CFL's...

I berking hate CFLs'. They have to "warm up", the light is unnatural, they break just as often as incandescents, and they are full of toxic stuff so you have to evacuate when they blow.

I just took every damn CFL out of our house.

And we're greenie, tree-hugging, vegetarian hippies! I have a composter in the back yard for berk's sake.

So besides the floundering of the gubbment making us buy this crap, I went with stocking up on the "heat lamps" and selectively bought some halogens and LED's.

Erf.

Just get the new LED houselights.

They are only, what.... $50 per bulb or so ? :D

I have been less then impressed with CFLs either. They do NOT seem to have anymore life then incandescents from what I have seen. The older ones have a horrible color, but the newer ones are pretty good color wise.

LED's are likely the true future. They should last a lot longer, but are currently pretty damn pricey.

Every watt-hour you put in with lighting, you pay for several times.

Obviously, you pay for the watt-hour the bulb used, but that payment includes the two and a half watt-hours worth of fuel the power plant burnt to sell you that watt.

You also get to pay to take that watt-hour's worth of heat out of your room; modern air-conditioners have coefficients of performance of 13 to 20, but the whole system generally has poorer performance due to duct and fan losses. Count on no better than 10 watt-hours of heat removed for 1 watt-hour of electricity used.

tl;dr - use LEDs and as little as you can get away with. Make sure your curtains are easy to open by day.

Just bought a 120-watt equivalent LED bulb for the garage. Love it. Spent $35..... ouch.

I have several hundred incandescent bulbs that I collected when the ecoterrorists were talking about banning them like in most of the rest of the world. That's how much I hate CFL, that and you can't run CFL in a droplight. LED is too expensive right now to do a whole house, though I like the idea of a drop proof droplight.

On heat given off, that sort of balances out in colder climates, you spend the summer pumping the heat out, but in the winter you are putting less heat in.

I don't have a problem with them, they only take about half a second to start up and the light is whiter, but I'll admit that they don't last any longer and while mercury is no big deal, you have to wonder where it's all gonna go when each of these bulbs has a drop or two in it. Of course LEDs are the best but they're bloody expensive right now.

CFL's suck. I use them in my outdoor fixtures only because they came with them. Once the burn out they get normal bulbs.

I hear these stories all the time but I haven't had any issues with CFLs. I have a couple in desk lamps in my home office, their color is great and they've worked fine for years now. I also have one in my drop light out in the garage, I just used it the other day when the temperature was about 20 degrees and it came on right away.

I love CFL's but don't use them exclusively. I love the even, super-bright light you can get out of them. I would say 75% of the lights in my house are CFL's. The only ones I've been annoyed at are (1) the 3-way CFL's - they were TERRIBLE, didn't dim in the right order so the lights went dim-superbright-inbetween-off instead of dim-inbetween-superbright-off and didn't last very long at all, despite costing a small fortune. (2) The CFL in my closet - my closet is on an outside corner so it gets cold in the winter which means the bulb takes forever to warm up.

Other than that, it takes what, 10 seconds for a cheap bulb to warm up? A good CFL bulb takes almost no time at all. 15 seconds is not enough for me to whine about, and certainly not enough for me to go back to a hot short-lived incandescent. The bulb life is amazing. Anyone having a problem with them being short lived probably bought a cheap or bad batch (check them - they should have a warranty) or has a bad fixture or switch (causing power flickering - very bad for a ballast). I have had CFL bulbs last literally 10 years. Even the cheap ones last for years and years. The bulbs in my office are on for 8-10 hours a day 5 days a week and last for 3-5 years despite being the $2/ea variety bought in a big box.

The mercury content is very low and the bulbs are recyclable. They recover the mercury.

Kenny_McCormic wrote: you can't run CFL in a droplight.

??? I have three in drop lights in my garage. I suppose if you actually drop them all the time you might have trouble, but try not dropping them. ;-)

I generally use CFLs for all but task lighting. I use a LED flood in my drop light because I do drop it from time to time.

In reply to dculberson:

I live in the Arctic Tundra. I've timed the CFL flood lamps in the kitchen, it took over 90 seconds in the summer and 4.5 minutes in the winter. The regular CFL's take between 20 and 90 seconds every where else in the house. It's a 1996 house with no electrical issues and 4 year old insulation (max) and siding (hardi-plank). It's even been Green Certified. There's no reason to have such poor performance, but we do.

And I suffer from migraines (and have for 9 years). The fluorescent light kills me, but it also drives the wifey nuts. I find the "natural daylight" incandescent bulbs to give a much better light.

CFLs come in all the sale colors as incandescent bulbs. I have found that name brand CFLs, except those specifically stating they are fast start, don't come on to full brightness when you first turn them on. The FEIT brand does and of course the ones you pay more for in the name brands to get the fast start.

I've found regardless of brand that those that are encapsulated (look like traditional bulbs) don't work nearly as well and come on at about half the light. I now always get the corkscrew ones.

I have found I need to step up one rating to get a comparable quantity of light. In other words replace your 60W incandescent with a 75 W equivalent CFL. I think they are over optimistic on their ratings. BUT LEDs make the over optimistic CFL ratings look like they are overrated. Most of the LEDs hardly rank as anything more than a glorified night light.

I love the concept of the LEDs but $19-$50 a bulb is outrageous!!!!!!

I had to live off of a generator for a year and that's the time I truly began to appreciate CFLs. When you hear the difference in generator note between turning on a traditional bulb and a CFL it brings home the energy savings.

Bright White is less harsh than daylight bulbs and so much easier to read and see fine details than the yellowish Soft White bulbs.

