Sounds like you got a bad batch. I’ve been buying them for about 6 years now, and have had a grand total of 1 burn out. Granted, I only have a half dozen or so bulbs in my apt, but still.
This will indeed save you money, but it will also slowly drive you mad as the buzzing, flickering, green-blue fluorescent hell-light continually crushes your soul and plunges your mind into despair so deep you don’t even notice when you die.
I get enough of that shit at work, thanks. INCANDESCENT FOREVER!
CF bulbs use an electronic ballast which drives them at around 25-40 kHz, typically. No buzz, and no flicker. And the color is much more natural than it used to be.
No, CFLs aren’t the same as the tube fluorescents in office building. They come in warm white, and they don’t buzz. (You can get cool white or daylight if you like, but warm white is the most readily available color.)
Obviously, my “no” was in response to friedo, not Q.E.D., who beat me in with a simulpost.
I despise Flourescent tube lights, as a child I could see them doing their flicker thing even when the balast wasnt going bad, it used to give me nasty headaches.
that said I use the compact flourescents in every fixture I can find, they work great and dont bother me at all.
I leave my pc on 24/7 except in the summer when the extra heat it pumps out just adds to the swelterfest in the living room. for saving on the electric bill a few smarter large items will add up faster than a pile of little ones. turn the heat off when not in use, a room heater is better than central when you are home alone in your room.
QED I have to wonder about your comment that wall warts draw minimal power when the attached device isn’t running. Several of the dozen or so wall warts I use are always warm to the touch when plugged in. Even without any device even attached.
This may or may not be a sign of poor manufacturing or real life departure from theory. But certainly it’s a way of saving several Watts per hour.
I’ll second this. I use some sort of “daylight” fluorescents whose color I find eminently preferable to that of incandescents - they’re definitely bluer than incandescent bulbs, but the yellowness of incandescents has always bothered me; these really feel to me like they mimick actual sunlight more closely than any light bulb I’ve ever used. But they do sort of give my windows a seemingly bluish glow like that from a monitor or TV from outside the house. I think that’s just in comparison to other houses with incandescent bulbs, though.
A few years ago it seemed like compact fluorescents frequently failed on us, but none of the ones we’ve bought more recently have failed yet. I suspect it’s more a matter of quality control than anything else, since it used to be that one bulb would fail within a few months of manufacture while others lasted seemingly indefinitely.
I don’t know how they’ve affected my energy use, but my mother replaced most of her lights with compact fluorescents and had a very significant decline in energy use. I’m just so charmed by the color out of these light bulbs that it’s enough reason for me to prefer them on that basis alone.
What engineer_comp_geek said about temperature cycling. I agree that cold-booting a couple of times a day isn’t going to hurt.
**Tastes of chocolate **speaks words of wisdom too. The weak link component for the lifetime of electronic devices is normally the electrolytic capacitors. Their capacitance value gradually falls with age, and is accelerated by increased operating temperatures, working voltages, and ripple currents, which all conspire to dry out the crucial electrolyte. If you run all of these parameters to the max then even a good electrolytic will have a lifespan somewhat shorter than that of a lightbulb.
I almost share friedo’s burning hatred of the fluorescent bulb, but I do use them in hallways and corridors where the quality of light isn’t too important. Apart from the flicker, fluorescents just ain’t white. If you look at the spectrum of daylight you’ll see a wide band of noise, with all visible colours pitching in to make white. With a ‘white’ fluorescent light the colour spectrum looks more like a series of narrow spikes or comb - this means that colours are missing. Your brain partly compensates for this (but has to work harder to do so) to restore the colour balance you think you see, but it’s not good to do colour rendering work under fluorescents. Also it’s illegal (in the UK) for a workplace to operate rotating machinery soley illuminated by fluorescent lighting. This is because the flickering can cause a strobe effect, and what appears to be a stationary lathe chuck may actually be spinning in sync with the mains phase.
Normal incandescent bulbs are a little yellow, so if you want something to minimise eyestrain and get good daylight rendering, then use an incandescent halogen bulb. A little expensive, but worth it.
Under any reasonable set of operating conditions, computers will last long enough such that your likely to throw it out before it breaks. Walk into any computer science warren in the country and you see scads of 486 era computers that have abused to the extreme and they are still perfectly functional.