It will eventually produce more light when it catches on fire.
Actually, it’s incandescents that are more likely to be damaged by jostling while lit – they have a thin metal filament burning white-hot in there. CFL’s are a gas inside a tube, and less susceptible to jostling damage.
However, I have noted that with CFL’s, it’s much more important to get a good quality one – the cheap ones seem to either produce poor color light, or last shorter, or both. (Incandescent bulbs seem to be such a mature product that all of the brands work fine.) With CFL’s, I’ve been very dissatisfied with the LOA (Lights of America) brand, and I avoid that one now.
The 8-to-10 times longer-lasting figure is, in my case, a joke. I’m happy if I get 2 times… and if I need special socket…then the price goes up.
Oh, knock it off already. The normal failure mode of these bulbs is NOT TO CATCH FIRE. The few incidents which have been reported have all been due to inferior off-brand products using unapproved components. 99.9999% of these bulbs pose zero risk of fire. Your uninformed alarmism is growing tiresome.
Well if we’re telling anecdotes I’ve never had one fail to light up properly, never noticed any dimming, and have been writing dates on bulbs for the last 6 years when I put bulbs in to see how long they last. One failed within 6 months, none of the rest have failed yet.
Well thanks for not having a sense of humor. And your statistics don’t relate to my personal experience. I have 9 fixtures in my house with CFL’s and I’ve replaced a number of these bulbs in time frames WAY under their advertized duty cycle. 1 of them failed in a fire and one of them failed in what sounded like an internal short (no smoke or flames). Now you can pull a non-factual number of 99.9999% out of where every you pull numbers from but my personal experience with CFL’s has been very poor in both safety and durability.
What we’re probably seeing here is the skewing of data due to batch purchases. People (like me) who buy packs of bulbs are experiencing the quality of a single manufacturer. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the experiences related in this thread are magnified by this fact. Good bulb manufacturer, good results. Bad manufacturer, bad results.
About my experience. One packet of very cheap CFL’s when they first came out cheap gave me problems.
They work fine for me.
As I understand it, the lifetime of an LED depends on total number of hours, not cycles. It also depends on temperature, but as long as the LED is cooled properly, I think it’s the best choice for a flashing light.
Mythbusters did a test and confirmed it - I think the test involved incandescent, CF and LED lights, cycling them on/off every minute or so for several weeks, and at the end only the LED light was still working.
As a data point, here in Singapore, I haven’t seen a single incandescent light bulb in yoinks, and there certainly aren’t any in my house. I have 2 tube lights above my desk, and they haven’t been change since… I moved in, I think. Call it 10 years. And the last time I changed a light was when the toilet light started flickering, and that was changed about a year ago, so call that 9 years.
One point, though, you seem to be referring to them as some sort of direct replacement for incandescent bulbs, which seems strange to me. I’ve seen them around, but hardly anyone uses them here - perhaps part of the reason is because your lighting circuits aren’t “standard” for florescent lights, and that’s somehow causing your florescents to blow?
In any case, what do you use in the office, then? I can’t imagine you use incandescents in the office as wall - for one thing, it’d be unbearably hot, and for another, they’re not all that bright?
I remember when I was overseas for a while, and had to use a incandescent light - honestly, I could do without orangey light. Stark, orange light - that’s how I remember it.
If a bulb was 20% dimmer 3 years after installing, do you think you would be able to compare the current light output from your memory of it? Or do you have some device that measures it?
Look up the word “notice” sometime, just for kicks.
So if someone failed to notice dimming, that would mean they failed to detect it. I’m sure you have a point there somewhere, but my interpretation of the word seems to be a standard one.
YMMV, but I don’t think I could reliably notice or detect a 20% reduction in light output between one event and another 3 years later.
Exactly. And he didn’t, either. Doesn’t mean there was no such reduction, only that he didn’t notice it.
Musicat no I don’t think I’d notice. Well, I might because our house has a number room lights that comprise a cluster of three bulbs, and I’ve been replacing the IC’s as they fail so some of the CFL’s in a given cluster are years older than others.
However generally I don’t think I would notice 20% dimming, but firstly, what isn’t sufficient for me to notice I see no reason to care about, and secondly if some dimming in service bothered me I’d just put in a slightly stronger bulb in the first place. The cluster lights generally had 40 watt IC’s and I’ve been replacing them with 8 watt CFL’s. If dimming were a problem I could easily put in 10 watt CFL’s in the first place and still save heaps of power.
I hope more economical full-spectrum lighting technologies are developed. We haven’t undergone nearly enough evolution to live inside (with little sunlight) all of the time without considerable health effects.
We’re not plants; we do NOT require sunlight to be healthy.
What about for Vitamin D production?
I’ve never had a CF last longer then an incandescent. Yet, they cost many times the price. I always feel like I’m getting scammed. Maybe there’s some difference if you’re talking about a huge company with many thousands and thousands of lights running all the time, but in an average single family home, I’m unconvinced it makes much of a difference.
We have dozens of nutritive sources of vitamin D, which is a good thing for most of us. Most people, particularly in developed nations, don’t get nearly enough sun exposure to meet our requirements, otherwise, what with clothing and a largely indoor lifestyle.