# Are CFLs The New "Normal" Light Bulb?



## Diesel_Bomber (Sep 16, 2007)

My wife and I invited some neighbors over for lunch today. The female of the couple asked why my wife and I don't have any "normal" light bulbs in our house. This question made me pause and I actually had to think for a bit to figure out what she meant. She, of course, meant incandescent bulbs when she said "normal". My entire house is CFL or linear fluorescent and I regard these as "normal" light bulbs, thinking of incandescents the same way I do 8 track tapes.

Anyone else feel similar, or had a similar conversation?

:buddies:


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## Illum (Sep 16, 2007)

similar conversation yes, on the same grounds no

it was a lengthy conversation about why my flashlight collections don't use "normal" [incandescent] lamps

CFL's are pretty popular around here these days....at least our neighbors


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## jtr1962 (Sep 16, 2007)

I more or less consider linear fluorescents "normal" light bulbs at this point since I've been using them for over 20 years. The heat, power consumption, color temp, and very short life made me give up on "normal" incandescents years ago. If nothing else, it annoys me greatly to have to change out bulbs constantly. This is especially true in hard to get to outdoor fixtures. Honestly, with today's CFLs, and especially T5/T8 linear tubes, I don't see why anyone is still using incandescents. For that matter it puzzles me why linear fixtures haven't been more widely adopted in homes. They're way less obtrusive than most bulb-based fixtures. The only exception might be where lights are turned on/off a lot. And with the coming of age of LEDs, which eliminate even that drawback, I think the excuses for using incandescent have just about run out.

Yes, my brother and sister both still use regular incandescent. Neither can really give me any logical reason other than the reflexive "I hate fluorescent". This is probably based solely on their impressions of the old, crappy cool whites from 20 years ago. On another note, places like Home Depot aren't exactly helping matters any, either. Most of their linear fluorescent offerings are crappy halophosphor T12 cool-whites and fixtures with magnetic ballasts. Neither offer much, if any, cost advantage any more over triphosphor T8s and electronic ballasts. I honestly don't know why they're even made any more, except perhaps to keep people on a steady diet of incandescents by virtue of their drawbacks. If only enough people saw what "good" fluorescent lighting, such as high-CRI 5000K tubes, looks like they probably wouldn't touch another incandescent lamp again.


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## made in china (Oct 14, 2007)

I was thinking about this the other day. I have "dimming" R30 CFL's in my kitchen. They don't really "dim" much. To my eye, they seem to dim maybe 20%. Which made me think "I hope I can still by incandescent lamps in the future". I really like the way incans dim. My home is mostly CFL, and my kitchen is those dimming CFL's. BUT, I use incans exclusively in the other dimming fixtures in the house. 

Here's my take on all this:
Incans just have a warmer quality. As they dim, they become more yellow/orange. Sets a nice mood.
Incans on a dimmer circuit can be used in an efficient manner. My dimmed Incans are usually not run above 50% unless we need the light. So, effectively they use much less energy in our home.
People don't look at the big picture of CFL's. A 20W rated CFL pulls at least 36 watts. The lamp is 20W, but the ballast wastes power. Again, dimmed incans can compete in general household use.
CFL's use toxic materials. Incans are harmless.
CFL's require MUCH more resources to manufacture. Toxic and otherwise.
CFL's are almost all made in China these days. On my soapbox here, I hate the fact that everything is made in China. Oh the blasphemy of our free society padding the pockets of the Commies. GREAT....off soapbox now
Incans can last a long time. 67W Traffic incans last a min of 6000 hours in extreme conditions. Manufactures "build in" short operating life to domestic incans but they can do better if they wanted to.
I have had CFL's that fail early, and some last many many years. 

I have seen some new incan products lately.Philips Halogena Energy Saver look like a viable alternative to using CFL's. So, I hope that CFL's don't become the "normal" light bulb. They are not that great. I'd like to see better alternatives to both incan and CFL. It's probably going to be LED in less than 10 years.


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## lctorana (Oct 14, 2007)

No, they're not.

Incans rule.


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## IMSabbel (Oct 14, 2007)

made in china said:


> Incans on a dimmer circuit can be used in an efficient manner. My dimmed Incans are usually not run above 50% unless we need the light. So, effectively they use much less energy in our home.



That statement is so bad and wrong that everytime somebody reads it god kills a kitten.

