Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs 923
While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil, the world's largest retailer has committed to get compact fluorescent lightbulbs into 100 million homes this year. CFLs are found in only 6% of households today. These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use. Wal-Mart seems determined to use its marketing prowess to do what hasn't successfully been done in the CFL's 25-year history: to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.
Brilliant! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm hoping LED-based lightbulbs become more common in the near future...
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Guess what? There is a delay.. maybe a second or so - and then on top of that it takes them about a minute to get up to full brightness. So the 100W equivalent CFL's I have put out (guesstimate) 20W of incandescent equivalent light. I keep my house at 70F. When the bulbs have been operating and are up to about (guesstimate) 100F, they turn on with about a 1/4 second delay. Who keeps their house at 100F?
This makes them inappropriate for stairwells, bathrooms, and any place with automatic light sensors.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Interesting)
Guess what? There is a delay.. maybe a second or so - and then on top of that it takes them about a minute to get up to full brightness. So the 100W equivalent CFL's I have put out (guesstimate) 20W of incandescent equivalent light. I keep my house at 70F. When the bulbs have been operating and are up to about (guesstimate) 100F, they turn on with about a 1/4 second delay. Who keeps their house at 100F?
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Overall, I'm not thrilled with the illumination performance of CF bulbs. I keep using them in all my sealed ceiling fixtures for two reasons: I don't like the risk of fire
Not sure what's up. I have several much colder. (Score:3, Informative)
There are places they work, and places they don't work.
In my kids' bedrooms -- especially their closets -- they work wonderfully. The kids constantly leave on lights and I get slightly less pissed off about it this way. In places that need a lot of
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With the smallest CF's I can find I've got mine down to 10W with no eyestrain and the wife can sleep. My experience with CFs is that they're a tiny bit slow to warm up and the light can feel a little dingy... also some of them hum a little. It's a small price to pay.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Informative)
If you've ever used a camera with a manual aperture setting (remember them?), you will know that the focus is much more critical at f/2.8 that f/16 (you can pretty much get away with leaving it on infinity beyond f/8, which is exactly what cheap cameras do).
In bright light, your pupils contract. This increases your eyes' depth of focus, moving your far limit further away and your near limit closer, thus allowing you to see better over more range. Wearing convex lenses will artificially shift your near and far limits closer, thus allowing you to see clearly close up.
I was born short-sighted -- I can't see anything clearly that is more than a couple of metres away. Some time before my 17th birthday, I got my eyes tested and found I would need glasses for driving. It's like having a macro mode when I'm not wearing my specs (which is most of the time, because I'd rather bump into things than wear glasses.) So I don't need reading glasses.
Less AM Stress (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Less AM Stress (Score:5, Funny)
I think those who modded this as "funny" rather than "insightful" either don't use CFLs, or don't get up before dawn.
As someone who does both, I have to agree fully with you. That minute or so while the older CFLs (I don't see either the delay or the gradual increase in brightness in newer ones) ramp up to full light really makes getting up a lot easier on the eyes.
Before I changed over, I remember as my very first choice of the day, did I want to stumbling around in the dark or squint for the first five minutes after turning on the lights?
I think I will really miss that feature, once I can no longer get CFLs with what so many people choose to call a "flaw". Jeezus, folks, not like you need to enter a room and have enough light to perform brain surgery in under 2 seconds...
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The thing I don't like about it is that I have some fixtures that CFLs will not fit into.
Once true, but not anymore. Granted, you can't get high-wattage CFLs for all fixtures, but you can now get the 60W-equivalent CFLs that take up less space, at every point (including the stem), than an incandescent. My hallways, which have recessed fixtures with the bulb at an odd angle, currently contain exactly such bulbs.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Informative)
No, the sun gives off pure white light by definition. (That's why we have evolved to see that spectrum as the neutral colour. If you look at the spectrum [lbl.gov], arguably it's actually a shade of green.) The reason the sun looks yellow in the sky is because the blue light has been scattered away by the atmosphere, making the sky look blue; the remaining (less scattered) light looks yellow as a result. However, if you look at a piece of white paper in the sunlight, it looks white because the yellow light directly from the sun combines with the blue light from the sky and adds back up to pure white again.
