GEC Genura

[Dave Plowman (News)]

About a couple of years ago I bought two of these in R80 23w form for a couple of lamps that get fairly heavy use. The anglepoise on the electronics workbench and the computer keyboard light. To save on running costs and to allow easy movement of the anglepoise due to lower heat. They were very expensive - IIRC something like 15 quid each. And one has failed

- not the workshop one that gets bashed a bit, but the computer one which never gets touched. They're said to have a life of 10,000 hours. So even at 4 hours a day - an over generous estimate - they should last about 7 years. So much for cost saving CFLs...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Genuras are electrodeless induction fluorescents. Their life is pretty much the life of the electronic control gear. The life of electronic components is governed by random processes, and it's not so much a case of wearing out, as a probability that the lamp will have failed after so many hours. That means the life, whilst long, has a much bigger standard deviation. The other one could go on for 20,000 hours. The biggest effect on life of such components is temperature -- roughly, the expected life halves for each 10C temperature rise. Therefore using the Genura in a well ventilated fitting is the most important factor for lamp life. I've had some which did over 20,000 hours, but then you start getting into the realm of the phosphor wearing out. I recall one infant mortility too.

[meow2222]

Thats entirely consistent with mfr claims. 10k hrs is a mean figure.

NT

[Derek Geldard]

4 hrs (generous) x 365 x 2 years = Ca. 3.0k hrs

This was my experience also. 8-((

Due, so I'm told, to running it cap up in a shade.

Derek

[David Hansen]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:45:35 +0000 (GMT) someone who may be "Dave Plowman (News)" wrote this:-

The one which failed may still have saved you money, if that is why you bought it.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Oh, and by the way, they're "GE" Genuras, not "GEC" (completely unrelated companies, the latter of which went from being britain's largest private employer in early 1980's with a large cash mountain (for the time) to completely bankrupt 20 years later.

GEC's lighting division was GEC Osram, but was sold back to the Germans (from which it had been obtained after WWII) as part of the GEC/Siemens collaborations sometime in the late 1980's. (As a GEC employee, we used to be able to buy Osram bulbs through staff discount until that happened.)

[Tony Bryer]

WW1 - see

, bottom of page. I bought a copy of The GEC Research Laboratories 1919-84 a while back (it's on a ship somewhere between the UK and Australia) and a very interesting read it is too.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It's more complicated than that, and I must confess I don't understand one of the bits. Osram seems to have started up independantly in both England and in Germany around the turn of the century, and I've never seen anything which says what the relationship between these two bits was. Any mention I find of one part at that time completely fails to say anything about the other part. The English bit became GEC around WWI, but the German bit which was owned by Siemens merged into GEC after WWII (I presume as part of the war reparations, but I've never seen that explicitly stated). The whole lot was sold back to Siemens sometime around the late 1980's (I recall we could suddenly no longer get GEC Osram bulbs on staff discount;-).