Well all be darned. Thanks, maybe there is hope to convert “all” the lights after all.
Slight hijack, but does anybody else notice that recently (well, I’ll say in the last, oh, say 10 years or so), light bulbs burn out much quicker? I mean, the reason I’ve gotten so many fluorescents is that my light bulbs were burning out, well, I’m bad at keeping track of time, but it seemed something like every couple of months or so, sometimes even sooner. I had to constantly replace them, and I just don’t remember that being a problem before.
Hard to say - subjectively, it seems to be too soft, and gives book pages a yellow cast. I suspect it is because I stuck it in a torch style lamp with a milky plastic shade that works well to diffuse an incandescent. I suspect that type of shade isn’t designed very well for flourescent light, but that’s the kind of lamps I have.
I haven’t read the links, but the filament “boils off” tungsten due to thermionic emission – the hotter it gets, the more rapidly you lose atoms. And the rate is greater than exponention (Richardson-Dshan equation). So it follows that the cooler you run your lamp, the longer it will run. Dramatically longer. The rule of thumb is that liftime goes as the twelfth power of the current, so a tiny change in current or voltage results in a huge change in bulb life.
The down side of burning a bulb at low current is that it’s dim. You want to get the bulb fairly hot, to imitate sunlight. In modern tiungsten-halogen bulbs, you want the bulb to run hot to get the greatest efficiency from the action of the halogen in returning the boiled off ato,ms to the filament.
There’s a bulb burning inside the Edison Tower in NJ. I’ve been told that it’s been burning for years, but I don’t know how true that is. I have read that we stil;l have some of Edison’s original bulbs, in working order.
Actually, the new compact fluorescents (which simply screw into a standard lamp base) use different phosphors than the unloved blue buzzing fluorsecent tubes that Tom Hanks made fun of in Joe Versus the Volcano. They produce a warn yelloe glow not unlike standard filament lamps. And they don’t blink or buzz…