The reason people prefer "warm" yellow light is purely emotional as far as I know. It reminds them of campfires and candles.
Commercial Electric - Home Depot (Score:3, Informative)
Home Depot sells the Commercial Electric and nVision tubes. No delay. They work really well.
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*there are circumstances under which a CF would benefit being in the same installation as a motion sensor, but it generally works out that t
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Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
There is a secnod bonus to CFL, they produce less heat. This is particularly important in Southern Climes where your cooling bill is considerably higher than your heating bill. Even those areas where it is frosty outside, electric heat is very inefficient so you are still better off.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you mean it's not economic. A heater designer would have to be pretty dumb not to get 100 percent efficiency out of an electric heater.
It also depends on bulb orientation (Score:5, Informative)
The performance of these bulbs does vary ***greatly*** with the orientation of their installation.
As a personal example, I bought some CFLs for my parents' house and installed them base-up in overhead recessed fixtures. They were very understandably unhappy with the startup time - almost a minute of dim light in a kitchen is very unacceptable. But those same bulbs, base-down, were fine in other places in the same house. If I'd thought about it ahead of time, we could have purchased CFL "instant-on" bulbs and gotten much improved performance in the recessed cans.
CFLs use various types of gas mixtures, and some use drops of liquid mercury like other big fluorescents. If it's a liquid mercury bulb, it takes a short time to evaporate all the mercury when it's first powered on. In this situation, a base-down bulb will probably brighten faster than a base-up bulb, because the drop of mercury will initially be condensed near the emitter coils. The so-called "instant on" CFLs use a different, non-condensing gas mixture.
Also, the brightness profile may have some effect on bulb lifespan: instant-on bulbs may last a shorter time for various reasons. If you're willing to tolerate a slower warmup, you may pay less over the long run for bulb replacement.
See the discussion on this link, or google for "cfl base-up brightness":
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.ph
Moral of the story: there are reasons for these differences, and you can use those differences to your advantage, IF you're willing to think thru the data and specs a bit. Don't toss the baby out with the bathwater just because the "Duh, CFLs are good, heh heh heh" line isn't the whole answer.
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No. Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
Erm, if you're using a light meter that's designed to be used with incandescent bulbs, it won't read properly when exposed to the light being produced by a fluorescent bulb. This is due to the design of the meter, not to the bulbs actually p
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Zero delay on modern bulbs. My only current complaint is that they don't play nice with dimmers. I use them everywhere else.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
Visit Home Depot. They have a larger selection and include dimmable and hard to find sizes including candelabra bulbs which are dimmable. A set of 8 3 watt dimmable bulbs in my decrative chandelier is a nice touch.
Power wise it replaced 8 25 watt bulbs.
GE has dimmable bulbs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brilliant! (not so!) (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you freaking serious? The delay was too long? Have you become so immersed in the current culture of Instant Gratification, that when you weigh the individual bonuses and global bonuses of using these bulbs, against the minor annoyances of how long the bulb takes to achieve brightness and the exact color of "white" light that the bulb throws off (Ok, that wasn't YOU, but I'm replying to other freaks who agreed against the bulbs.. sue me)
Come ON! Let's see.. the bulbs use an incredibly small amount of electricity compared to regular incandescent bulbs.. so you get to save money there. Don't need to save money? I'll give you an address you can throw money at. I'm only one of the MILLIONS of people who could use that money you are throwing away by not switching to CF bulbs.
Don't like a "whiter" light? You prefer the yellowed light from incandescents? Ok, sure it is a "warmer" tone.. that is because it is created by a glowing filament... it is a "white" light born of a red light... you know... red as in infrared, red as in burning, red as in fire and heat.. remember playing with metal and campfires, getting a piece of metal glowing brightly orange, or even white hot (if the fire was hot enough). Seeing a common theme of wasted energy here, thrown off in HEAT that is unnecessary to the process of providing light? I say unnecessary, because if you want heat, use a blanket. Not a light bulb.
You bathe your head in more radiation coming from your cell phone. You are in no danger from your CF light bulb.