I bought some name brand slow starting CFLs for the bathroom. That way when I get up in the morning and turn the light on they don't blare me out and cause my head to hurt. The bulbs brighten up as I wake further up and we reach peak output at about the same time. You've just go to learn to work the system.

carguy123 wrote: When you hear the difference in generator note between turning on a traditional bulb and a CFL it brings home the energy savings.

Power costs how many cents per kilowatt hour? CFL's are how many dollars more expensive per bulb than incandescents? The math will never work, trust me.

I'm all about lowering our consumption though (even though our power is all hydro or wind up here), so I'd love to switch to all LED's. That currently takes some cubic dollars.

carguy123 wrote: CFLs come in all the sale colors as incandescent bulbs.

I'm not particularly pro- or con- on CFLs, but this is simply not true. They come in packages that say they are the same colors, but they are not. CFLs add a green-to-purple overcast to everything they light up, even if they are the so-called color correct ones.

LEDs are actually not much better as they tend to have a lot of blue overtones. You can get very good LEDs that give out museum-quality white light, but they are about $100 each for a typical PAR-style downlight lamp.

I live in cold weather, too. But the ones I bought vs being given by the power compnay 1) light up fast, 2) look good, and 3) last forever. I replaced an incandecant that burnt out every couple of months due to vibration a decade ago- it's still there.

IMHO, user error.

They're not all the same. Some of them light up instantly. The ones from Ikea are both inexpensive and seem to be very responsive. I've never actually had to replace one, so I'm not even sure where I have them in the house anymore :) The only room that has any warm-up time is one of the bathrooms - it lights immediately, but takes about 60-90 seconds to reach full brightness. That's actually kinda nice in the morning.

We did go to LEDs on our motion-sensitive outdoor lights, CFLs don't like the on-off cycles on those and incandescent bulbs were always burning out. The LEDs have made them trouble-free - again, Ikea has great prices on them. Under $10, I think, and that's one that's happily bright enough to do the job. I didn't notice the difference in illumination between the LED on the downstairs light and the incandescent on the upstairs before we got them both changed.

My drop lights are LED. I cannot stand incandescent ones - so much heat and so freakin' fragile.

dculberson wrote:

Kenny_McCormic wrote: you can't run CFL in a droplight.

??? I have three in drop lights in my garage. I suppose if you actually drop them all the time you might have trouble, but try not dropping them. ;-)

Its a drop light, its designed to be dropped, and when its dropped, you pick up the glass, spin in a new bulb and keep going. With a CFL you clear the area and treat it has a hazardous waste spill. I also have a tendency to blow bulbs from dropping welding slag on them when welding under a car, to really vaporize that mercury.

I have CFLs in several lamps/fixtures throughout the house - mostly in the ones that are ambient lighting or stay on all the time (front and back door light is on all night, light over the stove is on all night (for the dog w/ bad eyesight), a table lamp thats on most nights while Im awake...basically just for the cost savings vs keeping an incandescent bulb burning for the same period of time. I realize the cost savings isnt huge, and I prefer regular bulbs, but between wally world and my local energy co having given me a few dozen CFLs for free, I figure, why the berk not.

Never noticed a difference.

Kenny_McCormic wrote:

dculberson wrote:

Kenny_McCormic wrote: you can't run CFL in a droplight.

??? I have three in drop lights in my garage. I suppose if you actually drop them all the time you might have trouble, but try not dropping them. ;-)

Its a drop light, its designed to be dropped, and when its dropped, you pick up the glass, spin in a new bulb and keep going. With a CFL you clear the area and treat it has a hazardous waste spill. I also have a tendency to blow bulbs from dropping welding slag on them when welding under a car, to really vaporize that mercury.

If you treat the tiny bit of mercury in a CFL as hazardous waste, you must have a hell of a time getting anything done on a car. Any solvents, oh goodness, you have to install a ventilation hood and never put your head under it while working with them. Same with paint. Brake cleaner, forget about it, you must put on a haz-mat suit before dealing with that stuff! Not to mention gasoline, coolant, brake fluid, welding byproducts...

People freak about the mercury in a CFL but the stuff we all deal with every day is just as dangerous or more so because it's easily aerosolized and we are exposed to so much of it. It's a trivial amount and it does not represent a significant hazard to a healthy adult. I remember playing with the mercury from a broken thermometer as a kid and I turned out [twitch] fine [twitch] .

In reply to 4cylndrfury:

We converted the whole house to CFL's three years ago for the "why not" of it. PUD gave us a case and we bought the rest. The specialty ones were expensive (candle lamps in the fan, floodlights in the sunk lighting, 3-way lamps, etc).

I liked CFL's, until I completely switched the house. Mixed with standard incadescent bulbs, I'd never noticed their shortcomings.

Even instant on ones take a minute or two to come up to full brightness. Most have awful color skews. They don't fit in many light fixtures. And, they seem to go out almost as fast as the regular bulbs.

I am quite disapointed, and have switched several back to regular incadescent.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

I'm with you on the LED's. I really like them, plus they should (theoretically) last forever. I'll have to go to IKEA for those to try!

As for CFL responsiveness, we have 4-5 different brands and versions in the house ranging from free ones from the PUD to the expensive "fast start" ones. The nicer ones were quicker, but still very noticeable. On the reliability front, the cheap ones didn't blow out fairly often (one actually ass-ploded as opposed to just burning out) but what usually happened is they would flicker or dim noticeably so they would have to be replaced anyways. There was definitely a quality difference in the brands/models.