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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'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
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
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
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 don't think it is the color of the light that makes them seem dimmer. I think it is just a case of over exaggerating the benefits. When they say the bulb is equivalent to a 100 watt bulb, you can expect to actually get the equivalent of an 80 watt bulb. This wouldn't be so bad if they, as you said, sold 150W equivalent bulbs.
There are two issues I have with CFLs though.
1) I have had problems with them interfering with IR remotes. The first time it happened to me, I thought I was mistaken about the TVs channel changing on it's own, as I wasn't really paying attention. 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. When the house checked out empty, I started looking for other possibilities. Over the next few weeks, I figured it out. Having the remotes stop working when the lights were on was the final determination. This may be better know, but it has kept me from using CFLs at all in any room that needs the use of an IR remote.
2) The county dumps in my area have declared the CFLs to be toxic waste. This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. The stores that sell the bulbs are not collecting them, so the only legal way to get rid of them is by driving them to the dump.
I don't know the actual toxicity of the CFLs, but I have to wonder what the actual environmental impact is when you account for the bulbs being toxic, and the extra trips to the dump to dispose of dead bulbs. Anyone with real data on this care to chime in?
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.
At 6AM in the morning, the delay is a welcome "feature".
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
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.