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• Wednesday, May 2, 2007 12:31 AM

  Mercury

  It takes about 100 CFL's to equal one old mercury thermometer; plenty of those have been broken and/or thrown in the trash. But it's still an issue; it's good to see that home centers and places like Ikea will often recycle them.

  I spent some time trying various CFL's when we moved into our house a couple years ago: globes for the bathroom light bars, dimmables for the bedrooms, floodlights for the back yard and for the living room track lights, and 45-watt monsters for the kitchen fixtures. There is nary a glass curlicue or U visible in a house with 47 CFL's. No flicker (though the dimmables make a soft buzz -- but so do dimmed incandescents), and the bathroom globes actually look better than the over-warm bulbs they replaced (though they take several seconds to reach full brightness). In two years I have replaced exactly one bulb, at a cost of $3. (It was one of the cheap ones.) Savings (here in PG&E land, where electricity is ridiculously expensive) of about $80/mo. In two and a half years, I've made my money back and then some.

  Then again, I've been using CFL's since they were flickering, short-lived, and made people look like mottled ghosts. I have the old-style fluorescent tubes in the garage (that were there when we moved in) to remind me of just how far things have progressed.

  —idlemind Read idlemind's other letters
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