I just can't believe people are whining "But it takes soooo long for it to light up. WAH! Mommy! Make the bulb light faster!" It takes longer for a web page to load with broadband, than it takes for the light to come on. Christ, it takes less than a second. Time measured in Microseonds. Why aren't you whining about how seconds it takes your car to start between turning the key and actual ignition? WHy aren't you whining about how long it takes the BIOS to check your drives before booting begins off the harddrive? Why aren't you whining about how long it takes your OS ((Linux or Windows) to boot? My God. Is 30 seconds just way way too long to melt butter for you as well?
As far as the color of the light goes... get a life. There is more variation in the shade of white in the background of this freaking web page, from computer monitor to computer monitor, than there is in the difference between regular bulbs and CF bulbs. And if you are complaining about the color, and you DON'T have a specific color profile set up for your monitor, as well as the exact INF file for your monitor, and programs like Adobe color correction running, AND an accurate, less than 4 month old AFGA color chart nearby to check your monitor color reproduction against.. you have no right to talk about the shade of white.
Stop burning paper money and get with the program. And go buy some damn CF bulbs. At Walmart!
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, 60 watt equivalent CFLs cost roughly $1.50 a piece (8 pack) at Costco. Much cheaper than Walmart. Nice, bright, instant on.
(A while back, in my dad's new garage, within 3 weeks - 6 of his fluorescent tube fixtures broke. It was a batch of bad ballasts in them. It would have been a bitch replacing just the ballasts - lots of cutting wires, tying the new one together, tearing the fixture apart and putting it back together again - in other words a PITA. We decided to go with regular bulb fixtures with CFLs because we would get the fluorescent cost benefits but the screw in bulb convenience.)
Anyway, the upfront cost is not worth complaining over - with regular use you got your money back within 3-5 months.
Because electricity is really expensive per BTU. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OT: Electric heat. (Score:4, Interesting)
You feel a lot more comfortable if you have warm feet, even if the actual room-temperature is slightly lower than normal
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I noticed this too. Instead of installing underfloor heating everywhere I just spent $10 on some nice slippers.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lighting as heating (Score:3, Insightful)
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Unless he's using a reverse-cycle A/C system with a COP greater than 1. Which is pretty much all of them.
For the guy further up that wondered if there really is much difference regarding the extra heat of incandescent bulbs - there is. Especially the halogen types. Air-conditioner installers need to take this extra heat into effect - a dozen 50 watt halogens in a large room is like having a small 500 watt bar he
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Funny)
Heat is heat, its all kinetic energy.
Obviously you are very knowledgeable on the subject, using big words like that.
Why are they pushing an obsolete product? LEDs!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why are they pushing an obsolete product? LEDs! (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately we live in a market economy. The cost is a real factor. My average lamp is 900 Lumens. My 1 watt flashlight is only 32 lumens.
If I live another 30 years in my present home, what is the cost to outfit a 6 bedroom 3 bedroom home with LED lamps and will I have any savings over CF bulbs I now have installed?
LED lamps are about 20 cents / Lumen.
Refrence PDF alert. http://www.aceee.org/pubs/a042_l11.pdf [aceee.org]
At 5 lamps in the kitchen overhead, 2 under the microwave, 5 in the dining room, 4 in the living room, 15 in bathrooms, 12 in bedrooms, 6 in porch and drive, 4 in the laundry, 2 in the hallway, and 5 in the rec room. Average size 60 watt equivelant. Total numbers of lamps is 60 for a total of 54,000 lumens needed.
To make matters of finding a proper replacement, many LED's are not rated in Lumens but intensity. I don't need a spot of light on the celing above the light. I want the room lit up. Remember there are aproximately 1,000 Mcd to a Lumen. Using that compare this bulb to a typical 14 watt CF lamp.
http://item.express.ebay.com/Home-Garden_Lighting
I don't think a 16 lumen lamp is a direct replacement for a 14 watt CF lamp of nearly 900 lumens.
