Haters of CF lightblubs, have you tried LED's

In My Humble Opinion
1

2 parts to this, one is why do you hate CF lighting? And the second part is if LED lighting any good for you?

The reason is I hate CF lighting and have gone back to incandescent lighting, but am curious about LED lighting. My reasons for hating CF lighting is that it gives off what I would say is a ‘ghostly’ light, it seems to have a illusion of brightness without much definition (making it harder to read stuff, no matter what the wattage and how bright the room is), and actually seems to have taken away colors.

Why I want to know why you hate CF lighting is because if your reasons don’t line up with mine then your liking LED’s may not equate to me liking them. For instance if you don’t like CF for the mercury risk inside your home that wouldn’t really be helpful. If you don’t like the flickering, I really don’t think that would be either, but if it’s the quality of light, and you don’t have that issue with LED’s then that would seem to be a better indicator.

It would be particularly helpful if you went from IC to CF to IC to LED’s

2

I enjoy the light from CFLs. I don’t experience any of the color problems you describe. I have no problem seeing detail under them. Now if LEDS were competitive in price, I’d like to try them too. My experience with hand held LEDs is that the light is never bright enough. I have a leftover suitcase of incandescent bulbs I would give to anybody that wants them. I’m just keeping them for relics.

3

I see CF lamps as somewhat ghastly (which is a greener shade than ghostly) in their illumination, and don’t like them so much for that. But for many things they are fine. However I do like the light from LED lamps better and have installed them in a few places. I can believe the economic argument for saving energy with them.

4

I think you CFL haters can take comfort in the idea I think they will be a short lived technology. I think the LED is the light of the future. As the price declines, the volume will rise. Assuming the price pressure doesn’t lead to shorter lives, replacing light bulbs will become a thing of the past.

For a number of years, I was in charge of a church building. Over the years, it had several additions each with different exit lights. The 80’s construction mostly used LED exit light. After 20+ years, none of them were ever replaced. The oldest section had regular incandescent bulbs, 15-25 watts. I had to watch them like a hawk and constantly replace bulbs. I got sick of that and when CFL’s became popular, I started putting them in instead. Some of them at 24/7 lasted a couple of years. With exit lights you balance the convenience and safety against costs. In some places, you also have high labor costs too.

I think many of the battery powered emergency lights use incandescent bulbs too. I wonder with the price of batteries if LED’s would be cost effective there too.

5

I have gone ix-nay on CFL’s for a reason that I rarely see discussed (much).

I’ve never paid much attention to the light quality. I like that they are a little brighter than the corresponding incandescent for about 1/4 the energy. My eyes get tired very quickly when I am reading, but I have not paid attention to whether this happens with IC and CFL alike. (Now that OP mentions it, I WILL pay some attention to that.)

My problems?
(1) Yes, I’m concerned about the mercury, should one break.

(2) The biggie for me: DISPOSING of the damn things! Hey, like, I want to do this environmentally right and save the world and all, but… but… but…

[sorry anecdote about that]So I had this CFL that burned out. Of course, I wanted to dump it properly. Not in the regular trash. Not even in the recyclable trash (can’t put hazmat there). Gotta take it to a proper hazmat disposal place. So I let my fingers do some walking, and made some phone calls…
Turns out: There’s only ONE place in town to dump household hazmat, or CFL’s anyway. We’re talking about a moderately big town too. Fresno (pop. about 1M including nearby communities, as of a few years ago). They are only open to the public TWO weekends per year, and I just missed one of them. AND I have to make a reservation in advance, and the next opportunity won’t be for about 6 months. :confused: Just to dump one damn CFL??? :dubious:

So screw that, I decided. I could have just let it lay around for 6 months, but I just didn’t want to do with that and have to deal with it all over again in 6 months.

So I put it in the trunk of may car, so I could dispose of it whenever and wherever a chance arose.

Suffice it to say that I eventually disposed of dead CFL else-where, else-when, and else-how.
[/sorry anecdote about that]

So that’s why I quit using CFL’s (except for one more that I already had, that I’m using now).

Now I am waiting for LED’s to get more popular (translation: cheaper). In the meantime, I am sticking with edison classic lighting.

Here in CA, vanguard of everything vanguard, they have mandated non-edison bulbs a year ahead of everywhere else. Needless to say, there has been a run on the market for IC bulbs while we can still get them. They are flying off the shelves. I have done my part: I bought a stack of IC’s which I estimate will last until I can start playing around with LED’s.

Looks like CFL’s were a bright (ahem) idea that just didn’t pan out.

Moral of the story: Memo to government: If you’re going to mandate CFL’s (even if only until something better comes along), you f’ing well also gotta mandate that there WILL be some passably feasible way to get rid of them too!

6

I don’t know if any of the locations listed here are close by, so it might not be convenient. (And, it is definitely not as convenient as getting rid of the old fashioned bulbs. Of course, you shouldn’t have to do it as often, either.) But, there are more options other than the municipal centers. Seems like Home Depots and Lowe’s offer the service. Here’s a Earth 911 list of places to recycle CFLs in Fresno.

