I forgot to mention that I think the biggest concern I have about CFLs is the mercury issue which makes clean up more of a pain if you break one. It also means you should recycle the bulb instead of just tossing it into the trash. That’s one reason I’m eager to see LED bulbs come down in price.

Les: “Like all fluorescent lighting, CFLs have a frequency to them and can flicker when they’re starting to wear out.

Flicker becomes noticeable when the sinusoidal luminance transitions occur slowly enough for the eyes to render as nerve impulses.  This is called the flicker fusion rate and for most people it’s around 1/15 second.  (Pity the individuals with a shorter response time; everything flickers to them.)

Standard fluorescent bulbs use a 60hz transformer ballast whose strobe effect gets more pronounced as they age.  This should not be terribly noticeable except that when you get several ballasts in a small area, they get visible heterodyne effects that can be quite obnoxious. 

Most CFL’s use an electronic ballast whose frequency is far in excess of anyone’s flicker fusion rate.  So even very old CFL’s don’t noticeably flicker in relation to their ballast, they just get dimmer.

One thing I have noticed about CFL’s is I think they fudge a bit on luminance equivalences. (My light meter is broken - damn! - so this is a subjective impression) If I’m replacing a 60-watt incandescent bulb, I buy the 100-watt “equivalent” CFL.  It still saves energy and they still last a long time, but I don’t like to sacrifice illumination levels. No sense living in a cave.

Does all incandescent bulbs mean ALL incandescent bulbs?  Because my beloved Lava Lamps need a nice hot incandescent to work.

Oven and refrigerator bulbs, candelabra lamps, plant lights, and certain other type of bulbs are exempted.  I just checked my partner’s Lava Lamp, it has a 40 watt appliance bulb in it - these are exempted.

I think the mercury issue will take care of itself as there will be an obvious need to have recycling programs and such. And along them lines, in our area we already have a recycling program for such stuff, but the city does a shitty job of advertising it. Which explains why no one knows about it and landfills are still being filled with electronics as if that isn’t a problem.

I wish that were true.  Our university has all sorts of environmental statements and intentions, but every day I ride past the library dumpster, and it is often FULL of long fluorescent tubes.  And by “often” I mean one day out of every two weeks or so, all year long.

It’s difficult to get environmental understanding into practice.  Really, there’s a tremendous time lag.

We have some that appear to be ‘normal’ shapes, but are actually the tube is bent inside the glass- I assume it’s a cosmetic thing.

As I mentioned before, a lot of lampshades have a little wire clip designed to hold onto the bulb itself.  Also the external envelope improves durability.  So the bulb-shaped (with squiggles inside) CFL’s may not be just cosmetic.

Bought 4 more SES spots today I don’t know about in the US, but most ‘normal’ bulbs are bayonet here, and if you need screw types they can be a pain to get. 

Mrs H wasn’t happy as they were £1.69 each, rather than £1.29 for two- spots being more expensive anyway, but as I pointed out, they go so often that for an extra £4 or so its worth it. in the long run.  These are 7w=25w, only ones I’ve seen, so theoretically not as bright as the 40w they replace.  However once it warmed up after a few seconds it seemed about the same as the remaining 3 filament type on the rail- once all are replaced we’ll see, though that would still give 100w (theoretical), though pointing around different parts of the kitchen.  Mrs may complain, thou will be less of an issue in hall and landing.  I think getting hold of replacements for the living and especially dining rooms may cause disagreement, for the cosmetic shape, as these are the ‘candle type’, and need to look right.

a lot of lampshades have a little wire clip designed to hold onto the bulb itself

Not here- this is an oldfashioned way of doing it.  Shades are held onto the fitting itself by a screw-collar onto the socket part.

The main problem with the CFLs is the huge potential for mercury poisoning.  They contain mercury and, if broken, you cannot just clean them up the way you would an incandescent because you will expose yourself—and the room in which it was broken—to mercury.  I read a story of a woman who dropped a CFL while installing it in her daughter’s bedroom, couldn’t afford the over $2000 to decontaminate the room, and had to cover the doorway with heavy plastic wrap until the levels of mercury declined.  They’re very dangerous.  The government’s gone and banned incandescents with no CFL disposal system in place.  Break one, you’re screwed.  Throw them out in the trash, the environement’s screwed.  This “solution” to one of our energy problems is about to make things a LOT worse.  Stock up on incandescents, people.

I broke one about a year ago, no one got ill. Didn’t know about the mercury.  This could be a classic case of failed risk assessment.

Yup.  It’s true.  Here’s a link to an NPR article about it:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=7431198

Tracey, if you look up above you’ll note in a previous comment I linked to an EPA guide on cleaning up a broken CFL. It’s a bit more of a pain, but if handled properly there’s not need for a $2000 clean up.

