I've got three different dead CFL's that I want to cut apart so that I can examine the circuitry and to see what component emitted the thick smoke cloud when the GE bulb failed.
I was thinking of making a jig from a 2 by 4 scraps with two v's cut so that I could rotate the base of the bulb around against a 1/2" Dremel cutoff wheel at a fixed distance, sort of like a can opener.
The N-vision bulb that failed appears to have had a manufacturing defect - the plastic hole where the tube exits was chipped. That may have contributed to its early failure. Unlike the GE bulb, it did not emit any smoke when it failed. The ends of the bulb darkened, but it died free of smoke stink. I don't know about anyone else's SO, but mine can smell a lit cigarette in a car a mile ahead of us on the highway so burning bulbs is a really bad thing.
Are you insane? Cutting them open will void the warranty. ;-)
AP has another coal story this morning.
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Instead of forcing CFLs down people's throats, I think we should just ban air conditioning. It uses a larger share of electricity than lighting so its banning would go a lot further towards saving the earth. Of course, that might create social conflict if folks follow my other suggestion that to avoid the need for cleaning shower walls one should just avoid showers.
One of my techs did. He also used a dremel, but made to "incisions" lengthwise so he could split the base in half. I asked him "why?" and he responded with... "Because Dremel rules". This is the same guy who made cut-away engine displays for a few years before he got into the alarm trade. He's planning on doing the same thing with a couple of cameras.
There's a better solution. Build a tunnel from Alaska to Florida and ship the cold air down here.
No, wait. That won't work. Without doing anything useful about global warming, Alaska will be like Florida by the time we finish the tunnel (or that idiotic fence along the southern border).
There's a better solution than that as well: Save water. Shower with a friend. One can wash while the other scrubs the stall; then swap.
That article confirms something I've said before. In a state like Idaho, where electricity comes from hydro, the CFL equation falls flat on its face. They add mercury to the environment without providing any "offset" at the stack because there IS no stack.
More than that, the article makes it clear that the biggest gains are going to come from regulations limiting what coal plants can expel into the air. It's going to make power more expensive, at least in the short run, but the paybacks will be real and enormous. That much is clear from the record of states that have taken the right steps. Dribs and drabs won't clean the air and neither will the commercial sector because there's no profit in it. That's when governments are supposed to step up and do the right thing.
There was an interesting sidebar, too:
NASA Chief Not Worried About Climate
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It makes the point that we're rather arrogant in assuming now that man rules the planet, all climate change must cease. All it would take is another Krakatoa-sized eruption in the world to turn on some serious global air conditioning. The soot from such eruptions typically blocks significant amounts of sunlight for years and years.
At the time I wrote that article, low power electronic control gear was somewhere between expensive and unavailable. Now that it's more readily available, I wouldn't actually suggest reusing it from dead lamps, although the downlighters covered at the end of that article are all still running from the original
8 year old control gear from some Philips PL Electronic CFLs. They've probably had about 4 lamp changes over that period.
Very interesting. I notice some of the bulbs really discolored at the base in your "fanned out" photo. I've never seen a bulb twist like the Ikea's. I assume these are all 220VAC units from the UK addy. I don't see any helical bulbs which appear to use narrower tubes. Is that just a coincidence or are they not available for 220VAC?
It looks as if you've opened them in a number of different ways. What tool did you use? I think I seen the tell-tale curves left behind by a small grinding wheel on some of the bases where you cut away the shell.
This is just an R&D exercise. (Rip open and Destroy, in the best Brainiac tradition. (-: )
From what you've written, I'm expecting to see a dead capacitor in the GE. What worries me is that it could come from the era when all that bad electrolyte was floating around.
Are there any interesting uses for the electronics other than driving lamp tubes? Tesla coils or bug zappers? (-: Recycling should be fun.
Many of them weren't new, but borrowed from around the house in order to take the photo.
Bare in mind I wrote that article over 5 years ago. I don't think helical tubes existed back then. The largest Ikea one is interesting in that it has a clear dog-leg which you can just about see right in the middle, extending half way up the tube. This is a cold chamber which is used to regulate the mercury vapour pressure.
