Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity; Energy-Savers a Turnoff for Wives

By Blaine Harden Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 30, 2007; Page A01

NESKOWIN, Ore. -- Alex and Sara Sifford, who live here on the Oregon coast, want to do the right thing to save a warming world.

To that end, Alex Sifford, 51, has been buying compact fluorescent light bulbs . . . He sneaks them into sockets all over the house. This has been driving his wife nuts. . . . the bulbs, with their initial flicker, slow warm-up and slightly weird color, bug her. . . . Experts on energy consumption call it the "wife test." And one of the dimly lighted truths of the global-warming era is that fluorescent bulbs still seem to be flunking out in most American homes. . . . A key to the abiding grass-roots resistance to CFLs, Reed and other experts said, is indelible consumer memories of the hideous looks and poor quality of earlier generations of fluorescent lights. . . . "People remember them from 20 years ago and they are not going to forgive," said Dave Shiller, vice president of new business development for MaxLite, a Fairfield, N.J., company that manufactures CFL bulbs.

(That's about all I can post and feel comfortable that I am staying within the "fair use" copyright exception - I'll post the URL to the much longer and complete article below although I believe that registration is still required )-: even though it's still free (-:)

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FWIW, my N-vision CFL floodlight has begun to take a very long time to warm up and appears never able to reach its initial brightness level. Too bad, because it looked like a real winner at first. My wife wants it gone from the kitchen! I concur. Slow warmup is really, really annoying when you want to look at something right away.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green
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Take care when you remove it lest you drop and break it. ;)

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Reply to
Dave Houston

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I'm beginning to think CFL's are the gypsy moths of the '00's. Instead of catching mercury spewing out of smokestacks like we should (along with carbon) we're distributing toxic mercury all throughout the environment, hoping it's all going to be properly recycled even thought we know Americans aren't the best recyclers in the world. It is pretty bizarre, when you stop and think about it. Perhaps the best we can hope for from CFL's is that they will spur development of better alternatives that don't require creating mercury vapor in fragile glass tubes in our homes.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

I have a house full of those N:Vision PAR-30 floods equivalents. They come in 2 or 3 colors. The warm ones are pretty good. Yes they take a long time to warm up (30-90 secs). I commented on that in a prior post.

Currently I have 5 recessed cans in my kitchen and primary lighting, 7 in the master suite, 4 in the great room and 6 more elsewhere in the house. If I used incandescent in all of them the whirring of the electric meter would be deafening. We have learned to adapt to the warm up.

Check the "color" of yours. The non-warm ones were pretty stark.

Dan Wright

Reply to
Dan Wright

I might have missed that because what surprised me the most when I first got them was they were "instant on" - the speed at which they reached full brightness floored me (and my wife). However, she, not I, was the first to notice the ever-lengthening "warm up" times. Why would they work so remarkably well right out of the blister pack and worsen, drastically, in such a short amount of time?

I believe the trickle current from the X-10 autosense circuit has damaged or is damaging something internally. I've had CFL bulbs plugged into appliance modules begin to burn at the base while operating. Not sure if they would have caught fire if I didn't happen to be standing there, but the areas around the tube ends were burned dark black and brown. Lots of acrid, nasty smoke too. SAF for CFL's dropped to an all time low, which is why I posted the WaPo summary!

It might be a good idea to get two more new test bulbs and run one off a mechanical timer vs. one on a appliance module on the same schedule as the timer. That should tell me if the trickle current is ruining the bulb. I may even get a third one to leave on all the time to see if it's repeated on/off cycles that do the bulbs in.