Seriously, when you are running your incs at 50%, they drop down into the single digits lumen/W range. The only thing less efficient would be _candles_.


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## jtr1962 (Oct 14, 2007)

made in china said:


> Incans can last a long time. 67W Traffic incans last a min of 6000 hours in extreme conditions. Manufactures "build in" short operating life to domestic incans but they can do better if they wanted to.


There's a reason they "build-in" that short lifetime. It's because underdriving them to get longer lifetimes results in _even worse_ energy efficiency, and incandescents stink in that regard to start with. Small base candelabra bulbs are a great example. They're rated several times longer than the usual 750 hours of 60 or 100 watt bulbs. Their efficiency is also 8 to 10 lm/W instead of 15 to 17. Traffic light bulbs are something like 6 lm/W. Since most of the operating cost of incandescents is the energy used rather than the purchase price of the bulb, bulbs are designed to have a 750 hour life except in cases like traffic lights where they're hard to change. This is a compromise between energy efficiency and lifetime. Also note that underdriving incandescents for longer life means they're even more orange. :sick2:



> People don't look at the big picture of CFL's. A 20W rated CFL pulls at least 36 watts. The lamp is 20W, but the ballast wastes power. Again, dimmed incans can compete in general household use.


The power rating on the package includes the ballast losses. I know. I've measured it on my Kill-a-Watt. C'mon, 16 watts ballast losses for a 20 watt CFL? For a 20 watt bulb it is more like maybe 17 watts goes into driving the tube and 3 watts is wasted in the ballast. In effect this makes the system efficiency about 15% less than the tube by itself. The better ballasts waste less than 10%. Most CFLs are still about 60-70 lm/W overall when ballast losses are included. The only kind of incandescent that can remotely compete might be highly overdriven IRC bulbs. However, the lifetime of a few hours would be totally unacceptable for general lighting. As for dimmed incandescent, when dimmed to one-third power your 10 lm/W chandelier bulbs are now more like 3 lm/W since they only give 10% of the light. There may be reasons people dim incandescents, such as setting mood (I'm personally not a big fan of the whole candlelit atmosphere thing), but energy efficiency isn't one of them.

I do agree that LEDs will probably take over. I don't see CFLs being mass-produced either in a few years given that LEDs are already 50% more efficient, still on a steep improvement curve, and suffer none of the drawbacks of CFLs. Down with incandescents! Down with CFLs! LEDs rule!! :devil:


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## made in china (Oct 14, 2007)

IMSabbel said:


> That statement is so bad and wrong that everytime somebody reads it god kills a kitten.
> 
> Seriously, when you are running your incs at 50%, they drop down into the single digits lumen/W range. The only thing less efficient would be _candles_.


Never said anything about lumens/watt here. I don't care about lumens/watt. In technical aspects, yes I also agree that incans are very inefficient. BUT, you don't always need all that light. And even though they may be inefficient, I still dim them down to just what is needed. The CFL's annoy me because they maintain high lumens even at the lowest level of dimming. 

I doubt the statement is so bad and wrong that God would kill a kitten. But the pollution that CFL's generate during production and disposal would certainly kill a kitten.

Seems the strongest arguments so far are people who care about lumens/watt. Let's talk about the other drawbacks of CFL like that little prob of how they are manufactured and how to dispose of the mercury and other toxics in the lamp....


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## paulr (Oct 14, 2007)

made in china said:


> Seems the strongest arguments so far are people who care about lumens/watt. Let's talk about the other drawbacks of CFL like that little prob of how they are manufactured and how to dispose of the mercury and other toxics in the lamp....


Certainly true, however you also have to add up the toxic stuff released by burning fossil fuel to generate the electricity to run either type of light. I would say that if you want bright, non-adjustable light, use CFL or linear FL. If you want dim and adjustable, use LED's. So maybe some hybrid FL/LED setup would be best.


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## made in china (Oct 15, 2007)

paulr said:


> Certainly true, however you also have to add up the toxic stuff released by burning fossil fuel to generate the electricity to run either type of light. I would say that if you want bright, non-adjustable light, use CFL or linear FL. If you want dim and adjustable, use LED's. So maybe some hybrid FL/LED setup would be best.



Here in the Seattle area you can pay a surcharge ($20 a month I was told) to "get" clean energy. I am not sure of the details as I don't participate in this program. But seems like a guilt free way to burn tungsten! 

