I fitted CFLs throughout the house in the mid 1980s. They were very expensive then but the maths still worked in my favour regarding cost (energy consumption + cost of bulb) over their lifetime compared to incandescent bulbs. They took a long time to wind up their elastic band but we got used to that. I think we have one of the originals still working somewhere. The new ones may not last as long but not an issue. I had to change one recently but I can't remember if that was this year or last year.
I hate halogen spots due to the narrowness of the beam - even the wide angle ones are pathetic. The light directly underneath them is great but move a foot in any direction and you need your night vision specs. Move around quickly in a room full of them and you're likely to have an epileptic fit due to the strobe effect.
I did a job in the eighties - some shelving/cupboards for The Futon Shop. Their lighting was halogen spots and one night one of the bulbs exploded and a large lump of hot glass landed on some bedding, set it alight and burned the shop down. I wasn't bothered as I got the job again when they re-refurbished the shop.
Are you seriously suggesting that I, an adult of approaching 60 years, cannot tell the difference between emotional and physical issues ? Sheeesh ! I don't like the bloody things primarily because I can't see properly under them. Secondary purely practical reasons are that I don't like the quality of the light they produce. I don't like the fact that they won't fit properly in many decorative light fittings. I don't like the fact that many of them have a significant delay starting, and a significant delay ramping up to useable brightness and colour temperature.
Genuine emotional issues, which I have not directly mentioned as part of the debate, are that I hate having this eco bollox foisted on me by a government kow-towing to an unelected 'expert' body in Brussels, whose primary purpose in life is to justify their own existence. Much of the eco nonsense spouted about these devices centres on the narrow issue of power consumption, and that is the only aspect that the green-mist-save-the-world brigade have latched onto. Bugger the fact that the energy budgets to manufacture, ship and dispose of the things, are many times that of regular light bulbs ...
Well, I have had them so dim and orange as to be useless.
Before they finally failed.
The other problem is as with most fluorescents, the spectrum is a series of monochromatic lines, not a spread spectrum of normal black body radiation. So they can make certain colours look unnatural.
Plus there is a certain amount of UV give off anyway.
Plus there is mercury in them.
Like windmills its a question of a really bad technology being thrust on us because its allegedly 'green' in a case where its contribution is so little as to be meaningless.
On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 02:38:49 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be ScrewMaster wrote this:-
That was my opinion too, in the days when the lamps cost £10 or so, when that was a lot of money. Soon paid for themselves.
Interestingly the people who rail against them tend to be the same people who rail against sustainable electricity generation, quoting the book "Sustainable energy - without the hot air" in support. They can't have read the book very much, or they would have read the bit in it about energy saving light bulbs
"Generally I avoid discussing economics, but I'd like to make an exception for lightbulbs. Osram?s 20 W low-energy bulb claims the same light output as a 100 W incandescent bulb. Moreover, its lifetime is said to be 15 000 hours (or "12 years," at 3 hours per day). In contrast a typical in- candescent bulb might last 1000 hours. So during a 12-year period, you have this choice (figure
9.3): buy 15 incandescent bulbs and 1500 kWh of electricity (which costs roughly £150); or buy one low-energy bulb and 300 kWh of electricity (which costs roughly £30)."
Even if one believes, like I do, that the equivalent ratings quoted by manufacturers are "optimistic" they are not as "optimistic" as to change the balance dramatically.
The next page
has this
"Mythconceptions
"There is no point in my switching to energy-saving lights. The "wasted" energy they put out heats my home, so it?s not wasted.
"This myth is addressed in Chapter 11, p71."
and there we read
"Mythconceptions
"There is no point in my switching off lights, TVs, and phone chargers during the winter. The 'wasted' energy they put out heats my home, so it's not wasted."
"This myth is True for a few people, but only during the winter; but False for most.
"If your house is being heated by electricity through ordinary bar fires or blower heaters then, yes, it's much the same as heating the house with any electricity-wasting appliances. But if you are in this situation, you should change the way you heat your house. Electricity is high-grade energy, and heat is low-grade energy. It's a waste to turn electricity into heat. To be precise, if you make only one unit of heat from a unit of electricity, that's a waste. Heaters called air-source heat pumps or ground-source heat pumps can do much better, delivering 3 or 4 units of heat for every unit of electricity consumed. They work like back-to-front refrigerators, pumping heat into your house from the outside air (see Chapter 21).
"For the rest, whose homes are heated by fossil fuels or biofuels, it's a good idea to avoid using electrical gadgets as a heat source for your home ? at least for as long as our increases in electricity
-demand are served from fossil fuels. It's better to burn the fossil fuel at home. The point is, if you use electricity from an ordinary fossil power station, more than half of the energy from the fossil fuel goes sadly up the cooling tower. Of the energy that gets turned into electricity, about 8% is lost in the transmission system. If you burn the fossil fuel in your home, more of the energy goes directly into making hot air for you."
Never had a problem with colour-blindness tests. As I mentioned, the only CFLs where I do find colour annoying are the dimmable ones which noticeably change hue at different brightness levels.
Isn't it true that the mercury *in* the CFL is less than the mercury release by burning the additional coal that would be required if an incandescent lamp were used instead?
Yes, but only if the power is generated by coal-fired power stations. In France, where the majority of electrical power is generated by nuclear plants, and in Norway, where near enough 100% is hydroelectrically generated, fluorescent lamps increase the amount of mercury released into the environment.
Which is all jolly nice if you only address the situation from the end-user point of view. Things would change dramatically against the CFL argument, if the hugely different energy and monetary costs of manufacturing, shipping, and correctly disposing of them over the humble and simple incandescent bulb, were genuinely factored into the equation. However, I suspect that this would be so complex to do, that it's never going to *actually* get done, so there will never be any true comparative figures. The general public does not understand what is in a CFL, so has no genuine understanding of what goes into making them, which is why the green mist brigade can get away with only pushing the *apparent* end user power savings. As for them being cheap to buy now compared to 10 years ago, they're not. They are being hugely subsidised by money being collected from us all, as part of our electricity bills.
And on the subject of sustainable electricity generation, the ugly noisy windmills that are sprouting up all over the countryside to distract drivers and cause more deaths on the roads have, I believe, been the subject of studies which show that at best, each one will only just about pay the energy costs used to build it and maintain it over its lifetime. A much better solution would be to just build some more nuclear stations. If people don't like the idea of building them on land, then build them out to sea, instead of the wind farms. Nuclear power is by far and away the most sustainable form of electricity production, whilst wind and solar are about as far the other end of the scale in terms of practicality, as you could get ...
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