Fixed! Sounds like GE is really bad at making CFLs. I’ve been using CFLs by Osram and others for years, and I don’t think a single one has failed yet.
Arise!
A bunch of my GE CFLs just died in one fell swoop, and now I’m bulb-less. Have there been any advances in CFL or other energy-efficient light bulb technology recently? Is it worth paying $10 per energy-efficient compact-fluorescent bulb, when incandescents are under a buck? How are LED bulbs – do they flicker?
Arise!
All of my GE light bulbs recently broke in one fell swoop, so I’m in the bulb market again. Have there been any advances in energy-efficient lights in the past few years? Are CFLs worth $10 each when incandescents are under a buck? How are LED light bulbs – do they flicker or leave trails?
I was going to buy myself one of these the next time I needed a light bulb, just to test out the technology.
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-409904-Dimmable-AmbientLED-12-5-Watt/dp/B004IUMGV4
But… $23 for a single bulb? I’d go for it if it were equivalent (in lumens) to, say, 100W bulb. Because then dimmable is useful. :-/
I am still not a fan of the CFL’s I’ve seen used. As bulbs of various types expire, I’m mainly replacing with regular incandescents and the halogen incandescents.
Had a kind of nasty bulb explosion recently, that came from, I think, one of the halogen incandescents, so that’s soured me on them a bit.
I like that the nearby Lowe’s has a display where you can see several bulbs in action to get a sense of the color and what not.
I suspect that LEDs are on a trajectory such that the price and performance of them will dominate the other bulbs (for most of my/our uses, anyways) in perhaps 2-3 years. I’m reluctant to spend the money for first/second generation LED bulbs in the meantime though.
It’s really about the energy savings over the 22 years it’s supposed to last. At, say. $0.10 per kWh, with a 47.5W reduction in power used, it would take around 4800 hours of use to pay for itself, or roughly half an hour a day of use over those 22 years. So it wouldn’t be good for a rarely-used bulb, but great for one that you keep turned on a long time.
Those bulbs are awesome. They’re the only thing I’ve found so far that has the same feel as an incandescent bulb. Massachusetts has some sort of subsidy going - they sell for about $15/bulb now at Home Depot here.
Still, they’re costly even at that price, so I haven’t replaced all of the bulbs. Those bulbs also aren’t supposed to be used in enclosed fixtures, which eliminates some of the lights in my house.
I replaced 6 bulbs in my dining room chandelier with them, as well as 3 other bulbs in a different fixture. Very happy overall. In the dining room, that light has gone from 660W to 612.5W - a 285W savings… for only $90. It might not be the best bang for the buck, but using less electricity makes me feel better.
We’ve been doing the light bulb shuffle. When one goes out that we use a lot, we steal the bulb from some place we don’t. My wife has a craft room that she only ever goes into during the day and it has a good window for natural light, so there are no bulbs in there anymore. The guest room, which gets used a couple times a year for visiting relatives, also has none. My office only has one desk lamp, all the bulbs in the ceiling fan have been taken.
The side effect is that we are seeing clearly how we use our rooms and how much of the house we use. If we were to ever need to move, we’d be much better at judging house size than when we bought this. Coming from 2 people living in a 1 bedroom apartment, we way overshot in our desire to be uncrowded.
I have a bunch of weird lightbulbs in my house and I don’t really understand the whole lightbulb product choices out there.
Right now my darn houselights (potlight and nonpotlights) take 30-60seconds to reach full intensity once turned on – it’s fricking annoying.
I am looking for relatively inexpensive lightbulbs, that are enviro friendly and turn on when I hit the “on” switch
any advice?
thanks
edit: ok a little googling helped… looks like Halogen is the way to go:
http://www.lowes.com/cd_Light+Bulb+BG_167459951_
and the CFLs cause cancer
See, here’s what gets me:
Meanwhile we have 3 or 4 laptops and a desktop computer (was two, but my desktop got outdated) on 60%-80% of the time. Is an incandescent lightbulb or 4 really going to make that much difference when the power supply in the desktop is 600W?
CFLs and LED bulbs save you about $10 a year per bulb if you can keep kids or shoddy residential power from breaking them.
I don’t see what the money you spend on other things has to do with this. If you have five CFL bulbs in your house in regular use, that’s an extra $50 a year in your pocket you wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s not changed by whatever else you have going on in your house.
Interesting… this one is 900 lumens at 9W – more light intensity and less power consumption than the first LED bulb you linked. Also a couple bucks cheaper.
Speaking of CFLs, I have some dead CFLs that I am aware have mercury in them, and woudl like to dispose of them responsibly. I recall hearing that some stores (home depot) provide disposal services for them, but I’m not aware of any in my area. Any idea how to find places that offer safe (mercury) CFL disposal?
Most of the light fixtures I use on a regular basis are ceiling lights. For energy efficient bulbs, does CFL vs LED vs Halogen really make a difference? What are the pros and cons of using each?
I recently got a 12-pack of 100w equivalent 2700K CFLs at HomeDepot for $9. I think the recent price drops are due to local power company subsidies, but with a price like that the breakeven point is well under a year.
And with Google I answer my own question.
An article about energy efficient lighting, comparing LED and CFL lights and which breaks off into a lengthy article with tables comparing CFL to LED bulbs (including cost and lumens)
So I bought a crazy house that has like 10 of those long, florecent, office/school type light fixtures in various places (like the greenhouse). Where do I buy these things? Do I have to go to Home Depot or somethng?
Yeah, Home Depot has replacement flourescent tubes. No links…I tried, but simple searches return all flourescent light fixtures, too. You can also check lighting fixture stores & other hardware stores.
Do you know how to take one out? You turn the tube until it lets you pull it straight out of the clips at the end.