Incandescent lights [Re: It's time to restore the 11/45.]

[Peter Corlett]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 03:26:14PM -0500, Jacob Ritorto wrote:
> I think CFLs are kind of terrible.
> http://www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp

I certainly won't miss CFLs, but that site is also veering on the conspiracy
nut rant complete with cherry-picked facts to support it.

The basic problem is that cheap-arse CFLs are over-marketed junk that make
false claims as to the quantity and quality of light output, and an
incandescent really is better than these on pretty much everything except power
consumption. AFAICS, most mass-market CFLs fall into this category.

There are however some nice outliers such as the ~2000lm 6500K bulb I found at
an electrical wholesalers. Turn that bad boy on and you can almost hear the
spiders frying from all the light pouring into the corners of the room.

LED lighting is actually delivering what the CFLs falsely claimed, provided one
doesn't need more than about 400lm per bulb due to heat issues. For the
customary single bulb per room in typical UK lighting, it means we're stuck
with CFLs until the technology improves or one replaces the light fitting with
one that takes multiple bulbs. We'll probably see a whole load of crappy LED
bulbs when that finally becomes mainstream though.