Tried them. They do not work for me. They’re close, certainly, but my eyes “earn” a lot of money and get a lot of workout every day and night, and I have to go with what works best for me in terms of eye strain and stress.
CFL’s are great. IMO they should be used wherever practical and wherever it will not negatively impact ergonomics.
I learned from here (primarily danceswithcats) that dimmer switches for incandescent bulbs should not use CFLs, and dimmer circuits converted for CFLs should not use incandescents. As I recall, a normal dimmer switch is a variable resisitor, and a CFL dimmer isn’t. The two switches change different electric parameters flowing through the bulb.
Is there an electrician in the house?
You’re confusing terms. The rating of wires in Amperes is based upon their size in AWG, their insulation rating temperature, whether or not they are tightly grouped with other current carrying conductors, and their place of installation, e.g. buried in earth, in a wall space, in free air, etc.
Simply stated, a 120V 15A circuit is rated at 1800W, which means it could power 18 100W bulbs, one 100W bulb amounting to less than one ampere.
The short answer is that CFLs, unless listed as dimmable, aren’t dimmable. IF listed as dimmable, they require a dimmer control carrying a UL listing for such use.
Various types of dimmers exist for incandescent or halogen fixtures, but they are not to be used for either compact fluorescent lamps (which directly replace incandescent medium Edison base lamps), or those flourescent fixtures which incorporate electronic dimmable ballasts, nor other HID fixtures, such as mercury, sodium vapor, or metal halide.
So if I have been using a 100 watt bulb in the same socket for about a year, and there is no obvious damage after inspecting the socket, is it safe to assume that the socket can handle the wattage, or is this something that can “build up” over time and one day in the future could still be a problem?
I’ve tried these. Don’t like 'em either. Give me normal tungsten lighting anyday. It’s much more relaxing and soothing for me. Solux-brand daylight-balanced halogens, on the other hand, rock, and have a CRI (Color Rendering Index) of 98-99 (100 being perfect match with daylight). Unfortunately, I think they’re only made desk-lamp sized.
More to the point, tall guys like me are less likely to get burned by a low-hanging CFL bulb
Our University had outdoor lights which could use high wattage light bulbs. To save money, they instead used lower wattage energy saving bulbs that were supposed to put out the same equivalent lumens. However when they decided to hold night courses lasting at late as ten at night, they deemed the lighting insufficient. :smack: They decided to replace the lower wattage bulbs with a higher wattage bulbs which put out more lumens.
Within a week, there were reports from all over campus that they could smell the strong burning plastic. Although the fixtures themselves could handle the higher wattage bulbs, the decorative plastic vintage-looking light coverings could not. :eek:
Right. My point was that even rather pitiful wires could handle a 100w bulb without overheating.
You can get high-wattage (high-lumens) CFL’s up to 200W, 12,000 lumens. That is the equivalent light of 3 or 4 of those incandescent bulbs. Should certainly provide enough to replace those.
Of course, CFL’s that big are not quite so ‘compact’, and may not fit in your fixture (but 200W incandescents are big, too).