7

The last time I went CFL shopping, there were two kinds. There were the regular ones, or “original” or whatever were first offered as IC replacements, and there was a second kind called “daylight.” I found the “regular” CFL’s to be equivalent in how they lit the room to IC’s - kind of a soft white-yellow light that I’ve been used to all my life. No flickering or anything, but I thought the IC brightness equivalency to be lacking and needed to get the next brighter ones, so instead of 60-watt equivalents, I was buying 80-100 watt equivalents instead.

The “daylight” CFL’s, however, are absolutely intolerable to me. They seem to let off a blue spectrum that is horrible and garish. To me, real sunlight seems a bit yellowish, and similar to the IC’s and therefore the first kind of CFL’s that I’m happy with (also, no flickering). I have regular CFL’s in all my fixtures. When I bought a “daylight” CFL 100-watt equivalent for my floor lamp, I had to take it right back out and return it. It made me feel crazy, way worse than the regular bar-fluorescent overheads at work. Just horrible.

As to LED’s, I haven’t seen any of the household ones yet. I do have an LED flashlight, and to me it’s a similar bluish tint as the “daytime” CFL’s, it’s fine for walking outside in the dark, but no way would I want that lighting my home. The city has started re-lamping the alleys with more efficient fixtures and bulbs, which I believe are LED’s, and those are similarly very white to bluish. I really don’t like them and have trouble translating colors with them - colors are darker to me with the LED’s somehow, or maybe more saturated, or something.

8

I don’t hate CFs at all. The last couple generations of “soft white” CFLs have been good enough for me.

Having said that, I did cast some off because of failures. The decorative globes above the bathroom mirror started dying in less than a year, I assume from the humidity and short on/off cycles. The one in the living room lamp lasted a couple years, then started having trouble turning on.

So I replaced the living room and bedroom lamps with these Philips LED bulbs:

http://www.ecat.lighting.philips.com/l/enduraled-a19/lp_cf_s_lea_eu_fa_us_lp_prof_atg/cat/us/?lpType=Lamps&userLanguage=en&catalogType=LP_PROF_ATG&userCountry=us&proxybuster=D783F74D5B6F7D8ED724E689126EA51A.app106-drp4

I love them. They give off a pleasant soft white light, and don’t give a shit how frequently you turn them on and off.

9

Our city has a program where they come in and replace all the incandescent bulbs with CFLs.
The few CFLs I had were not bright and took too long to come on.
We did the change over anyway and I’m thrilled. The lamps are very bright, come on very quickly and don’t have that ghost light.

The program was free and it’s supposed to lower my electric bill by about $80-$100 a year.

10

(I wonder how recent this is. My sorry attempt at recycling one measly CFL in Fresno happened about 3-4 years ago.)

11

I live in a county with maybe 70,000 population. Our county recycling center takes them.

12

I remain committed to halogen bulbs (mostly available only in the internet - bulbs.com, etc). The color is just as good as the old incandescent bulbs, they are dimmable and are less energy hungry. I don’t find that the LEDs are quite the right color temperature yet. I have a desk light which is supposed to be daylight, but is more moonlight.

Bob

13

I hate CFL’s because I hate the way the light looks. I second this bulb. It’s expensive, but the best I’ve found and replacing incandescents.

14

CFL’s give off a strange yellowish, sickly light. It literally puts me in a depressed and surly mood. I threw them out and went back to incandescent.

I have six cases of various wattage incandescent bulbs stockpiled. Enough to last out my lifetime (I hope) or at least 25 years. I plan to buy another three cases of 40 Watt bulbs next year. If I die early some lucky so and so will inherit a lot of new bulbs with the house.

My kitchen has two florescent fixtures with the standard 4 foot 40 Watt tubes. Cool White. those are fine. they aren’t yellow like CFL’s

15

you can get CFL with different color variations, brightness (a friend has a large one above a workbench, you don’t want to look directly at it for long) and bulb types (there are smooth globes).

LED are great for focused light.

16

The chief problem with LEDs is that they are so dim that you can’t use them for anything except refrigerator lights.

And so expensive that the cost of replacing all the bulbs in your house rivals the down payment on a used car.

And with no guarantee that they will last the promised operating time.

But other that that…:rolleyes:

17

Yeah, right now there is a big cost difference between the two. For many people, especially in these tough economic times, the cost is just too damn high!

CFLs don’t bother me much, if at all. Maybe it’s a gender thing-- seems like many women can see colors that lost of men just don’t.

18

That’s my major issue with them, especially for something like the laundry or the toilet- I don’t want to spend $5 on a CFL lightbulb for those places, especially when a 40w incandescent was 60c.

Also, the “warm-up” time takes a bit of getting used to, but otherwise I don’t mind CFLs… I just think they need to be about half the price.

19

Just like the rent?

this is false. Some of the higher power LEDs can be oppressively bright. The Philips bulb I linked above is stated to be equivalent to a 60 watt incandescent, and in a quick side-by-side I did I think it’s a little brighter than that.

Hell, on the M-39 expressway in Detroit, they just did a complete rebuilding of a main section of it, and installed LED street lights. And they work.

20

Less talk about Halogens. I have used then as work lights. I am also thinking of replacing the incandescent, that I put inside my washing machine to keep it from freezing up, with a halogen. It seems every cold spell, when I need it, the incandescent has either unscrewed or the vibration busted the filament. What idiot would put the laundry in the garage?

Also no federal ban coming on them.