Nothing that fancy -- just a screwdriver, knife, and pliers. Some come apart along the seams, others are solvent welded.
I bought several of those large Ikea lamps at the time. One had an early electronics failure. The case quite easily unclips so I saved the almost new tube and chucked the rest. Of the remaining ones, some ~7 years later, the second one just died of old age (worn out tube electrodes). I uncliped and chucked the tube, and refitted the tube saved from the early electronics failure, and it works again. Don't know if I'll get another 7 years from it -- the electronics might not last that long as it runs quite hot in an enclosed fitting.
It could be just about any component. Resistors are good at smoke too. Semiconductors usually just go pop and crack the case if you look carefully. Some electronic control gear deliberately burns itself out when the tube dies so it doesn't keep trying to restart it, although that normally happens without any smoke.
Do you mean the chinese ones made with a stolen formula from a taiwanese factory (which they had discarded as not viable)? I thought those mostly ended up on computer motherboards.
Tried that, was afraid I might break the bulb. It turned out to be rather easy to freehand a cutoff wheel around the slot at the top of the plastic "components bay." A few side cuts and it popped out, although I did break or cut one of the wires to the tube.
I was surprised to see no apparent component damage. There's a nick in the transformer insulation, but I think it was my doing with the Dremel. The can-type capacitor had a slight bulge on top, but nothing like what I've seen in dead ones. While this is not the old lamp from the Taiwanese formula theft era, the capacitor looked like those that I have seen on failed motherboards. I'll bet those bad capacitors got around more than anyone realizes. It's only PC builders that regularly inspect boards closeup that might have even noticed it enough to raise the alarm on the web. I really expected to see a fried component. There's a strong smell of overheated plastic inside, but these things run hot normally.
I think this tube is still good. It flickers when I hit it with a static shock.
I suppose I could snip and test components one by one, but this was a cheap bulb. I just had ANOTHER Lights of America triaxial fail with only a dim glow in the central tube. It would be nice if I could recover some functionality from these things, even if I have to hardwire them into a lamp.
Do you have any thoughts on whether the trickle current from an X-10 appliance module could cause premature failures in CFLs? I've been experiencing an ever-increasing failure rate. I suppose I need to run side by side test of a bulb switched on and off by mechanical timer v. a X-10 timed bulb, but I've already got way too many science project on the list!
Capacitor failure is common in CFL's because they are operated above their temperature rating. This isn't normally a problem because they are only required to work for something like 10,000 hours, whereas an electrolytic operating within its temperature range would last very much longer than required in a CFL.
I've seen a couple of capacitor failures in CFL's, and in neither case did it cause the lamp to stop working. It caused the lamp to take longer starting and to run dimmer. It is possible that some other control gear circuits might cease working if the capacitor dies.
The common failure mode for a fluorescent lamp is that the emission material is all worn off the tube electrones (forming the dark marks at tube ends). This will not have any impact on a tube flickering when exposed to static. A while back, I added detailed description of the common tube failure modes to the Wikipedia fluorescent lamp page:
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Yes, if the tube is flickering at all, even dimly. That can wear it faster than when it's fully on.
Exactly my point. How likely is it that the bad caps *only* found their way to the PC motherboard makers? I think it's more reasonable to assume that they'd also wind up in lots of other electronic devices of that era. Somewhere, I still have the MB with the bad caps. They not only bulged, but leaked yellowish gunk. That may still be what I find when I open the older, failed GE's and Lights (out!) of America bulbs.
I recently pressed the last large wattage LoA bulb I had from very old inventory into service. It was running in a photographer's 12" aluminum reflector with a ceramic base and lots of air vents. After less than a month in service, it failed, emitting only a faint glow from a single tube. It was running from an X-10 appliance module and operating at about 45 degrees downward from horizontal. ]
At first I thought the entire batch of LoA bulbs was bad but out of five, four have failed and one still runs 6 hours a day over the terrarium, also controlled by X-10. It operates base up and is fairly poorly ventilated compared to the other fixtures where the bulbs failed so "go figure." I'm hoping another bulb autopsy will reveal a problem that might have a solution. I might try to laughingly return them to Wal-Mart to see if they really will do anything but laugh at me before I make them unreturnable via Dremel.
