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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.
"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
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
I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that the reason I don't use them has nothing to do with their cost. I had one once, and the delay between the time that I switched on the light and the time the light actually turned on really annoyed me. I know it's stupid, but that's why I haven't bought any more. That, and it didn't really last all that much longer than other regular bulbs that I have. It didn't ever burn out, but it started flickering to the point that it would give just about anybody a headache.
Personally, I'm hoping LED-based lightbulbs become more common in the near future...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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...
The delay is pretty much a thing of the past. The ones in my house turn on instantaneously, as far as I can detect. If they are very, very cold (way colder than you'd ever let it get inside your house), it can take maybe half a second.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night.
Regular bulbs are cheaper to produce - namely because they don't need a ballast (what is hidden in the base in CFLs) like all fluorescents do. Price a replacement ballast at homedepot for a digital (T32?) fluorescent - it costs between $16-25 for four tubes, sometimes more. So I'm surprised they CFLs got so cheap.
BTW, 60 watt equivalent CFLs cost roughly $1.50 a piece (8 pack) at Costco. Much cheaper than Walmart. Nice, bright, instant on.
(A while back, in my dad's new garage, within 3 weeks - 6 of his fluorescent tube fixtures broke. It was a batch of bad ballasts in them. It would have been a bitch replacing just the ballasts - lots of cutting wires, tying the new one together, tearing the fixture apart and putting it back together again - in other words a PITA. We decided to go with regular bulb fixtures with CFLs because we would get the fluorescent cost benefits but the screw in bulb convenience.)
Anyway, the upfront cost is not worth complaining over - with regular use you got your money back within 3-5 months.
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
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.
Zero delay on modern bulbs. My only current complaint is that they don't play nice with dimmers. I use them everywhere else.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Guess what? There is a delay.. maybe a second or so - and then on top of that it takes them about a minute to get up to full brightness. So the 100W equivalent CFL's I have put out (guesstimate) 20W of incandescent equivalent light. I keep my house at 70F. When the bulbs have been operating and are up to about (guesstimate) 100F, they turn on with about a 1/4 second delay. Who keeps their house at 100F?
This makes them inappropriate for stairwells, bathrooms, and any place with automatic light sensors.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
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.
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.
Just need to spend a buck or two more per bulb. The cheapest ones do, and always will have a delay (Walmart has to be there to serve the cheapass market). Best way to have instant on bulbs is to look for ones that specify "instant on". I've had a few friends & family that switch after seeing mine, but end up buying the cheapest ones they can get their hands on. It's no surprise they end up trashing them once they learn their lesson (bicker over a buck, and get what you pay for) or go back to normal bulbs.
I have several and it really varies from manufacturer to manufacturer as to how bright they are when they turn on and how long it takes to turn on. Some are instant on with about 75% of thier max brightness and only take about 15 seconds to reach thier full brightness. I believe the brand was NuVo, I know I bought them at Home Depot. A real cheap set from Big Lots, take a good minute to reach thier full brightness and take a half second or so to turn on. The rest fall somewhere inbetween. The real good ones will cost you about 4x as much as a good bulb, but they last 8-10x as long and cost about 1/4-1/6 as much to run.
There is a secnod bonus to CFL, they produce less heat. This is particularly important in Southern Climes where your cooling bill is considerably higher than your heating bill. Even those areas where it is frosty outside, electric heat is very inefficient so you are still better off.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Uh, I live in Finland, and if anyone told here that they are using a hot-running lightbulbs so they would save some money on heating, they would be officially titled as the village idiot. Instead of using lightbulbs as your source of heat, I recommend that you use them for their primary purpose (ligthing), and heat your home through regural means. The heating in your home is designed for heating, so use it. It would be same if I ran my radiators red-hot so I could use the red glow as a nice source of ambient light. Hey, at least I would be saving some money on lighting, right?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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"
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.
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At 6AM in the morning, the delay is a welcome "feature".
My only current complaint is that they don't play nice with dimmers.
Visit Home Depot. They have a larger selection and include dimmable and hard to find sizes including candelabra bulbs which are dimmable. A set of 8 3 watt dimmable bulbs in my decrative chandelier is a nice touch.
Power wise it replaced 8 25 watt bulbs.
The truth shall set you free!
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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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!
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!
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AFAIK, the two main quality issues with fluorescent lights are:
With CFLs, the ballast frequency issue was solved a long time ago. Basically, the voltage needs to be stepped up way higher than line voltage (120V in the US, 220V many other places). The low-tech way to do this is with a transformer. This means you get 60 Hz (or 50 Hz, whatever) current at that high frequency. That means flickering. Flickering doesn't happen with incandescent bulbs because it is heat of the filament that is causing the light to be emitted. The electrical current going through the bulb goes to zero 120 times a second (with 60 Hz power), but the filament's thermal mass is high enough that the bulb "coasts" through the zero voltage (and zero current) crossing and continues to emit light. You can even turn off an incandescent and watch it continue to glow for a fraction of a second after power is removed, because it takes time for the filament to cool. But this continuous lighting thing is not the case with a fluorescent, as I understand it. The gas in the tube only produces light when there's a voltage, and it stops pretty much instantaneously when it's not being electrically excited. Thus, with a fluorescent and a low-tech ballast, you get an effect similar to what it looks like when your monitor is set at a painfully low refresh rate, only not quite as bad, but still annoying.
But, as I said, compact fluorescents don't suffer from this issue. The reason is they have electronic ballasts. Instead of simple, dumb circuit with a transformer in it, they have a circuit that steps up the voltage, but it converts it to a much higher-frequency A/C voltage before it gets into the tube. I'm not sure of the frequency, but googling indicates it is in the tens of thousands of Hz. So, it's fast enough your eye really can't perceive it.
The other issue, color temperature is a little different story. As this explanation says, "Warm light is preferred for living spaces because it is more flattering to skin tones and clothing." I think this is the key reason for aesthetic objections to CFLs. Incandescents produce warm light at a color temperature of about 2700K, because that's what happens when you heat up a filament. With compact fluorescents, different options are available. If you want something similar to what you're used to with an incandescent, you should choose a 2700K CFL! It's not at all uncommon for CFLs to come in color temperatures in the range of 4000K or 5000K. That will appear considerably bluer or even weird and greenish compared to an incandescent. Nobody wants their skin tone to appear overly greenish, so 2700K it is, for aesthetic purposes, in most cases.
On a side note, things are different if you want to, say, take pictures of things. In that case, you might want to go with a higher color temperature, because 2700K is considerably warmer (yellower) than what you see outside on a nice sunny day.
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.
That's because they're brighter (the CFL--not the woman). We know from experience that women find these two things odious:
Most women expend incredible amounts of time and effort to avoid being seen, either by altering their appearance cosmetically to mask or otherwise obfuscate their features or by insisting that you turn the lights off during sex.
When confronted by a well lit area, a reasonably intelligent woman, upon realizing that you installed the new light, will complain that she "doesn't like the way it throws off light," thereby marrying her distrust toward optical clarity with her natural prejudice against new technology.
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.
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Of course here in So Cal we don't get many, er, elements. Hey, how's that weather, Colorado?
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