The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption
http://members.misty.com/don/lede.html [misty.com]
"The better usual modern white LEDs (as of September 2006) produce about 29-45 lumens of light per watt of electricity
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/makingithappen/no_regrets/
"while the fluorescent produces over 50 lumens per watt"
The high effeciency LED's just are not on the market yet for most white LED's.
I'll stick with CF's as the additional cost of LED's don't yet produce a measurable savings. I have been watching the lumens/watt and cost race for some time. It's getting close, but the average modern white LED is still not as effecient as a typical CF lamp.
A laboratory prototype of a white LED achieving 150 lumens/watt has been announced on 12/20/2006.
Wake me when these are on the shelf at a competitive price.
LED not ready (Score:5, Informative)
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ColorKinetics's claim to fame is that they mix RGB for lighting effects, plus a bunch of ways of communicating with LEDs. But since they are using the same LEDs as everybody else, their lights aren't going to compete any better with CFLs than any of the other LED based lights. To make LED based lighting happen, either our existing LEDs need t
LED lighting = junk (Score:3, Informative)
I am quite confident in telling you that if you've got an LED bulb that you paid $50 for, and it consumes 5-9 watts of electricity, then it is going to be nowhere near as bright as a 100W incandescent bulb. LED technology will get there, but it isn't there today.
High temp, not low temp, might be the answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Typical CW fluorescents actually produce a slightly greenish light, not blue (and if you look at a spectrometer's output, you'll see a big spike around 550 nm, which is green), and have a correlated color temperature somewhere around 4000K. I say "somewhere around" because, since they are really producing a number of fairly distinct wavelenths rather than a continuous distribution, they don't have an exact black-body radiator equivalent. But the general consensus is that it's somewhere around 3400-4200K (depending on phosphor), with a greenish cast. It's this green cast that's the real killer, and makes CW fluorescent light so unflattering to most people's skin; the color temperature itself isn't the major issue.
If you want warmer (lower color temp) light, it is possible to buy "warm white" fluorescents. They have a correlated temperature of somewhere around 2950-3000K, or about the same as a 100W bulb. To most people, it looks a lot like an incandescent. They're still spectroscopically different (again, fluorescent produces peaks and valleys at various wavelengths, as will anything that's not actually heated to several thousand degrees), but they're designed so that the human eye perceives them as a warm 3000K source, rather than the usual green.
To be honest, I think "warm" lighting is vastly overrated. I agree that the CW fluorescents are obnoxious, but what I discovered is a far better option than trying to approximate the 3000K yellow glow of a bulb, was to jump up in color temperature, rather than trying to go down. Personally I've found that the high-temperature (5000K) "Daylight" fluorescents are the most pleasant. They don't have the green cast that the 3200K CW ones do, but they also don't have the false yellow tinge that the 'warm' ones do. They really are the closest thing to sunlight, if you get the right bulbs. (Some people also find them very handy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, in fact they're the key component of those pricey therapeutic lamps.)
Until I changed to 5000K lights, I never realized how yellow incandescents made everything appear. Walking from a room lit with the high-temp fluorescents to incandescent bulbs is like going from the outside into a cave; it's really striking. Rather than trying to produce crummy imitations of what are really a limitation of incandescent bulbs (their low color temperature), I think fluorescent light manufacturers should really be extolling their high-color-temperature, "full-spectrum" bulbs, because once you've lived with them, there's no going back. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while to rid people of the idea that 'high color temperature' means the cruddy, unflattering, green light they've grown accustomed to in office buildings and other institutional locations.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Time to check your electrical supply for noise and stability. Do incandescent lamps dim when the refrigerator starts? You may have power problems.
How many soulless corporate juggernauts... (Score:3, Funny)
Three... (Score:5, Funny)
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night [nytimes.com].
Re:Three... (Score:4, Informative)
Another example of how the system is set up to favor bastards. The thing is, most people don't believe in suing at the drop of a hat. In fact, they don't even consider the possibility of suing as part of their normal decision making process. For normal people, it's only after stewing on wrongs done to them that the idea of suing occurs to them.
