The new bulbs are particularly vulnerable to extremes of temperature, for example; you won't want to use them in your garage in winter. CFLs are also 25 percent longer in size than the average incandescent. This makes them unsuitable for all kinds of lighting fixtures--particularly chandeliers and other ceiling lights--which will have to be either discarded or reconfigured, at considerable expense, after the Bush ban goes into effect. You can't use most CFLs with dimmer switches, either; ditto timers. Newer models that can be dimmed and are adaptable to timers will require you to buy new CFL-compatible dimmers and timers. The quality of the light given off by CFLs is quite different from what we're used to from incandescents. The old bulb concentrates its light through a small surface area. CFLs don't shine in beams; they glow all the way around, diffusing their illumination. They're terrible reading lights. Many people find fluorescent light itself to be harsh and unpleasant.Here's the beauty part --the part you could only find in a government environmental mandate:
a CFL bulb can take two or three minutes to reach its full illumination after being turned on. And once it's fully aglow, according to the Department of Energy guidelines, you need to leave it on for at least 15 minutes.Because turning it off and on frequently shortens its life!
Odd, isn't it--an energy-saving device that you're not supposed to turn off? Such complications undermine the extravagant claims made for the CFLs' energy savings. Let's say you're a CFL aficionado and you want to fetch your car keys from your darkened bedroom: You switch on the light, wait a couple minutes, finally find the wallet as the room slowly brightens, and then leave the light on, because you don't want to shorten the life of your expensive CFL. Will you remember to go back and turn it off 15 minutes later? Or will you get in your Prius, drive to Whole Foods, and leave the light burning for several more hours while you absent-mindedly fondle the organics? If you're not a CFL aficionado, by contrast, you turn on the incandescent light, get your car keys, and then switch it off. Who's wasting more energy?Plus we have to ignore the laws of supply and demand.
Sam Kazman, of the antiregulation Competitive Enterprise Institute, likes to cite the now legendary Great Light Bulb Exchange sponsored by a local power company in the tiny town of Traer, Iowa. Half the town's residents turned in their incandescents for free CFLs--and electricity consumption rose by 8 percent. The cost of burning electricity went down, and demand increased. Funny how that happens.Not to mention, because they contain mercury, they shouldn't be dropped in the regular trash (how many do you suppose will end up in our landfills anyway? I sense an environmental disaster incipient, do you?), and you're supposed to open the window and air out the room for 15 minutes before you clean up a broken one.
Maybe some entrepreneur will make a more efficient incandescent or a brighter, mercury-free CFL by 2014 when the regs go into effect. Meanwhile the, er, bright side could be an uptake in literary taste: before reading a book we'll have to ask ourselves if it's truly bulbworthy --worth using our stash of old reliable 100w incandescents for.