We have very different lighting schemes. Nearly all table and floor lamps. The floodlight produced a very interesting effect with one of the table lamps and really was astoundingly quick to reach full intensity. Now it take 30 secs and from what you're saying, might soon take 90. This sounds like another interesting problem to run to ground. Trickle current with these bulbs may be quite destructive. With the local electrical rates doubling and tripling here in the DC metro area, I want to try to get CFLs to work. If it means some workaround of the trickle current problem, I'll give it a shot. But I gotta test first and find the time to do it according to CHA standards! (-:

It didn't seem so bad and my wife's *really* picky about light color as it relates to cosmetics and food preparation. Lots of CFL and fluorescent solutions have had low SAF for that very reason. The N-Vision bulbs have been much more acceptable than past bulbs. Too bad the arthritic warm up and the GE bulb beginning to burn up have caused CFL's to lose more ground in her mind, approval-wise. And we're not talking about losing just a little ground. We're talking about Poland-sized chunks. (-:

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

In our condo in Brazil there is one light that takes a minute or two to reach full brightness. It's an extremely _white_ light. My wife bought the bulb and I didn't pay attention when the electrician installed the fixture so I wasn't aware of the brand or even the type. However, after reading your description I assume this is a CFL. The light is an annoying color. I hate using it even for a few minutes. I guess I'll try to find a warm color version next time we go down there.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

If UL-approved, they might smoke, smell and discolor but the plastic should not catch fire.

BTW, this seems to be another common complaint.

Reply to
Dave Houston

There's an article in today's NYT (by the same bozo who thinks lighting uses over 20% of US electricity) about coal and carbon sequestration.

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Some chemists have developed a method to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. The CO can then be used to make other useful things (e.g. synfuels, ethanol).

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Reply to
Dave Houston

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^dafnctpd&SystemType=2&LogonId=f7eecb462aecb681dcfbdc3351d22153&DocId=003694126&Page=1 The mercury emitted by coal power plants to run an incandescent is 26 mg over 5 years. For a CFL this is 6 mg. Add to that the max 5 mg of CFL in the bulb itself and you get 11 mg compared with 26 for the incandescent. A mercury thermometer has between 500 and 1,000 mg. And the 5 mg of mercury in a CFL is contained, as opposed to the mercury emitted by coal power plants, which is breathed in or consumed when eating fish. See the above link for what to do if a CFL breaks.

So, as long as 80% of our electricity comes from coal, it's still better to use CFLs!

Reply to
ericjhwilson

Many people have reported premature failures after a year or so. If you have to replace the CFL annually, the 5 year score becomes CFL 31mg, Incandescent

26mg.
Reply to
Dave Houston

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Reply to
BruceR

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Reply to
Dave Houston

On a related topic, I saw an AP story yesterday that claimed lighting accounts for 22% of USA electricity use. Having earlier found (and cited) DOE data saying lighting was 9% of residential use and 6% of industrial use, I contacted the EIA (Energy Information Administration) for help in finding statistics for the commercial sector. You'll have to do the math yourself but, in 1999, lighting accounted for about 23% of total commercial sector electricity use. (716 / 3098)

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Using figures I cited earlier, each sector accounts for about 1/3 of the total so that means lighting takes about 12-13% of total USA electricity use, much less than the figures given by the NYT & AP. The energy figures tossed about by the tree-huggers would appear to be just as inflated as the life expectancy figures tossed about by the CFL manufacturers.

Furthermore, since many industrial and commercial uses already are using high efficiency lamps there's not a lot to gain by forcing them to use CFLs.

So, CFLs aren't go>The warranties on the packages all seem to tout 5 to 7 years but in

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^dafnctpd&SystemType=2&LogonId=f7eecb462aecb681dcfbdc3351d22153&DocId=003694126&Page=1>>>

Reply to
Dave Houston

Or... You're wrong entirely. Calling people who care about the future of the planet "tree huggers" does nothing to further a meritless POV.

That is an unproven hypothesis. You have way of knowing what percentage of commercial and industrial users employ high efficiency lighting. Without hard figures your claim that "there's not a lot to gain" is baseless.

CFL's alone won't save the planet. Neither will any one, single technology. However, using high efficiency lighting is one of many useful steps we can take to slow the destruction of the planet. It is patently absurd to claim that because one useful thing won't solve all our problems that thing should not be implemented. Your argument is analogous to saying that since arresting one serial killer will not stop the tide of violence in our world we shouldn't have bothered arresting Ted Bundy.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

tree humpers better fo ya

u have no of knowing either, n*****ts

the planet will still be here long after u and everyone else is long gone.

I agrees

Reply to
MaxMaxwell

Ever been interviewed by a reporter? It's a thrilling experience. They managed to get SO much stuff wrong in the one newstory that I still shake my head. And that was twenty years ago. Things haven't gotten any better. I see them run with figures that came from advocacy groups or vested interests without an attempt to verify their accuracy and, worse still, they get defensive if you point it out to them.