In any case, your chance of successfully pursuing a wrongful termination suit depends on the jurisdiction. If you are an at will employee, the employer can fire you for any reason, unless firing for that reason itself breaks a law (e.g. violation of anti-discrimination or whistelblower protection laws). In many jurisdictions there is a public policy exception to at-will termination. Employees cannot be terminated for filing workman's comp claims in jurisdictions with a public policy exception, because such terminations are clearly in violation of the intent of the workers' compensation laws, even if those laws don't explicitly forbid termination for filing claims.
If there is no local law against discouraging employees from seeking medical treatment, there might not be a public policy exception to at-will termination in your state. Your state might not recognize a public policy exception at all.
What you need is a lawyer versed in the employment laws of your state. Good luck finding one at 3 in the morning while you're suffering an asthma attack.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wish someone would mod this up, because you're right on the money, so to speak. "Wrongful termination" lawsuits are a joke when you live in an at-will state such as mine. Unless you're protected under a specific law (such, as mentioned, as discrimination laws), employers can fire you at any time for any reason. Yes, even for things such as leaving a work site to take care of basic medical needs.
When these kinds of laws were set up, it was the assumption of those that passed them that no employer in t
Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is that? Sure, the majority of people don't like Wal-Mart, but why do you feel the need to mention it in an article where Wal-Mart is doing something good?
As for the article it's mostly a "duh" thing. It's main points seem to be that Wal-Mart's trying to sell a lot of these bulbs, the people who make money off of incandescents don't like it, and then it goes into the history of the light bulb.
I'm glad Wal-Mart's doing this, too many people refuse to buy them, if Wal-Mart does what they always do (cheap) then their plan should work and power consumption should drop.
((Why do I see myself losing Karma here...?))
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well start the grand debate early on... (Score:5, Insightful)
RIAA is evil. They're suing their customers.
Microsoft is evil. They lock people into their products and make my job difficult with obscure licensing requirements and feature omissions.
SCO is evil. Sure, UNIX(r) was great and all, but we got over it years ago.
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service. Just like Newegg, Amazon, or any of most of the other faceless online entities who are struggling to charge as little as possible in an attempt to get ahead. This might hurt the local specialty merchants, but then, so does Newegg limit the market of a brick-and-mortar specialty PC parts store, who stands no chance at all at matching the pricing, availability, or product diversity such a beastly online merchant.
That said, I'm an informed sort of fellow, and I don't really want to pay someone to hold my hand while I make a purchase, anyway. The decisive lack of knowledgeable sales representatives at Wal-Mart and Newegg is, to me, a clear advantage, because I don't have to pay extra for supposedly-clued people to stand around and bullshit me.
Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop.
And so, at the end of the day: I could either pay less for those cheap Chinese goods, or I could pay more. Obviously, I'd rather pay less. Just like I'd rather get a raise, than continue toiling away undercompensated. Just like I'd rather sit, than stand. And I'd rather lay down, than sit. And so on, and so forth.
So now, they're making a concerted effort to boost CFL lighting, so as to cause people to spend less money on electric lighting instead of more money on more money on electric lighting. A boon for everyone. Cool!
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
When we give a name to something, an entity as large as walmart for instance, that allows us to sum up the hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions they take on behalf of walmart as one concept. But in reality, walmart is hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions.
Add this to a blurry concept of good and evil, and you've got a real mess that can't be summarized easily and thus can't be easily comprehended by our brains.
The truth about walmart (and every other thing) is it is neither evil nor good. Some of the people are evil, some of the policies are evil, some are good, some of the people are good. I worked for walmart after college during a hard time in my industry ... I met all those people, good, bad, evil, and the majority just people trying to feed their families. Most aren't even capable of understanding the damage walmart as a hole does to the country (wage depression which leads to manufacturing outsourcing which leads to more wage depression)
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Informative)
But ultimately that is exactly where we should be heading. As more products are purchased overseas more Americans are able to afford more stuff with less and less actual work. Its the same theory as with robotics. Your not replacing workers with robots (or people from china) your allowing us to get stuff cheaper and those workers to move to more knowledge based work.
