Giving energy saving light bulbs a bad name

I think all the light bulbs in the Jaded Green house are energy efficient, with the exception of the one in the porch which is on a timer and you're not supposed to use energy efficient bulbs there (why?)

I've never understood the people who say they can't bear to use these light bulbs because they produce such a horrible, dim light. We've never had any problem with them.

Until last week that is.

Visiting my parents, my father commented that he had bought a pack of 8 long life bulbs from a mail order company and how horrible the light was, enough to render them unusable. He was going to demonstrate by plugging it into a table lamp but the lamp wasn't working, so he gave me a bulb to take home.

A few days later, a light bulb failed in our hall. It's a long hall and we have 3 lights there. The light bulbs are in a crate under the stairs and it was going to take rather more effort that I wanted to get one out, so I put in my Dad's bulb.

Goodness me it is horrible. If I had to live with light like that I would be so depressed. The light is blue. All the rest of our bulbs produce a nice cheerful pink light.

and what annoys me is that there are people who have been put off energy efficiency and think those of us who use them are lentil knitting loonies for even thinking that they should use them.

And I really am going to excavate under the stairs to get out a decent happy light bulb.

Gwd that's aweful. We've nver had any trouble with our globes at all

I think one of the annoying things is knowing what to do with them now.....

Was about to give something of the sort a look myself Billy, that's just the thing. The colour temperature, or character, of a light makes all the difference. Each type certainly has its own place, and putting the wrong type of ANY sort bulb in the wrong setting just seems off. Imagine lighting your stairs with the bulb from out of the oven!!
I agree with not using the energy efficient for the outside lamps. We've got one on the back porch for the dogs and that's fine, but the one on the front step, while rated the same power, just doesn't cut it for the area it needs to. Back to colour temperature vs. ambient conditions & light saturation. Add that and it's so wicked cold here they don't get to full strength for a bit, instant start and all.

I use CFLs, but have a lot of reservations about them. Tables like the one above make it appear like the light of a fluorescent lamp is entirely characterised by the colour temperature. It is not.

Daylight and incandescent light is esentially black body radiation, coming as it does from a hot object. The spectrum is smooth and continuous. Fluorescent light is produced by electron transitions and these produce discrete wavelengths of light, so the spectrum is often composed of a series of different colour spikes. Look here for some plots for GE lamps.

Now, since the eye has only red, green and blue colour receptors, the light can be tailored, by choice of phosphor, to look like daylight of a particular colour temperature. So the light, viewed directly, looks alright. But if it reflects off a surface with similarly spikey reflectance spectrum, the colour rendering will not be the same as the same as daylight of the same colour temperature.

Moral of the story; if you use fluorescent lighting, check the colour of your matchpot of paint under daylight and artificial light before you paint the whole room, or you could get a nasty surprise when you turn the lights on.

I heard that energy saving bulbs were bad for the environment due to the mercury inthem?

As I understand it, the mercury released in burning enough coal to provide the extra energy for a conventional lamp, over the life of a CFL, is greater than that contained in a CFL. So if the energy saved by CFL's reduces coal fired power generation, it outweighs even the mercury released by improper disposal of CFL's (Which I hope noone does ...).