My suggestion for the future of lighting would be to take into consideration all aspects of the life cycle of the product. LED's have to be made in a semiconductor fab. So do CFL ballasts. CFL's add insult to injury by needing a small amount of mercury. Semiconductor fabs can do a good job of controlling their pollution. And the actual LED is a relatively small component. Hopefully manufacturers can provide a LED lamp assembly that is compact, "green" and possibly re-usable, just requiring a very infrequent replacement of the light engine, not the whole device. It won't be of much help to the environment if manufacturers start pumping out cheap LED lamps that are barely more efficient than CFL's but fail too often needing to be dumped into landfills. I can just see it going that way however. We'll see


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## 2xTrinity (Oct 15, 2007)

> Never said anything about lumens/watt here. I don't care about lumens/watt. In technical aspects, yes I also agree that incans are very inefficient. BUT, you don't always need all that light. And even though they may be inefficient, I still dim them down to just what is needed. The CFL's annoy me because they maintain high lumens even at the lowest level of dimming.


The problem there is not with fluorecent technology inherently -- there do exist linear fluorescent ballasts that will dim all the way, but it is a feature of the ballast itself, and isn't possible with a retrofit CFL as it has to do all sorts of gymnastics to "interpret" the behavior of a standard incandescent ballast, and react accordingly.

Another one of the reasons though why dimmable CFLs don't dim as much is precisely due to the fact that lumens/watt does not drop as the lamp is dimmed -- so while it might take 80% power to get 50% output from a filament, it 75% input power will still be closer to 75% output on the CFL. 

IMHO, I wish someone were to make attractive-looking household light fixtures that used standard T8 or T5 tubes with dimming ballasts. They exist for commercial fixtures and have much higher efficiency, and life than self-ballasted CFLs -- whch most of hte time fail prematurely due to problems with the self-contained ballast anyway.



> My suggestion for the future of lighting would be to take into consideration all aspects of the life cycle of the product. LED's have to be made in a semiconductor fab. So do CFL ballasts. CFL's add insult to injury by needing a small amount of mercury. Semiconductor fabs can do a good job of controlling their pollution. And the actual LED is a relatively small component. Hopefully manufacturers can provide a LED lamp assembly that is compact, "green" and possibly re-usable, just requiring a very infrequent replacement of the light engine, not the whole device. It won't be of much help to the environment if manufacturers start pumping out cheap LED lamps that are barely more efficient than CFL's but fail too often needing to be dumped into landfills. I can just see it going that way however. We'll see


As far as dimming with LEDs though, that will ultimately be the best way to go -- as lumens/watt actually increases as they are dimmed. The problem with LEDs though is the fact that they need to be heatsinked. To work properly, IMHO LEDs will almost need to come out as dedicated fixtures, and not as screw-in bulb replacements. 

The way LEDs could be ideal would be a large dispersed array that could be a direct replacement for something like a fluorescent fixture in a typical office (with the frosted ceiling panels). If there were a huge number of several different color LEDs (not phosphor LEDs, as phosphors degrade) dispersed into a matrix, then things like color temperature could be adjusted at will, and even a progressive "warming" effect as the fixture is dimmed could be a feature. Heat would also be spread out. Such a fixture designed properly could last effectively forever if enough emitters were used, and they were underdriven enough. The problem is, it is cheaper and easier to install fewer emitters and drive the crap out of them -- and the company would then get the benefit of engineered obsolescence. A product that lasts forever without maintenance is never good...


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## LEDAdd1ct (Oct 31, 2007)

I hate engineered obsolescence. It's why so many of my electronic toys...umm...equipment poops-out for no good reason. That's why I've jumped on the modular light/upgradeable emitter bandwagon.

I can't wait to see LEDs in light fixtures. Doesn't mean I will ultimately populate my residence with them, but still, I'd love to see how they _look_.