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Yes I do - and I remember at the time quite a few people (myself included) thinking that it was a ridiculous waste of space and cardboard. I'm actually very happy that they come in much smaller boxes now, and if that's down to Walmart then I think that's something we should be thanking them for.
Hell, one of my reasons for finally buying a DVD player is that DVDs take up less space on my shelves than VHS cassettes.
i'm no fan of wal-mart (Score:2, Insightful)
in any case, good for wal-mart. this, along with that $4 RX deal they've started (in some areas? dunno if it's company-wide yet), and we've got a few small steps in the right direction. now if only wal-mart would use it's buying power to get a good deal on gas...
Brighter CFLs would attract more buyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brighter CFLs would attract more buyers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two issues I have with CFLs though.
1) I have had problems with them interfering with IR remotes. The first time it happened to me, I thought I was mistaken about the TVs channel changing on it's own, as I wasn't really paying attention. The second time it happened, I freaked me out, because my wife was out of town, and the idea of my lights changing the channel never occured to me. I had to do a complete check of the house with a golf club to make sure there wasn't someone in the house. When the house checked out empty, I started looking for other possibilities. Over the next few weeks, I figured it out. Having the remotes stop working when the lights were on was the final determination. This may be better know, but it has kept me from using CFLs at all in any room that needs the use of an IR remote.
2) The county dumps in my area have declared the CFLs to be toxic waste. This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. The stores that sell the bulbs are not collecting them, so the only legal way to get rid of them is by driving them to the dump.
I don't know the actual toxicity of the CFLs, but I have to wonder what the actual environmental impact is when you account for the bulbs being toxic, and the extra trips to the dump to dispose of dead bulbs. Anyone with real data on this care to chime in?
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1 CFL saves 360 kWh over its life (delta of 45W times 8000 hours). That took 360 /
A gallon of gas contains about 36 kWh of energy (sorry for the weird units; I should have gone to BTU to start). So 1 CFL saves 30 gallons of gas.
Where is your dump?
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Re:Brighter CFLs would attract more buyers (Score:4, Informative)
List of Companies Claiming to Recycle or Handle Spent Mercury Containing Lamps (last update May 2006) [nema.org]
It's not what you think (Score:4, Informative)
I personally buy mine from BlueMax (http://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/compact_flu
I think if you pick up a good CFL, you'll find that it's not the temperature that's the problem but the spectrum. However, if you want warm CFLs, they are easy to get. Check any Home Depot or similar store, and they should have them for sale. That's what I used prior to discovering the full spectrum variety (which I can only find online).
When will they be dimmable?? (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.gelighting.com/na/home_lighting/ask_us
My two cents, or maybe I should say my two watts (Score:2)
If they sell those compact energy saving light bulbs for 99 cents, hey, I'll bulb (although not from them). If they sell if for $5+, it's not worth it, especially since you throw them away before they're dead (yes, dimming is a huge problem over the lifetime). Some stores do have sales on them, but it really matters as to what brand. Shop smart, and do th
Of course it's for money (Score:3, Informative)
Walmart has no vested interest selling electricity or energy. Since CFLs are more expensive up front, they get a greater slice of profits. The more expensive the item, the larger profit margin. Warmart is still a company that's only interested in profits, and I'm not ready to slap the saintly tag on them, but this is purely capitalism at it's best. The invisible hand will see where the profits are and follow the money, and when it comes to light, the money is in saving energy.
Women do not like them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Women do not like them (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Women do not like them (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK, the two main quality issues with fluorescent lights are:
With CFLs, the ballast frequency issue was solved a long time ago. Basically, the voltage needs to be stepped up way higher than line voltage (120V in the US, 220V many other places). The low-tech way to do this is with a transformer. This means you get 60 Hz (or 50 Hz, whatever) current at that high frequency. That means flickering. Flickering doesn't happen with incandescent bulbs because it is heat of the filament that is causing the light to be emitted. The electrical current going through the bulb goes to zero 120 times a second (with 60 Hz power), but the filament's thermal mass is high enough that the bulb "coasts" through the zero voltage (and zero current) crossing and continues to emit light. You can even turn off an incandescent and watch it continue to glow for a fraction of a second after power is removed, because it takes time for the filament to cool. But this continuous lighting thing is not the case with a fluorescent, as I understand it. The gas in the tube only produces light when there's a voltage, and it stops pretty much instantaneously when it's not being electrically excited. Thus, with a fluorescent and a low-tech ballast, you get an effect similar to what it looks like when your monitor is set at a painfully low refresh rate, only not quite as bad, but still annoying.
