country than any liberal social program has. Employees are happy, customers are certainly happy, seems the only ones not happy are the ones who have the power to control others lives taken away from them...
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
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)
There are some simple changes that some corporations are in a position to make which have great environmental impact, like when Google started pushing the PC industry to make simple 12 volt power supplies instead of inefficient ones with multiple voltage outputs. People assume that pro-environment means "expensive" but that's not necessarily the case. More and more companies are realizing that this sort of thing can be a cheap, painless way to generate good press for your organization. And after all, Wal-Mart is not really an evil company, just a money-grubbing company that deservedly gets a lot of press for doing evil things.
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 ;-)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
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).
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.
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?
Ah, Color Kinetics, the folks who patented pulse-width-modulation for varying LED colours so other LED manufacturers can't do it or have to pay through the nose. I wouldn't mind, but it's such an obvious technique.
Well, the GP specifically talked about $40 LED lightbulbs, and, as I was saying, those just aren't bright or full spectrum enough to be used for regular lighting yet.
ColorKinetics's claim to fame is that they mix RGB for lighting effects, plus a bunch of ways of communicating with LEDs. But since they are using the same LEDs as everybody else, their lights aren't going to compete any better with CFLs than any of the other LED based lights. To make LED based lighting happen, either our existing LEDs need to get a lot cheaper, or they need to get a lot more efficient.
Incidentally, ColorKinetics patents a lot, but most of their patents seem to be for trivial and obvious engineering designs; I think they're evil, and I hope you won't support these people by buying their products.
Home Depot sells the Commercial Electric and nVision tubes. No delay. They work really well.
www.wavefront-av.com
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
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
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.
I've just changed a bunch of them back to incandescent.
They don't give out "the same amount of light for 75% less" - its more like 75% light for 50% less. I tried various makes, and the ones that claimed to be the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent were more like 60 watts. The worst were the trilights - spending $25 on a couple of bulbs that are useless galls me no end. So I'm sitting on a couple of hundred dollars (I had changed all the lights) of CFs that are going to end up as dust collectors.
Buy better-quality incandescents - they give more lumens per watt than the cheap incandescents (you can check the lumens output on the box). And avoid those "long life" incandescents - they achieve their long life by being VERY inefficient. CFs don't save money if you have to use twice as many to get the same light output.
Does anyone know of a site that does a "shootout" of different brands? Google wasn't much help for me. I've used CFLs in lamps and secondary locations for years, and noticed that quality varies a lot. It would be nice to have some research available so I don't have to waste money and time buying poor quality units.
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."
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 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.
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?
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...