(seewww.lightingfortomorrow.com) for some examples. But they are heat
to:
formatting link
and notice the heat sink. We'll see
I would think that shipping cost would cost as much as the replacement.
Do they pay shipping too?
I was thinking about trying to take them back to Walmart next time they fail. Walmart is pretty good about returning stuff if you have the receipt.
On a side note. I have heard that having the lamps with the base at the bottom lasts longer than having the base at the top. ie desk lamp vs ceiling light. Extra heat on the electronics.
SO, if I go in the bathroom for a total of one half hour per night and have two 60W indecesant bulbs in the fixtures, then I consume a total of 60W per day. If these same two fixtures each have 15W CF bulbs (equivalant to 60W), but have to leave them on 24/7, I am using 720W per day. That is far from being a savings, particularly when you consider the CF bulb costs $3 or so, and the indec bulb costs 25 cents. Until they come up with a CF bulb that can last as long as advertised, and can be turned on and off as needed, I will not buy any more of them. Besides the one that I mentioned yesterday that lasted
5 or 6 weeks, or less than 100 hours, I have had another one flare up, causing sparks and a bathroom filled with stinky smoke. Luckily no fire, but the smoke was terrible and seeing sparks blowing around the room is not my idea of fun. Additionally, this is not the first bulb that has died before its rated time. In fact, almost all of these spiral types are dying in short time, whereas the original straight CFs seem to last and last and last. I dont even see that type sold anymore.
I would imagine that Chris was suggesting that fluorescent lighting was better used in locations where there would be longer use of the lights.
When I was in college many years ago we computed that the lights they were using at that time had to be off for more than 48 minutes to break even cost wise, not counting the cost of labor of replacement.
Today's lamps are far different and the penalty for short time usage is far less for the better lamps available today. However not all lamps available today are any better and I suspect some are worse. I suspect the differences we are seeing in results from CFs and other newer lamps has a lot to do with the quality of their design and build.
Posted rates don't tell the whole story. There are service charges and taxes added on, for example. Take your total bill and divide by the kWh used to get your actual rate. Mine was $0.132/kWh in March. A friend in western New York, however, just paid over $0.30/kWh on vacation home because the fees and taxes swamped the cost of the low kWh use.
That's not the whole story either, because then the "rate" is dependent on consumption and cannot directly be compared.
It's most accurate to describe the power bill as a linear function of the form "mx + b", where b is a constant charge, m is the rate per kWh, and x is the power usage. This is more complicated, but it reflects the actual billing structure rather than trying to force it into a single number.
Why would you leave them on all day? All I said was that the more you turn them on/off, the faster they wear out.
Around here, Philips CFLs are available easily for $2/bulb at the local Home Depot.
At 10.4 cents/KWh, it takes 16.82 KWh to make up the price difference, or around 280 hrs of runtime for the bulbs you specified above. As long as they don't wear out before that then they make sense.
Turning them on/off once a night shouldn't be a problem--any CFL should be able to last for years under those conditions, and if it doesn't I'd contact the manufacturer. For a pantry light that may get cycled a dozen times while making a meal and is only on for a few seconds at a time, they're probably not the best thing to use.
For my home office where the lights get turned on in the morning and stay on basically all day, the bulbs pay for themselves in a couple months.
I'm not sure what "additional" charges, if any, are included in the stated price (e.g., stranded debt, transmission & distribution, etc.). The accompanying footnote tells us that "[p]rices are calculated by dividing revenue by sales", so that would suggest it does, in fact, include all of these miscellaneous items and quite possibly the fixed charges as well.
Excess power consumption by a fluorescent during starting is somewhere between nonexistent and equivalent to 1 second or so of continuous operation.
You mean watt-hours, not watts.
Meanwhile, if you have them on once a day for half an hour, they will last longer if you have them off the other 23.5 hours. A start usually costs something like 10 minutes of life.
If that one had a limited warranty, you can make good on it. Many have these limited warranties for home use.
Was that a dollar store junker? I never had any other than dollar store junkers do that. In my experience, most dollar store ones lack UL listing, while most other screw base (ballast included) CFLs have that. (Ballastless lightbulbs don't appear to me to need that.)
In my experience, spirals mostly outlast incandescents by far.
The main exceptions:
1) A Lights of America one and one bad run of GE ones - 25 watts, purchased around 2001. (I have also experienced more than a fair share of problems with non-spiral Lights of America CFLs.)
2) Ones overheating in small enclosed fixtures or in recessed ceiling fixtures.
3) High wattage ones (like 42 watts) operating base-up.
Home centers usually have a few. Electrical/lighting supply shops of the kind that contractors go to and the major online lightbulb sellers have more. Just avoid the dollar store ones - I consistently found problems, including poor color, poor color rendering, and severe shortfall of light output from claimed light output, lack of a lumen figure for light output, lack of signs of certification by any recognized safety testing organization whether UL or otherwise, usually most of these, often all of these in my experience.
One of my old PHILIPS CFL bulbs finally died after 12(?) years of service. I opened it up to do an "autopsy", and I was amazed at the number of electronic components.
Two circuit boards, tiny transformer, couple of electrlytic caps, SCR, transistor, dozen mini-resistors and caps, a few diodes,...etc.etc.
Haven't opened up a modern CFL, but, I'm sure they've cut the component count.
I agree, Paul, that the 10.4 cents/kWh for the average consumer rate for
2006 is right and includes all the extra charges. There used to be a magazine that published energy rates every month and it was easy to keep track; but I can't find it any more.
For those living in California, New York or New England, the first reaction must be "that can't be right! I pay a LOT more than that!" :-0
I'm guessing the national average is skewed by the fact that those who pay more are likely to use less and, by the same token, those living in areas where rates are comparatively low consume more (e.g., electric heat is popular in the Pacific North West but far less so in NY, MA, VT or NH where rates are two to three times higher).
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