CFL's and X-10

What were you drinking or smoking when you last *saw* an odor? (-: Good sense tells me to stop here because you're obviously torqued up about

*something* totally unrelated to the technical issues under discussion. The CFL smokey burnout problem is real. Educate yourself:

There's a nice picture of several "burnouts" here:

We've bought roughly 50 CFL bulbs and 2 of them have burned out rather violently, just like the bulbs pictured above. That's about a 4% fiery failure rate as opposed to a zero rate for tungsten bulbs. We've never had an incandescent bulb fill the room with enough acrid smoke to make us think there was a serious electrical fire. That honor belongs solely to CFL's.

-- Bobby G.

(Lengthy - and quite factual - details about cleaning up broken CFL bulbs snipped)

Indeed. The problem we're facing in America is that we've devolved into a truly polarized nation of people with very little tolerance of anyone else's point of view. As for CFL's and mercury, it seems that at least some people have picked up on a "disconnect." If CFL's are so damn eco-friendly then why does the EPA publish the lengthy, detailed toxic waste cleanup rules that you posted, Tom?

Not everyone is convinced of the value of the mercury tradeoff anymore since even *one* low mercury bulb contains enough mercury to poison 1000 gallons of drinking water.

By Alex Johnson - Reporter - MSNBC updated 3:12 p.m. ET April 7, 2008

| Compact fluorescent light bulbs . . . are running into resistance from waste | industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs' | poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than | previously thought. . . . Even the latest lamps promoted as "low-mercury" | can contaminate more than 1,000 gallons of water beyond safe levels . . . | "It's kind of ironic that on the one hand, the [EPA] is saying, 'Don't worry, | it's a very small amount of mercury.' Then they have a whole page of | [instructions] how to handle the situation if you break one," she said.

The correct answer to the mercury problem is to "catch mercury at the stack" and don't expect gimmicks, offsets or good wishes to do the job. The longer we patch together solutions that don't address the root causes, the more tons of mercury will go into the environment.

If the nation does settle on CFL's we need to look very hard for enforced recycling (as in $5 deposits on each bulb). We already know that recycling of CFL's is very problematic in the US and that worries me. Ideally, we need another, more efficient light source that doesn't involve single bulbs that can each poison from 1,000 to 6,000 gallons of water. I use CFL's, reluctantly, because one of the few dedicated CFL recyling centers is less than two miles away. Living close to a CFL recycler is the exception, though, and not the rule.

Hopefully the LED will reign supreme. That's another promising technology that doesn't involve spreading out tiny bits of neurotoxins to every zip code in America and is even MORE efficient than CFL technology. People are beginning to use LEDs more and more as the prices come down and the reliability and the number of available form factors increases.

Sadly, I suspect that LED bulbs are going to give X-10 users the same sorts of fits that CFL's cause because they consume so little current and contain electronics that might interact badly with X-10 gear. But I also think they'll be far better for the ecology in the long run since they achieve power plant emission reductions without introducing another vector of mercury poisioning into the mix.

-- Bobby G.

It's called an idiom. We use them in the English language.

Don't let that stop you.

I use them. So far no smoke.

Given your vehement opposition to CFLs, I doubt that.