But, as I said, compact fluorescents don't suffer from this issue. The reason is they have electronic ballasts. Instead of simple, dumb circuit with a transformer in it, they have a circuit that steps up the voltage, but it converts it to a much higher-frequency A/C voltage before it gets into the tube. I'm not sure of the frequency, but googling indicates it is in the tens of thousands of Hz. So, it's fast enough your eye really can't perceive it.
The other issue, color temperature is a little different story. As this explanation [lightbulbsdirect.com] says, "Warm light is preferred for living spaces because it is more flattering to skin tones and clothing." I think this is the key reason for aesthetic objections to CFLs. Incandescents produce warm light at a color temperature of about 2700K, because that's what happens when you heat up a filament. With compact fluorescents, different options are available. If you want something similar to what you're used to with an incandescent, you should choose a 2700K CFL! It's not at all uncommon for CFLs to come in color temperatures in the range of 4000K or 5000K. That will appear considerably bluer or even weird and greenish compared to an incandescent. Nobody wants their skin tone to appear overly greenish, so 2700K it is, for aesthetic purposes, in most cases.
On a side note, things are different if you want to, say, take pictures of things. In that case, you might want to go with a higher color temperature, because 2700K is considerably warmer (yellower) than what you see outside on a nice sunny day.
Re:Women do not like them (Score:5, Funny)
That's because they're brighter (the CFL--not the woman). We know from experience that women find these two things odious:
Most women expend incredible amounts of time and effort to avoid being seen, either by altering their appearance cosmetically to mask or otherwise obfuscate their features or by insisting that you turn the lights off during sex.
When confronted by a well lit area, a reasonably intelligent woman, upon realizing that you installed the new light, will complain that she "doesn't like the way it throws off light," thereby marrying her distrust toward optical clarity with her natural prejudice against new technology.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1.) Cooking -- I can more easily check that the color of certain foods is correct. So I don't overcook the vegetables for example.
2.) Arts and Crafts -- I have trouble distinguishing the difference between blue and black and the difference between grey and beige with incandescents and halogens. When sewing or painting its good to be able to see these differences.
3.) Choosing matchi
Simple Economics Alright (Score:5, Insightful)
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Given that profit margins normally work on percentages, that should roughly octuple 28% of their profit margin on lightbulbs.
They should be making 2.96 times as much selling light bulbs, of course they want to push this.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, one problem with that. The fluorescent bulbs last 10x longer on average (see TFA). So while they may make 2.96 x as much profit on one bulb, they're
it's about time (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amazing to think that in all that time, I've only lost three bulbs. Two of them burned out after 6+ years of regular use. One of them met an early demise thanks to a kinetic incident involving a toddler and a toy.
The initial investment may seem high (and when I started buying them, it was easy to spend around $20 on a single bulb) but over the years you more than get your money back.
The only real gotchas I've found is that they don't work at all with dimmer switches, and they may require a warm-up period if you use them outside and it is quite cold out. Indoors they are instant-on now. The old ones used to hum, flicker, warm-up to full brightness, etc. but those problems have pretty much been overcome years ago.
On the upshot, a relatively small desktop lamp can usually accommodate an incredibly bright CF bulb. To achieve similar brightness with a conventional bulb would no doubt destroy the lamp. If you like to read by a strong light source, you ought to try this.
Fluorescent Lights Damage Books (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe you should buy a vertical upright lamp.
Livermore's Centenial Bulb (Score:3, Interesting)
Another advantage... (Score:4, Informative)
Another advantage I've come across is that you can put a brigther bulb in a light fitting only designed to take a low wattage bulb.
e.g. if the light fitting says "40W Max" you can put in a "100W equivilent" CFL bulb since this is really only 20W in terms of actual power, and it is the heat that they are worried about.
