I see a few places are stocking 100W incandescent bulbs again.
I thought they had been banned under EU regs.
Personally I welcome them. They are brighter than their "equivalents". Instant on, and a hell of a lot cheaper now the subsidies have rendered the so called more efficient lamps so expensive.
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.
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.
I found it hard to locate the more powerful ones, until recently I saw
30W CFLs in Asda, stated to be equivalent to 120 W "equivalent". I got one to try it out, and it does seem quite bright in comparison to a 100 W tungsten bulb, and it seems to come up fairly bright right away. I may get more of them. Sorry I can't recall how much it cost.
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.
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.
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 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
244/2009. And yes I am very sad that I could be bothered to look up the source.
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