People of Earth: Ditch CFL bulbs!

I'm joining! Where do I sign up?

I hate them dang things.

Find some full-spectrum daylight 5000°K or 5500°K bulbs at Lowe's or Home Depot - I find the 6500°K ones to be a bit too white/cool for me. For long fluorescents (e.g., ceiling fixtures), also try to find one with a CRI (Color Refractive Index?) of 90 or higher (100 = perfect color rendition) - the CFLs I've seen don't list the CRI, but the tubes often do. I'll take full-spectrum daylight bulbs them for reading any day over tungsten, and even the 3500°K one I currently have in my bedside reading lamp (which more matches the tungstens we have in our dimmer-switched ceiling fan - CFLs for dimmer switches hardly exist yet) is fine, too.

We have found the claims of 5-7 years' bulb life to be a bit overstated, though - we've had to replace some bulbs in less than 2 years, and that is not with daily use, either.

But if they give you headaches, then you are right to stick with tungsten or I guess halogen. Fortunately, we aren't negatively affected by FLs/CFLs and have been using them almost exclusively since 1999.

Totally OT:

When oh when oh when oh when is NOW going to start raising a stink about how Muslim countries treat women:

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3321637.ece

(Now, back to our regulary-scheduled program.)

Oh great, Rod! I was just starting to buy CFL's, and now you've gone and started No-CFL-Pac. You luddite, you.

Seriously though, in my limited experience, the CFL's cost alot more than your standard bulb, and they don't seem to last long enough to make up the cost difference. While I like the thought of saving on my electric bill, do I really pay that much for light? I've become cynical enough to believe that General Electric and Phillips are behind this movement as a way to boost profit margins. (Kind of like HDTV, which will be hitting the fan in the next year or so.) Cheney has got to be involved in this deal somehow. As far as saving the planet, the whole campaign reminds me of asking the passengers of the Titanic to bail with champagne glasses...

I think Kirk's comment, reflective of our sometimes-short-bulb-life experiences, is a valid one - i.e., while one may save more energy with CFLs, one may not save more money.

My reasons for CFLs, as stated, are that I prefer full-spectrum daylight lighting to tungsten. LEDs to me are too cool (blue-white), from what I've seen (the reading lights on the DART bus are LED), but that could be my imagination; I have never inquired about the color temperature. Only a couple desk lamps at Lowe's use LEDs, and I have not seen LED lights for regular lamps, but maybe they do exist, and in the sizes I would want/need. Also, their light is very direct, whereas CFLs put out light, like regular bulbs, in all directions, which I prefer to spot-lighting. I guess an all-directional LED light would look like a porcupine - not too attractive.

At our other house, when we had Daylight fluorescents in the kitchen ceiling, you could be fooled, when looking into the room from around the corner, that it was a bright, sunny day shining indoors. I hear they can really help people with SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Plus, having them in the bedroom closets made matching black versus navy socks an easy task. I don't know if the Ott Lights are worth their extremely high price - i.e., I don't know if their full-spectrum bulbs are any different than the much cheaper other brands of the same color temperature that are available. Plus, Ott Lights have their own socket base, whereas most CFLs can be screwed into regular lamp sockets, so if you buy an Ott Lamp, you're stuck with having to buy their replacement bulbs. We have nice reading lamps we bought for $30 at Target whose Ott equivalent was about $160 (retail) at Penneys. Ott seemed to be the pioneer for this, though; he wrote a book decades ago on light and health experiments, and I think discovered this, IIRC, while doing those time-lapse films of, e.g., plants growing, for Disney films.

If anyone here has experienced lower electric bills from CFL's, please let us hear from you!

I bought a six-pack box of CFL's at Walmart just last Friday, and the box claims the the bulbs save "$44 in energy per bulb." For me, energy savings is important, and the only reason I would switch to CFL's. (Heck, I already pay a premium price for lightbulbs, because I prefer the more-expensive GE Reveal bulbs.) But I don't want to be taken for a ride. Is the initial investment worth it, or not?? Anyone?

Regarding the mercury, it is said that the power saved by CFLs (and the resultant less mercury spewed into the air by power plants) more than offsets the mercury in the bulbs.

That said, they should be disposed of safely. Some stores that sell them are disposing of them for consumers as well.

My complaint is the color. I like the warm light of a clear-bulbed incandescent. Haven't seen that replicated in a CFL yet.

CFLs really do save significant electricity. The waste does go to heat, but that is normally a very expensive way to heat. I guess if your furnace is on and you don't mind the cost, then you aren't doing much to increase your carbon load. That argument is only good 5 months of the year.

I understand the objection to the type of light they give and that might be a justifiable reason to continue with incandescents, but if there isn't a corresponding regret that you cannot do your own little part, then it's fair for us to suspect that your motives are tainted by Gore-loathing.

Hey, here's an idea: let's let Jindal build up a record of accomplishment before we coronate him.

At any rate, haven't we had enough southern governors in the White House as it is?

Worrying about mercury from CFL and concluding coal is safer is about like worry about radiation from nuclear power plants and concluding coal is safer. Coal gives off more mercury than CFL, and more radioactive materials than nuclear power. (In addition to soot itself causing a lot more cancer than a vague threat of radioactive materials, and mercury floating around in the air being a lot more dangerous than it flowing into the ground.)

Coal is an incredibly unsafe method of generating power, and, unless we actually do something about reducing our energy use and switching to alternate fuel sources, we're going to be using more and more of it as oil dries up.

It's, frankly, astonishing how many objections to CFL (or hybrid car batteries, another stupid objection) would apply hundreds of times stronger to coal and even oil plants if people bother to actually apply them consistently.