Tracey, inorganic mercury isn’t all that hazardous - see the link Les posted above.  If you spill organic mercury compounds like methyl mercury in your house, well that would be different.

More importantly, just burning the coal to power incandescent light bulbs for the life of one CFL puts far more mercury into the environment than the CFL does.

I put my CFL’s in a big plastic bucket with a lid, each in a bag.  Once a year, Illinois EPA toxic waste pickup in my county, problem solved.  But so far I’ve only had to recycle 2 of them.  I figure it’ll be 8 more years to fill the bucket and by then, we’ll have a regular CFL recycling drop-off point.

It’s a non-issue.

If metallic mercury were that poisonous, I’d long since be dead, considering the amount of mercury I rolled around in my hands, coated dimes with, and otherwise exposed myself to, as a kid.  The same is generally true of other poisonous metals, lead for instance: the pure metals are relatively insoluble, and thus they tend to pass through our bodies without doing damage.  As dof said, organic compounds are a different story.

Not that we should be complacent: obviously mercury, and lead, and other potential contaminants, should be handled carefully and sequestered from the environment, as far as possible.  But there’s no need to be panicky about metallic mercury.

How much mercury are we talking about?  Tracey- from the article you linked to

She says that even though fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, using them contributes less mercury to the environment than using regular incandescent bulbs. That’s because they use less electricity — and coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of mercury emissions in the air.

Tracy, could you please provide some reference to the story with the woman who had to pay $2,000 to clean up the bedroom after a CFL broke?  The NPR article you linked said workers who recycle/clean up CFLs can be exposed to high levels, but it also says the bulbs themselves have very little mercury (emphasis mine):

But the bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin, and the companies and federal government haven’t come up with effective ways to get Americans to recycle them.

“The problem with the bulbs is that they’ll break before they get to the landfill. They’ll break in containers, or they’ll break in a dumpster or they’ll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens,” says John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, the trade group for the people who handle trash and recycling.

I have a hard time believing that an entire bedroom could be contaminated on the level you are saying by a single CFL being broken.  The workers are being exposed to the accumulation of hundreds of broken bulbs if not more. The NPR article makes no mention to the bedroom cleanup incident, I’d be interested in reading the article that does if you could link it.

Snopes has an article about the CFL in the bedroom.  Short version: if it happened, she overracted in the extreme.  And of course once the hazmat people get involved, they can’t just shrug it off either.

Given that Flourescent tubes have been around decades, why the sudden hand wringing? They are common in offices, as well as around the home in kitchens and garages.

Yeah.  I see this every week or two in a dumpster I ride past on the way home:

And that’s just one building. Not a good thing, to be sure; microorganisms produce organic mercury compounds in landfills contaminated by mercury.  But the largest source of environmental mercury, by far, is burning coal.

I understand that in Germany, you can’t throw fluorescent bulbs of any kind into a landfill.  We will catch up to them eventually.

I am surfing the net sitting under a florescent light but I don’t think it is saving me any electricity at the moment. I figure every watt of waste heat it is not giving off is being made up for by the electric furnace that heats the house. Maybe it makes up for it in the summer when the AC doesn’t have to work as hard?

Consider that your furnace was putting out the same amount of heat when you were using an incandescent which was less efficient than that CFL. Your furnace wouldn’t suddenly be more inefficient simply because it noticed you’re using CFLs.

No, he’s right Les.  The furnace doesn’t notice CFL usage but the thermostat does, indirectly.  Consider his apartment as a big leaky calorimeter with a given heat loss rate.  It has one steady-state heat source (the light bulb) and one feedback-controlled heat source (the electric furnace, which is just a big incandescent lightbulb that only emits in infrared).  The runtime duration of the furnace is an inverse function of room temperature.  Competing heat sources (such as incandescent light bulbs) make it run for shorter time periods. 

Hence building insulation listed as one of the really-cheap ways to cut carbon footprint in one of the links I posted upthread.

He’s also right about the air conditioning.  Less interior heat production translates into many times the watt savings as inefficient air conditioning has to pump the heat outside.  And there again, insulation is good.  So on balance, the CFL still saves him a buttload of energy.

A “buttload of energy”, dof?  Are we talking methane here?

Would an incandescent really pump out enough heat to make a temperature difference in the room?- even 3 60w in a room is only a 1/10 of a single bar electric fire, plus all the heat is near the ceiling, which is where it will stay.  Humans pump out about 60w each. If you want to stay warm, get a cow in- they are about 150w.

The amount of waste heat given off by one incandescent bulb is small but we’ve converted most rooms in the house so it adds up. My point is that the (small) energy savings are mostly offset by the (small) increase in heating energy needed. As long as you’re heating with electricity it’s going to be pretty much an even trade. The savings offered by CFLs are more effective when we’re cooling instead of heating or with outdoor lights that have no effect on indoor heating.