I’ve had several burn out, and one never worked at all – it was dead right out of the package.
Standard CFL’s from a hardware store are rated for as cold as 0°F – we can stay below that for weeks during a Minnesota winter. You can get special ‘cold-weather’ ones that go as low as -10°, but that’s hardly the coldest of a Minnesota winter! Still, they do work better – we’ve used them in our barns.
Or you can just stay with an incandescent bulb – for the little time a garage light is turned on, the lower efficiency hardly matters.
Yeah, it was the cold weather CFLs we tried most recently; they didn’t last a year. We’ve gone back to incandescents for the time being. I doubt CFLs will catch up with our winters before they’re entirely replaced by LEDs or some other technology, though. Those oil lanterns at Lehman’s are starting to look better and better.
First place I put them was in a room that tended to be dark, where I and some other family members tended to spend a lot of time, and the incandescents had a lifespan of three weeks to six weeks. Never replaced one after putting in CFL.
However, in another room where the lights didn’t burn out particularly fast but were a bitch to replace, I had one CFL go pink almost immediately and then burn out within a week. The rest of them were still there when I moved out, approximately 2 years after putting those bulbs in. I would almost certainly have had to replace one or more incandescents in those fixtures during that time.
And I just had one burn out in my office, and it’s only been there for around three years. Another couple that I put in at the same time are still burning but they do seem not to be emitting as much light as before.
(When it burned out it simply went dark. It may have flickered a few times the time before the last time I turned it on and noticed it was dark, but it didn’t do it for long.)
Now–how am I supposed to dispose of these things? That could be a problem if I can’t just drop them in the trash. And I seem to recall that I’m not supposed to do that.
Seal it in a sandwich baggie before you throw it out.
In some locations, any store that sells CFL’s will take burned-out ones back, and dispose of them for you.
from that link (this line was in your post, it just didn’t get quoted):
“A design flaw in compact florescent bulbs mean they become dimmer as they age, a report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology said.”
I didn’t realize “being a fluorescent tube” was a “design flaw.” Seriously, this is one of those things that fluorescent tubes just do. even the backlight in your monitor or LCD TV (which are more likely than not fluorescent tubes) dim with age.
That said, I’ve had hit-or miss luck with CFLs. The one I had in the living room lamp lasted about three years, and it was generally switched on at dusk, and left on until about midnight. The decorative ones I put over the bathroom mirror started dropping like flies after 6 months, I assume humidity had something to do with that.
How about Ricky Williams?