Close the resource loop (Score:4, Insightful)
They is good! (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course here in So Cal we don't get many, er, elements. Hey, how's that weather, Colorado?
Re:They is good! (Score:5, Funny)
Busy making your water so you don't die.
Will they *ever* fix the RFI problems? (Score:3, Insightful)
As an aside, as an Amateur Radio operator, I can tell you that many, many, household appliances are guilty of severe RFI these days. I really don't think that I should have to run around putting chokes and such on devices I paid several hundred dollars to own.
Now, where's that FCC when you need them?
Re:Thank you Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically
No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you Wal-Mart for your caring. (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Though I was personally unoffended.
Re:They're still evil... (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
If you want to complain about Walmart, complain about their shitty service, or how their employees are morons, or the over all low quality of the products they sell, or how they treat their employees like dirt. There's no shortage of reasons why Walmart could be considered "evil", but selling things for a profit isn't one of them.
Everytime you get a paycheck that isn't negative, you've sold your labor for a profit. Get over it.
Indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed...
However, I think many people would be upset at a company that pays its employees as if the company never made a profit when it in fact does fairly well...
In Texas, there is a store named "H.E.B" , (Howard Butt). Its prices are similar to walmart, but slightly higher... But the culture inside the store is entirely different. The store is actually clean, the employees not worn out, and the whole thing is a privately owned company!
Profit+Greed = Evil
Clearly it's Disneyland w/ groceries. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you must not be looking hard enough. Perhaps they haven't any problems hiring people, but getting people to stay there is another story. Walmart's turnover rate hovers at around 50% (in 1999 it was 65%). Industry average is around 15%.
The turnover is precisely because walmart is so terrible to it's employees. The high tur
Re: (Score:3)
I think there's a correlation there
Seriously, I know several people who work at Wal-Mart. They tell me that most employees are the run of the mill employee who will never go anywhere. Just any any other retail store, duh. But many people do rise up the ranks, becoming sales managers, department managers, etc. One person I know went from high school dropout working folding clothes, to running an entire store. It may not be
It's *how* they make the profit. (Score:3, Interesting)
The average walmart employee's wage is under the poverty line. 40% of employee's families are on government assistance. The majority of walmart locations are built almost entirely from taxpayer dollars because in addition to and receive enormous tax breaks from local governments (Walmart is one of the top recipients of corporate welfare dollars, a bit of a rarity for a fortune 500 company posting record profits). Oh, did I mention the cleaning staff
you've got this all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
It's that compact fluorescent bulbs are now irredeemably evil.
Re:Plop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plop (Score:4, Insightful)
As a side note, the one light I did not change (the outside porch light) has blown about every 3 months since purchase, after 3 years I eventually changed it for a CF light too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've just changed a bunch of them back to incandescent.
They don't give out "the same amount of light for 75% less" - its more like 75% light for 50% less. I tried various makes, and the ones that claimed to be the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent were more like 60 watts. The worst were the trilights - spending $25 on a couple of bulbs that are useless galls me no end. So I'm sitting on a couple of hundred dollars (I had changed all the lights) of CFs that are going to end up as dust collectors.
Buy
Re:Plop (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some simple changes that some corporations are in a position to make which have great environmental impact, like when Google [com.com] started pushing the PC industry to make simple 12 volt power supplies instead of inefficient ones with multiple voltage outputs. People assume that pro-environment means "expensive" but that's not necessarily the case. More and more companies are realizing that this sort of thing can be a cheap, painless way to generate good press for your organization. And after all, Wal-Mart is not really an evil company, just a money-grubbing company that deservedly gets a lot of press for doing evil things.
Thank you, Wal-Mart. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's very, very unfortunate, but in perhaps 7 years, Slashdot editors have not learned how to be editors. kdawson, the Slashdot editor for this story, chose a title that makes it sound like Wal-Mart is a drug pusher: "Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs".
That set the tone. A lot of ignorant people commented on the story, ruining the discussion. People began talking about mercury, showing amazing ignorance. See my comment
External Ambience lighting (Score:5, Funny)