Hmmm. That would explain why base up failures are so common. If the devices are operating close to their rated tolerances base down, adding the bulb's heat to the electronics would certainly hasten the doom of any temperature sensitive components. I suppose the tradeoff is one of space vs. thermal "headroom."
The small N-vision bulbs that are almost exactly the size of a standard incandescent work in standard reflectors quite nicely, but the CFLs that stay within the design space of a standard tungsten bulb (at least in the US) are too dim for my taste. It's clear that the electronics are getting smaller but it seems that there's a direct correlation between light output and component bay volume and there may be a physical limit to how small they can shrink that base.
The problem seems to be that to run at the tungsten equivalent of 100W, the electronics bay gets large enough to interfere with proper air circulation at the base. I suppose that could be tested by running two bulbs, base up, side by side and cooling one with a fan. Another science project. Anybody with any teenagers in need of science fair ideas? (-:
Whilst there is the strong stench of electronic death inside of the bulb, aside from some discoloration on the inside of the bay, there's nothing that indicates a failure mode in a visually obvious way. I have at least 10 more dead bulbs to dissect. I've been taking photographs along the way that I'll post to my site when completed.
I assume that's "electrodes" although "Electrones" would make a great name for an electronic music group!
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Good job! It seems quite fair and balanced to me, and I see something I can add: lots of migraine sufferers are bothered intensely by the light of fluorescent lamps of all types. Long before a dying fluorescent's flicker is noticed by me, it's giving my wife migraines.
I don't know why wiki's got such a bad rep - it's really remarkable. It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. I thought the failure mode would involve loss of seal integrity but now I understand the complex processes involved in CFL failures. The only way to reliably test the tube on the duff bulb, it seems, would be to hook it up to known good electronics.
I just bought new 48" fluorescent worklamps for the basement. The first thing I noticed was how much brighter they were than the two year old lamps they were running next to. They really do dim pretty seriously over time and it's not until you operate a new one side by side with an old one that it's obvious. But the real problem is that for the first time, I can't seem to "damp" the flicker that results from using the lamp on an X-10 module.
I've put the new lamps behind two appliances modules (one with the local sense diode snipped) AND a filter, and they still flash intermittently when off. As I added each additional component, the frequency of the flashing dropped to about 1 flash every 10 seconds. I wonder if the diode snip mod I used for local control neutralization still allows trickle current to flow? It does neutralize the local sense ability, but I never checked to see if trickle current flowed. That should be easy to detect - I have a space heater whose neon lamp lights dimly when trickle current flows through it.
There appears to be more than one "local sense" mod and more than one type of appliance module circuit. I hope I can find some cure for it other than building a 110VAC relay box that's run from an appliance module. That should cut any trickle current to the device but I'd hate to have to add even more wall warts to the house.
Since I bought two identical lamps and they are both on at the same time, it would be a good way to test such an isolated, zero trickle current relay for bulb life. First thing to do is to check the existing setup for trickle current via a meter and then see if one of the other appliance module mods actually does eliminate any current leaked through the lamp. Since these are ceiling lamps with their own pull chains, I could even test them manually if I turned one off by that chain switch each time I used the pair. Well, that's today's science project. I'd really like to know what's causing the high failure rate of CFL's in my house.
I added the reason for this some time back -- see last paragraph of
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would not apply to electronic control gear in any case. You'll need to find a scientific reference for the flicker causing migraines, or it would likely be removed as unsubstantiated. Unsubstantiated psychological and physiological effects are normally removed from the fluorescent lamp article quite quickly.
Yes. Another test would be to apply a certain voltage to the filaments. This will vary depending on the tube, but something like 6V should generate a white fluorescent glow from the phosphor around the filament, indicating the filament is emitting electrons under thermionic emission into the gas. An orange glow from the filament without the fluorescence would indicate the filament can no longer emit electrons under thermionic emission into the gas, and the tube is dead.
The FDA has a web page that says fluorescents cause problems for those who suffer from migraines but they don't provide supporting evidence (or, if so, I missed it).
