Please file your troll posts under one of the following:

1) Fluorescent lighting gives me blinding headaches. I don't know how I survived entering an office building or bathroom before talking points told me about this.

2) My indoor jai alai league coupled with my tardive dyskinesia means I break light bulbs left and right. I poop my pants in horror because each CFL contains a couple milligrams of mercury, largely adhered to solid surfaces, and that a broken lightbulb might cause one can of tuna's worth of mercury to enter my body, displacing valuable Cheeto storage room. Also, I'm completely ignorant of how much mercury is put in the air by power plants, and don't realize that CFLs reduce the amount of mercury that gets into the environment, compared to incandescents.

3) The Government has no right to set standards for goods sold to Real Americans, which is why I use only leaded gasoline and lead paint on my 2-mpg Dodge Dart with no seat belts, catalytic convertor, or muffler.

4) Even though my trailer and spouses are decorated entirely in animal print and American flags, I am exquisitely sensitive to minute variations in color that spectrometers cannot detect. I am also completely ignorant of the fact that I can buy CFLs that emit in all sorts of color ranges, including 5500K bulbs that mimic natural sunlight, and 2700K bulbs that look like old-school incandescents.

5) CFLs set my home/meth lab on fire. Even though only four house fires were caused by CFLs in 2009 despite hundreds of millions of CFLs sold, I have unverifiable anecdotes about swarms of CFLs recreating Dresden. Once, I was walking down the aisle in Home Depot, and a gang of CFLs flame-molested me.

Please let me know if I missed any.

"Lumens is really a measure of brightness," says Joseph Higbee, the Communications Director for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association.

What always bothered me was the instruction to choose a bulb with the lumens you need, then choose the one with the lowest wattage.

Then you get to the store and the wall o' bulbs is organized by wattage.

I replaced all bulbs with CFL's several years ago so I am looking at a mass burnout soon. Had one go bad because it was dropped and one from a defect out of 23 bulbs... not bad. 2 of those are outside as well. Our temp range over a year goes from -10˚ to 110˚ F so I expected the outside ones to fail but they haven't. I am hoping the one's I have last long enough for the LED prices to come down

chimp_ninja: Please file your troll posts under one of the following:

6) I have a Fark GED in Electrical Engineering and can say with confidence that we're wasting our time with these inferior fluorescent bulbs since magical LED arrays powered by unicorn dreams are just around the corner.

chimp_ninja: Please let me know if I missed any.

You forgot that incandescent lightbulbs are TOTALLY, 100% ILLEGAL under the iron fist of the FartNambla administration.

Pssh, that's so mainstream. I don't even have lightbulbs in my home.

Every time you use a CFL bulb, God kills a resident of Milan, Ohio.

I switched over to CFL a long time ago, I've had very few problems with them. I'm curious about LED but the energy savings over CFL are not enough for me to endure the cost of switching over to them. I can usually get 4 100 watt equivalent CFL's for one dollar. So for me switching to LED (for somewhere in the range of $20-40 a bulb for a 100 watt equivalent LED) to save a few pennies more on electricity doesn't make sense.

JackieRabbit: Oh goodie! The weekly light bulb rant thread.

Raging Thespian: Pssh, that's so mainstream. I don't even have lightbulbs in my home.

You sound hip.

Everybody knows bioluminescent plankton is how to light your dwelling now.

theknuckler_33: Question for the lightbulb geniuses out there. I've got a fixture in my kitchen that takes three bulbs and it says not to exceed 60 watt bulbs. So, when I switch to CFLs, should I use "60 watt equivalent" bulbs that actually use like 24 watts (or whatever), or can I go with a higher watt equivalent CFL because it will still be below 60 watts in reality? The 60 watt 'equivalent' bulbs don't seem to put out quite the same amount of light as the 60 watt incandescent.

I've always had the same question... I am curious.

DarnoKonrad: Don't put anything in it that socket that consumes more than 60 watts. A 60 watt CFL is going to look something like this (new window), and you probably can't 3 of them in there anyway.

I think the question wasn't "can I put a 60 watt CFL in"... more like, it says 60 max... can I put a 100 watt equivalent CFL in there, which also isn't actually drawing 60 wats.

theknuckler_33: Question for the lightbulb geniuses out there. I've got a fixture in my kitchen that takes three bulbs and it says not to exceed 60 watt bulbs. So, when I switch to CFLs, should I use "60 watt equivalent" bulbs that actually use like 24 watts (or whatever), or can I go with a higher watt equivalent CFL because it will still be below 60 watts in reality? The 60 watt 'equivalent' bulbs don't seem to put out quite the same amount of light as the 60 watt incandescent.

You can exceed the equivalent wattage and use the actual wattage. It will however blind your visitors, causing them to stumble and shove their hand into a bubbling vat of chili on the stove, burning their hand which they will then yank back, spraying chili everywhere including on their face which will then burn, turning them into a freakish nightmare creature who must roam the sewers by day, only to emerge at night to feast on human blood (and chili). So you know, there's downsides either way.