CFL and batteries and all sorts of things might have special disposal requirements, so we'll need to set something up to dispose of them. So? It'd make a hell of a lot more sense than our recycling setup, a lot of which has no net gain in energy and saves resources that are in no danger of running out, like 'trees' and 'sand'. Switch that over, except for the plastic part, to collecting special-disposal stuff.

Incidentally, we should already have an infrastructure in place to manage things like that because we've been selling batteries and smoke detectors and CRT monitors and paint and computers and refrigerators and other stuff that need special disposal for decades now, which is why we 'don't have enough landfills'. We'd have plenty of places to put landfills if we didn't put toxic chemicals in them.

The only reason there's any objection to current stuff is the same reason it's mysteriously only on 'green' thing...it's being driven by politics, not by any sudden concern for the environment.

Typically I agree with Rod 90% of the time, but....I really don't understand the frustration with CFLs. We switched our house almost completely over to CFLs about 5 years ago and have been very satisfied. The early generation of CFLs did include a lot of quirks. But now you can choose from a wide variety that fit just about any lighting situation. We have two conventional incandescent bulbs in our house (due to the unusual structure of a couple of lamps), and I can't distinguish the light from those bulbs from the light produced by our CFLs.

I suspect that stores in some parts of the country offer a wider range of CFLs than other parts of the country. Here in the Ecotopian Republic of Oregon, my local store has at least two dozen varieties on the shelf.

Frankly, I think Crunchy Cons should embrace CFLs. They offer a great way to vote with your pocketbook, and to make a genuine difference on an environmental concern while also reducing your electric bill. Thanks to CFLs, we have cut our bill (and our use of electricity) by a huge amount.

CFLs don't work with rheostats and dimmers. Our lighting system runs on remote-control rheostats, so mostly we can't use CFLs anyway. But I bought a bunch on sale for the two or three sockets that aren't connected to the system. One of them broke on the way home from the store, and I spent the next two weeks trying to find a place to dispose of it, before deciding @#$%^& it, and throwing it in the trash. I think a more frugal alternative to incandescents would be really nice, but CFLs aren't it. This has nothing to do with ideology, it's just a good idea poorly executed, possibly in order to convince the public that it wasn't worth trying in the first place. (Like the way General Motors did seat belts for the first few years after they were required.)

I can't believe all the people believing all this bureaucratic BS on these CFLs. There may not be much mercury in 1 bulb but 1 X millions it adds up. Remember all the fuss about mercury in fish, thermometers and thermostats? The EPA doesn't want mercury in the landfills, yet they are silent when it comes to CFLs. How come if you break one in your home and notify the EPA, the average price of clean up is $2000.00? And if you think all people are going to dispose of them at a recycle center I have some swamp land for sale! Al gore and his global warming are both a big fraud! Where is the outrage of the government dictating what kind of light bulbs you will be buying in 2012. I for one am not falling for this socialist propaganda. Unite and refuse to buy CFLs and keep Thomas Edison from rolling in his grave!

Anybody know why CFLs take a long time to come up to full brightness whereas the straight tube versions turn on almost immediately?

The truth is that until the U.S. converts to clean renewable energy, using CFL's will put far less mercury in our environment than keeping standard incandescent lamps. Most cfl's do have a smidgen of mercury, between 1 and 4 milligrams, about what fits on the head of a pin. By comparison mercury thermometers typically have over 500 milligrams, about 125 cfl lamps worth. Many telephones, scanners, monitors, and other electronics all contain far more mercury than cfl's. While standard incandescent lamps don't contain mercury, they will use 3 times the electricity as a cfl, and cause for more mercury (and CO2) to be released by coal and gas burning power plants than improperly disposed CFL's ever would.

The U.S. EPA estimated that a coal-fired power plant will spew 13.6 milligrams of mercury in our air, to make the electricity for 1 incandescent light bulb, compared to 3.3 milligrams for a comparable CFL. That's 10 milligrams of mercury emissions prevented by using a single CFL bulb. That doesn't count increased electricity used in summer for air conditioning to offset all of the heat made by incandescent lights. If all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were improperly sent to landfills, that would only be 1/10 of 1% of all U.S. mercury emissions.

And, if you haven't found good colored ones that quick start and are dimmable, we carry them on our website.

Look at the big picture,
Chrispy
www.NewLeafAmewrica.com

I don’t know the technical aspects of CFL’s but what I do know from my own experience is some of the practical side of them. I have experimented with CFL’s in my garage for about three years now, garage only because my wife won’t allow them in the house due to the long startup time, and I have found that I have to over-rate the brightness to get the light I need to work, For example I have to replace a 100 watt incandescent bulb with a CFL claiming 150 or 200 watt equivalent light for me to see the same brightness on my work. The usable reflected light is no where near as good as an incandescent bulb. While CFL’s seem to be more durable than incandescent in my drop-light as far as burning out, the base part of them pops open to expose the supporting electronics and allow the bulb to flop around in the fixture. This can’t be good.

Then there’s the life expectancy claims, they really are trying to fool someone here. I have had more CLF bulbs die in the last 3 years in my garage than I had incandescent bulbs fail in the last 6 or 8 years prior to that, except for the drop-light failures. Even if the CFL’s require less electricity to operate, I believe I’m spending more money on new bulbs than I’m saving. I don’t work in the garage as much as I used to but can tell I’m still buying more CFL’s for the garage than I used to buy incandescent bulbs.

One more point; I’ve read that I am supposed to dispose of the CFL’s a different way than regular trash, however my local trash depot doesn’t have a special receptacle for CFL bulbs, so what am I supposed to do with them besides just place them in my regular trash for pickup and delivery to the landfill?