Letters to the Editor
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On the other hand
Besides being annoyingly inefficient, this can increase summertime air-conditioning costs and present a higher risk of fire.
I'd like to remind the author that even in California, there are four seasons.
One of those seasons is hot and needs air conditioning, but the others can get pretty cold.
So how does the math work out when you factor in all four seasons?
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Here's what we need to do
Relocate the populace to cities (Ceacescu)
Do away with the calendar (Robespierre)
Do away with technology (Pol Pot)
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CFLs and Neurological Problems
As a person with neurological problems triggered by fluorescent lighting, I find the march toward universal use of CFLs terrifying. After five minutes in a room illuminated by these bulbs, I begin to have extreme head pain, followed by cognitive and speech problems. If CFLs become the light bulb of choice, millions of migraine sufferers and people like me with neurological problems will have their lives severely limited. If CFLs blaze and flicker everywhere, where will I shop? Which restaurants can I eat at? Whose homes or businesses can I visit?
Telling others of my problems with CFLs and fluorescent lighting, I find that fifty percent of the time, people without neurological problems also detest these bulbs. If those of us who are especially sensitive have extreme problems with this lighting, it seems likely that average people are also adversely affected by it. I once convinced friends to switch their office lighting from cheap fluorescents to more expensive incandescent lighting. They reported back: not only had their productivity improved but they felt much more rested in their daily work environment.
I found the comments of reader DLF particularly annoying: “I don't tell them that all the lights in my house are CFLs, and they don't notice the difference.” Believe me, anyone who is sensitive to this lighting can immediately identify which bulbs in a room are CFLs.
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Why ask Pablo
when most of these letters are so much more intelligent and better informed? To generate the letters, I guess.
Rather than "Dump your incandescents," the slant should have been "Government wants to force a dangerous, sickness-inducing technology down your throats," for your own good, of course.
Let's hear it for the experts. Please tell Cleveland to gear up for an underground economy built around healthy light. Is China capable of producing anything that doesn't contain lead or mercury?
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No Mercury in the Environment is worth the risk
Pablo, please do not encourage people to buy products that require the use of mercury in their manufacture. The energy savings is not enough to compensate for the increased health risk. Our environment is toxic enough (witness the epidemic of mercury-damaged children, increased allergies, asthma, autism, behavioral issues). We cannot afford to continue to pollute our environment.
Yvonne in Portland
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Energy efficient bulbs and other appliances will do more than all 'renewable' combined
CFL bulbs are good for some places. LED bulbs will drop drastically in price, and have similar efficiencies. Geo sourced heating and cooling, better fridges, more insulation. These all have huge environmental paybacks. But they don't really add to the bottom line of Florida Light and Power.
The goal of big energy is to get your government to use your money to pay them to build daft 'eco' ways of generating electricity. Examples: wind (5x the cost of nuclear or coal, 20x the cost of hydro): Solar (20x the cost of nuclear, etc): Ethanol: for generating fuel from corn (1.5 gallons of gasoline equiv. per gallon of ethanol produced). For the most part we are buying it hook line and sinker. The 'dafter' the better.
It does not take long to figure out that since North Americans use about 3x the energy for our lifestyle than Europeans, that the biggest gains are in conservation.
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Mercury, Revisited
One of the previous letters mentioned that the mercury from a CFL is not inconsequential and that Pablo minimized it.
It's true that it's not inconsequential when one looks at the country on the whole and the number of CFLs involved. So it's important to know how much mercury isn't released into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants by using a CFL and thus less electricity.
The link below references an EPA factsheet and the number to know is this:
"... A power plant will emit 10mg of mercury to produce
the electricity to run an incandescent bulb compared to only
2.4mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same time."
Almost any way you slice it, the small amount of mercury in a CFL is a step down from what we're doing now.
http://www.gelighting.com/na/home_lighting/ask_us/faq_compact.htm
So switch to CFLs -- especially if your power comes from coal!
-André Angelantoni
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the problem with compact flourescent bulbs
We decided to replace our regular lightbulbs with compact flourescents, and ended up disappointed. The problem? We have an old house. The compact flourescent bulbs don't work in many old light fixtures...they burn out, literally, within hours. The only way we could use them was to remove the light fixture and have a bare cf bulb hanging from the ceiling. As much as we want to be environmentally responsible, we couldn't imagine removing every beautiful vintage light fixture from our home - one of the features that attracted us to it in the first place - in favor of a bunch of uncovered, glaring white curlicue bulbs. Not to mention that, having dropped a bunch of money on these bulbs whose price is supposed to be justified by superior longevity, it was a real pisser to see our investment burn out by the end of the evening.
I think there is an issue with the cf bulbs that causes them to burn out if they are in any sort of enclosed fixture. I hope that the companies that make these bulbs can figure out a way to address this issue. Until then, unfortunately, we'll only have them in table lamps and will keep the incandescent bulbs for the overhead fixtures.
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@ducati
Someone already mentioned that 3 way bulbs are available, but be careful before you buy a bunch of them. I recently bought one and realized that the base (not the part that screws in, but the part just above that) was much larger than a standard bulb, so that it wouldn't fit properly in the lamp when the shade was on.
Otherwise, I've never had a probelm with CFLs, I've replaced about half our bulbs with them and haven't had one burn out in 2 years.