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## Illum (Oct 31, 2007)

granted the ballast may waste some power...but that power hasn't been enough to burn me as would touching a 60 watter after say 1 hour of burn time

I find the 40 watt incans output basically the same as that of a 60 watter...I've made some amends to compensate for lower wattage lamps since a complete reinstallation of CFLs would render my incan stock unuseable. say the bathroom uses 2 lamps...and that 40 watts [1 lamp] is sufficient to light the place...I've replaced the two 60 watters with two 15 watters and after awhile you become conditioned to "low light"

but to answer the thread's question, no they would never become the "normal" lightbulb....sure they would become the most used lamps in the future to come....but when you mention "light bulb" the first that pops up would be the one with the glass globe and filaments, the ball that does pow when you throw it....
[for more how to kill lightbulbs, refer to http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showpost.php?p=165263&postcount=2]


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## circline guy (Nov 15, 2007)

I found this thread while searching for info about CFL's and fluorescent lights. Like the original poster, I have replaced nearly all of the lighting in my home with some version of fluorescent.

My interest in fluorescent lighting started in the mid 1980's when I was working for the now defunct Montgomery Ward stores. I worked in the Home Improvemnt department and one day we got two pallets stacked high with light fixtures from a Wards store in Montana that had been closed. In this group of lights were about ten packages of Lights Of America circline bulb/ballast adapters.

This was about 1985/6 and CFL's as we know them today were not yet available. Circlines were really the only option for replacing incans in table lamps and other home fixtures. These LOA's were originally marked $9.99 but had been reduced to a price of 99 cents! (the bulb was included) I bought all ten of them. They had magnetic ballasts, the electronic ballast had to wait until the 1990's.

The modern tri-phosphor lamps were still years away, so these still had the old haloposphor bulbs: cool white and warm white. Even the warm white ones were still too off color to blend in but they were much better than the cool whites, which stood out like a freak show in a room full of incandescents.

I tried giving a couple of the cool white ones (whose light color I hated) to a younger brother and his wife, but they returned them in a couple of weeks later, she didn't like them! (Big surprise.)

I still have about 5 or 6 working ballasts from these lights. The bulbs have all since died or gotten broken.

(As a kid in the early 1970's, I can still remember a neighbor that lived down the block who had a fluorescent bulb in a table lamp placed in their living room window. I remember walking by in the evening and recognizing the cold greenish glow of a cool-white bulb. Amazing to think that the wife would allow a fluorescent bulb in the picture window of her living room of all places).

Yes, I agree 100% with the posters' complaining about the fluorescent light assortments at Home Depot and other stores, all magentic ballasts with cool white bulbs, yecch. You'd think it was still the 1960's. None of the fixtures look like they would be much at home in a home enviroment; a worskhop or laundry room yes, maybe a kitchen. Totally out of place in a bedroom, bathroom or living room area.

I have linear 4 foot fluorescent fixtures in three rooms (kitchen, bathroom and laundry) and a ceiling fixture with 2 foot bulbs in a walk-through closet area off the bedroom. Some have gone for a dozen years without a bulb change.

I did have a GE torchiere using a 2D fluorescent bulb. The first one from Home Depot was a damaged return that had been put back on the shelf, the second only lasted about a week, the third one lasted about 15-18 months. In both cases the ballasts died. I have since replaced it with a torchiere that has a standard incandescent socket which has a circline ballast/bulb combination that fits.

After my experience, I would recommend avoiding any fluoresecnt fixture that uses a '2D' style of bulb.

I experienced no better luck with a 'Lithonia Lighting' ceiling fluorescent fixture that used two circline bulbs (22 and 32 watt). It lasted only about 15 months before its ballast died too. It was replaced with a fixture having standard incan sockets but fitted with 23 watt CFL's.

At least in these two situations I won't be stuck with a fixture that uses a proprietary ballast that would probably cost close to the price of the entire fixture to replace.

I have circline fluorescent fixtures/adapters in 5 other fixtures, including the living room.

Where I can fit them, I like the circlines much better than CFL's. The light from the circlines is less contrasty than CFL, the shadows are lighter. A CFL bulb, IMO is too bright in a fixture where the bare bulb is visible, an unshielded circline bulb is no harsher than any other exposed linear tube fluorescent bulb.

While CFL's die dramatic and sometimes scary deaths, billowing out plumes of acrd smoke and melting parts of their plastic housings, all my circlines have died quiet old fashioned fluorescent deaths, ends of the tubes going black and bulbs glowing dimly or blinking excessively at startup.

While I agree that Lights Of America has terrible quality control on their CFL's and electronic ballasts, I do very much like their 2700K circline replacement bulbs. Even warm white or soft white is too cool-colored for me when mixed in with incans. I know there are people here who like the so-called "daylight/sunlight" fluorescents but to me they look very unnatural.


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