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The earlier cited wiki page would seem to support my contention that the numbers promulgated by CFL proponents are wildly exagerated. It notes, as I did in similar fashion based on having run a business and having visited thousands of commercial and industrial sites, that "businesses find the cost savings of fluorescents to be significant and only rarely use incandescent lights". That means most of the savings from switching to CFLs must come from residences and since residential lighting in the US only uses 3% of total electricity, there's not a lot to be gained from replacing all (remaining) residential incandescents with CFLs. The CFL proponents' arguments appear to consist predominantly of inflated claims, chest thumping self promotion, name calling, and character assassination of those who dare disagree.
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Perhaps they've been breathing mercury fumes from broken fluorescents. ;)
It's pretty well-established, "D," from dendochronological evidence (tree rings) to ice cores, that Krakatoa-sized eruptions inject debris into the atmosphere for years. The darkened skies cause poor tree growth and a narrowing of the tree rings during that time. The debris that slowly falls to earth settles on the icepack like an endless layer cake, storing the history of earth's atmosphere almost like a book. Every eruption has a unique fingerprint. Modern techniques make it very easy to determine where the ash in ice cores came from.
I'd like to know the source of your information because as far as I know, there was never any doubt about the ability of massive volcanoes to effect the atmosphere for years.
In fact, the largest of them, the supervolcanoes, have the power to completely alter the composition of the atmosphere like the Siberian Traps eruptions:
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that covered 77,000 square miles with lava (that's the size of the state of Nebraska). Some believe this eruption was the trigger for the most massive dieout in earth's history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event and that it doubled the amount of CO2 in earth's atmosphere.
There's a supervolcano under Yellowstone Park with a caldera large enough to see from space.
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has an interesting article about it:
Anyway, back to your original comment, here's one site that describes how long volcanic ash can stay aloft:
Once again, Houston misquotes and misleads. The above statement implies that flourescents cause problems for all who suffer from migraines. Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that is not true. Houston doesn't bother to mention that the FDA's page on the subject also says, "... things that trigger migraine in one person might not affect another, even someone else in the same family."
That's partly because flourecent lights, in and of themselves, don't trigger migraines. It's the flicker that
*sometimes* triggers a migraine in *some* people. For some people looking at a neon light can trigger a migraine. For others strobe lights are a trigger. For most, strobes, neon and flourescents are not a problem.
BTW, there's a wonderful drug called Imitex that can end a migraine in five minutes for some people, allowing them to return to work in less than 30 minutes if it's taken promptly at the onset of symptoms.
I'm fairly certain that it's a known migraine trigger. It's on one of the fact sheets that my wife's neurologist hands out along with CRT flicker and other stroboscopic-type light sources. Finding a clinical trial that substantiates the effect might be difficult, but I'm pretty sure there have been studies using PET scans. I'll see what's out there.
That sounds like something that's easy to test. Thanks!
There are so many dubious points in the CFL "model" that it's hard to figure out where to start to debunk it. The most obvious is the "lifetime" bulb concept. It's being whittled away, but CFLs are still being touted as having enormous paybacks based on a lifetime that even a non-high school graduate can determine has been marketing hype.
When you force CFL's on people by fiat, you're removing a lot of incentive to recycle the bulbs properly. Instead of trapping mercury at the relatively few smokestacks, we'll be chasing it at every landfill in the country.
I suppose when people live on two continents and jet between them as conspicuous consumers at the apex of the carbon use pyramid, they have no choice but to try to induce average people to conserve like crazy to offset those yearly carbon load blowouts. Sounds a little like Amway. Gotta get a lot of suffering people under you before you can lead la dolce vita.
Wal-Mart thinks there's a lot to be gained! (-: That should raise enough questions about who really stands to profit from the forced marched to CFLs.
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I'm not sure what it is but it's clear someone's trying to start a war and turn CHA into a mess just like ASA. I suppose it's time to stand up and be counted. Things were quite collegial until a single poster returned to the group, accusing others of "stirring the pot" when it's pretty obvious who's got the big spoon in his hand.
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