I was installing compact fluorescents tonight. When I was throwing away the boxes I found a small piece of broken bulb, with white powder on the inside.
Sure enough, the bulb I had installed in my daughter’s room was broken. The light was out when I swapped them, and I didn’t try to turn it on, so I didn’t notice.
I know there is mercury in them. A cursory search finds a lot of (seemingly) alarmist articles about HAZ-MAT teams coming to clean rooms and kids and pets being evacuated.
So what’s up with that?
The EPA’s recommendations for cleaning up broken compact fluorescents.
http://www.epa.gov/mercury/spills/index.htm
Scroll down to “What to Do if a Fluorescent Light Bulb Breaks”.
I don’t see a lot of alarmism there, just common sense. Remove pets and children, air out the room for 15 minutes, shut off the central air and fans, pick up the broken pieces very carefully without touching them, don’t walk through it…
The good news is that the lamp was probably already broken before you opened the box, so the bulk of the miniscule amount of mercury that was in the lamp probably slipped out before you opened the box and screwed it it into the fixture.
The larger hazard is the glass - don’t cut your hand on the broken lamp, and you’ll be OK.
Yeah, my boyfriend kind of freaked out when I broke a bulb by dropping it in the kitchen, and he insisted on cleaning it up rather than me (a first) because “You have all those child bearing parts. Go sit in the living room and breathe the clean air.” Of course, he usually works with more serious lights (he’s in film) so maybe he had work-instilled caution going on.
“Freaked out” is probably the wrong term, but he hustled me out of the kitchen tout suite.