Director_Mr: Actually, at home depot I can buy the LED equivalent to a 60 watt bulb for $10. And it is dimmable. Gives off 480 lumens and it uses only 9 watts (it says 8, but when you read its like 8.6 watts). So LED arrays powered by unicorn dreams are already here.

What's the conversion rate between unicorn dreams and wattage anyway? I imagine there are some efficiency losses in the transmission through the horn.

Director_Mr: Actually, at home depot I can buy the LED equivalent to a 60 watt bulb for $10. And it is dimmable. Gives off 480 lumens and it uses only 9 watts (it says 8, but when you read its like 8.6 watts). So LED arrays powered by unicorn dreams are already here.

Wikipedia claims that a standard 60W incandescent emits 850 lumens, and Home Depot claims 860.

So the options work out to be. in apples-to-apples terms:
19th-century technology: ~14 lm/W efficiency, at an up-front cost of $0.35 per 1,000 lumens, and a 1.8 year lifetime. For 1,000 lumens, it will cost $11.52 annually (*).
CFL: ~64 lm/W efficiency, at an up-front cost of $1.94 per 1,000 lumens, and a 9.1 year lifetime. For 1,000 lumens, it will cost $2.56 annually.
Your LED: ~56 lm/W efficiency, at an up-front cost of $20.83 per 1,000 lumens.
Better LED: ~67 lm/W efficiency, at an up-front cost of $31.21 per 1,000 lumens, and a 22.8 year lifetime. For 1,000 lumens, it will cost $2.45 annually.

(I don't think you got a very good LED.) I've seen better efficiency numbers cited for LEDs, but can't find a product for sale that will spec much higher than a good CFL. In general, with present LED technology, you'll be paying a lot more for a relatively small increase in efficiency. Buying a CFL for now and switching to LEDs in a few years may be a better bet, and anything short of whale oil is better financially than incandescents.

(*): For all cases, I'm assuming 3 hours per day and $0.15/kWh.

theknuckler_33: Question for the lightbulb geniuses out there. I've got a fixture in my kitchen that takes three bulbs and it says not to exceed 60 watt bulbs. So, when I switch to CFLs, should I use "60 watt equivalent" bulbs that actually use like 24 watts (or whatever), or can I go with a higher watt equivalent CFL because it will still be below 60 watts in reality? The 60 watt 'equivalent' bulbs don't seem to put out quite the same amount of light as the 60 watt incandescent.

The short version is that your 60W incandescent converted more than 90% of the electricity it used to heat, meaning it was at best a 6W light and a 54W space heater.

Even if you put a really bright (100W-equivalent CFL, which will use ~27W) bulb in there, it will only be dumping ~20W of heat into the fixture, so it's less of a fire hazard, assuming there's space.

Don't neglect that last part-- if the 27W CFL is physically larger, it may be really close to some surface, and even though it's generating less heat it may cause a problem because of contact/proximity.

chimp_ninja: Please file your troll posts under one of the following:

1) Fluorescent lighting gives me blinding headaches. I don't know how I survived entering an office building or bathroom before talking points told me about this.

2) My indoor jai alai league coupled with my tardive dyskinesia means I break light bulbs left and right. I poop my pants in horror because each CFL contains a couple milligrams of mercury, largely adhered to solid surfaces, and that a broken lightbulb might cause one can of tuna's worth of mercury to enter my body, displacing valuable Cheeto storage room. Also, I'm completely ignorant of how much mercury is put in the air by power plants, and don't realize that CFLs reduce the amount of mercury that gets into the environment, compared to incandescents.

3) The Government has no right to set standards for goods sold to Real Americans, which is why I use only leaded gasoline and lead paint on my 2-mpg Dodge Dart with no seat belts, catalytic convertor, or muffler.

4) Even though my trailer and spouses are decorated entirely in animal print and American flags, I am exquisitely sensitive to minute variations in color that spectrometers cannot detect. I am also completely ignorant of the fact that I can buy CFLs that emit in all sorts of color ranges, including 5500K bulbs that mimic natural sunlight, and 2700K bulbs that look like old-school incandescents.

5) CFLs set my home/meth lab on fire. Even though only four house fires were caused by CFLs in 2009 despite hundreds of millions of CFLs sold, I have unverifiable anecdotes about swarms of CFLs recreating Dresden. Once, I was walking down the aisle in Home Depot, and a gang of CFLs flame-molested me.

Please let me know if I missed any.

Flourescent lights DO suck. They give off a horrible, sickly light, and they're a real biatch in the graphics industry when people are proofing work. Color-balanced tubes are ridiculously overpriced.

That said, I'll have to admit that after years of weak CFL's with horrible color temps and the brightness of an extinguished match, they are FINALLY something I'd be willing to buy, as long as I get the right lumen output and the right color temp. I have one I threw in with 3 incandescents(60 or 75 watts, I think), and you can't tell the difference without really looking at the shape when they're all blazing away. I will NOW be willing to expllore putting these in parts of my house now.

Now if they could do something about the aesthetics of the stupid things. Incandescent light bulbs has a pleasing, curvy shape. You could design fixtures that actually used bare bulbs and used the shape of the bulb as a part of the light design. Not with these things.

I really can't wait until LED bulbs cost less than $40 each, also.