Fixing a pollution problem with a worse pollutant is a solution only a scientist could love. It's really a question of national priorities. Do you want to spend your tax dollars on bombs and wars and rebuilding foreign infrastructures or spend the money on our own infrastructure? Catch the mercury and the carbon at the smokestack where you *know* you've caught it. Remember when Detroit claimed it could never clean up car exhausts? It can be done if there's a will to do it. The *will* came to Detroit in the form of Hondas, IIRC, that met the Clean Air standard quite economically and nearly sank the domestic auto industry.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

My experience has been worse but I keeping hoping the next batch of bulbs will be better, and so far, that's been true. For the most part, the newer bulbs seem to start faster, last longer and interfere less with X-10. But a bulb that emits thick (probably very toxic) smoke when it fails isn't an improvement, it's a serious setback.

All the assumptions built into the payback equation that we can't verify personally bother me. It's not a leap to assume that if the claims about longevity that I can personally verify are inaccurate, other claims may be dubious as well, particularly as to exactly where all the mercury goes and how much of it ends up there. Mercury is bad stuff:

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(look closely at that hand!)

Fixing a pollution problem with a pollutant seems too similar to fixing the cane beetle problem in Oz by introducing the cane toad,

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which is now the far larger pest. Catch both pollutants at the smokestacks. Don't depend on rosy projections of super long bulb life, reduced overall electrical demand and responsible recycling that may not quite happen as predicted.

-- Bobby G.

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>>> -4c06-be84-b62dee548fda

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Reply to
Robert Green

Been there, done that, got a scrapbook full of such fictions. Of course, I wasn't always as meek and mild-mannered as I am in CHA - I'm mellowing with age. ;)

Actually, I tried to educate the NYT reporter whose inflated figures first caught my eye. I emailed him with links to DOE statistics for residential and industrial electricity end uses, telling him I couldn't find similar reports for the commercial sector. He responded by saying the commercial sector figures for lighting were high enough to support his overall figure (IIRC, 22%). I disagreed and suggested he could get accurate figures from EIA (maybe even later, unpublished ones, given his position). He didn't respond. I now view all his environmental articles with a wary eye.

When I saw similarly bloated figures in the AP story, I took my own advice and emailed EIA. A day later I had links to the latest published stats for all sectors and email addresses for individuals to contact for more detailed data for each sector. Unfortunately, there was no apparent way to contact the reporter for the AP.

Reply to
Dave Houston

Even if you were to find a published, vetted study that showed the figures were questionable, the result would still be the same. It's the new America, where people are conditioned from birth not to be responsible for their words or actions. See the nearby alarm contract thread for details. (-:

About the only time I've gotten through to reporters is when there's a beat switch and I can say "Your predecessor wasn't accurate . . ." That doesn't put them in such a defensive mode. The WashPost recently redid their site (to increase the number of clickthrus) and I got into a discussion with their Executive Editor. He claimed that although the posted comments about the new design were almost completely negative, his private email was much more positive. Sure. Joe McCarthy had a similar list. They took down the online comments the very next day after someone else pointed out that anyone who ever lost a Usenet argument resorted to the same "I have supporting emails but I can't post them because they are private" trick.

The bottom line is that news organizations are not much different from any other organization. They can dish it out, but when their turn in the line comes, they don't seem to take it as well as they give it.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Inflated energy figures seem to be ubiquitous. One has to wonder whether they are being deliberately duplicitous or are just stupid to understand technical stuff.

For example, Monday's Slate had this article...

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which included this...

"Cable and video-game boxes, DVD players, and other electronics can use as much energy in standby mode as a 75-watt light bulb that's left on."

I doubt there are any devices that use 75W in standby - even my 15 year old stereo receiver draws less than 1W in standby. Even if they mean that as the total for all devices that draw phantom power, I think the 75W figure is still badly inflated for the typical home.

They certainly should know better because treehugger.com has this on their website...

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You almost have to conclude it's a case of deliberate disinformation.

Reply to
Dave Houston

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