Proper light bulbs returning?

e:

Only if they live up to their promised lifetime which IME they don't get anywhere near, especially the very expensive high power ones you need to replace a 100W incandescent.

Chris

So all the shelf clearing was for nothing?

How sad!

Not really. Look for the punctuation.

??

I think they are made from tungsten these days.

They are cheaper though, I am in total agreement.

HN

But carbon filament lamps are incandescent.

I assume the total cost of ownership refers to Tungsten incidentally.

HN

I don't know if it's been fixed, but the UK Act which brought this EU directive into UK law was rushed, hence faulty, and unenforcible.

Secondly, lots of companies stockpiled 100W (and most other) filament lamps in the UK, thinking there would be a large demand, but actually there isn't, so there's years worth stockpiled. The law (even if it had worked) only outlawed manufacture and import, not selling what's already here.

The issue of "equivalents" seems to be being corrected - I notice that 18W CFL's are no longer incorrectly quoted as 100W equivalent. The best real 100W equivalents I've found are the Feit 23W ones sold by Costco, but they've run out of stock until April. They have 60W equivalents too. The trouble is that many retail stores don't sell anything more than 18W CFLs, so they don't have anything which is genuinely equivalent to 100W lamps.

Being sold at a large mark up though.

I found it hard to locate the more powerful ones, until recently I saw

No it isn't, because he put 'equivalents' in quotes, meaning that it is a claim rather than a fact.

If

-- you don't mind the peculiar colour of the light

-- the lamp continues to give the rated light output right to the end

-- the lamp lasts as long as is claimed.

Bill

It's lies anyway.

Andrew, what are the "rules" about longevity claims for light bulbs?

It appears to me that if it's quoted in hours, it means continuous use but if it's quoted in years it's some unspecified daily use. I have even seen both figures on the same lamp without any explanation why mathematically they didn't correlate.

For fluorescent lamps, it is 3 hours "on" per switching. I presume CFLs are the same, but I don't know that for sure.

Standard filament lamps - it makes almost no difference to life how frequently they're switched.

It usually says something about how many hours per day they assume, but I don't think there's any standardisation for this form of measurement.

Yes, murky waters where I am too because we usually have the heating on for 6 months of the year, and part of the house heat is electric baseboard - so any heat that incandescents put out is still doing useful work during that time.

cheers

Jules

And if a CFL fails early in its life my experience is that one really resents having to pay so much to replace it.

The LEDs are even worse.......

Even the best cfls are crap for those with poor sight though. I suspect its the choice of frequencies in the phosphor or the flicker effect.

LEDs seem better. Brian

In message , Graham. wrote

I've had two blow recently. Both went on switch on. I'm sure that the electronics in some of these bulbs is not fit for purpose and the claimed life is the continuous life, if you never switch them off.

I don't think that's very accurate, for 3 reasons.

1. CFLs do have early failures, and of course this is made up for by the ones that last longer than rated life. Ie there isnt really a problem.
2. A cfl need only function for a short time to pay off its additional purchase cost.
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   I dont see any reason to resent the fact that some fail early, some last longer than rated. Its how all types of bulb work.

NT

ote:

If you're genuinely experiencing a substandard product, buy another brand! That's stating the obvious really.

NT

Do you remember it well?:-)

I think that for CFLs it effectively assumes for the survival factor 2 hours if the start-up time is less than 0.3 seconds. That's due to improve to 1 hour. This and a lot else about required perfomance is specified for CFLs in Annex II, Table 4 to Commission Regulation (EC) No