On May 19, 3:00 pm, Telamon
wrote:
In article om,





Roadie wrote:
On May 18, 9:50 pm, wrote:
www.newswithviews.com

I don't like fluorescent light bulbs.From now on when I go to the food
store,I am going to start stocking up on good old G.E.Real Incandescent
Light Bulbs,the 60 Watters.I am going to clean off the top shelves in
the closets in my house and stack em up in cardboard boxes.When fed govt
starts shoving fluorescent light bulbs (so-called light bulbs) down
everybodys throats,I will still be wasteing my electricity that I pay
for on my good old G.E.Real Incandscent 60 WATT LIGHT BULBS.
cuhulin,the Electricity Waster dude.Waste Mo Electricity,you can't take
it with you

In celebration of Earth Day my local grocery store had GE CFL's on
sale for a buck a piece. Couldn't resist the opportunity so I swapped
out most of the bulbs. What a difference - because they are so much
more efficient they consume 1/4 the energy for an equivalent amount of
light from an incandescent bulb. The color temperature is very close
to incandescent too.

And for SWL's concerned about noise, the only time I pick up any noise
from one is to move the radio to within 5 inches of the light.

Did you know that even though CFL's contain a very small amount of
mercury that they actually release less mercury into the atmosphere
than an incandescent. That is possible because much of our power
comes from burned coal which releases large amounts of mercury into
the air. Indeed if you were to break all of the mercury CFL bulbs the
total amount of mercury released including the amount of mercury used
in power generation would be far less than that released by
incandescent.

You can always have a bulb re-cycling program to collect the mercury.

Yes, I agree and such programs are starting in the USA. An NPR
program characterized the amount as something like 5 miligrams...the
size of the tip of a ball point pen. The amount of mercury not spewed
into the atmosphere by buring coal makes the risk of a few bulbs
breaking and the cost of recycling a more than reasonable tradeoff in
my mind.



The CFL's I have seen do not have a incandescent bulb spectrum but like
most florescent bulbs tint toward blue.

Actually the newer ones are colored slightly warm to come close to
incandescent bulbs. The color in degrees kelvin is 2700 for the GE
and comparable helical style bulbs. GE and other companies do make
cooler bulbs. The older style bulbs were definitely on the cold side
giving ones face a corpse-like color!


It would cost more money for the
inside bulb coating and also reduce the efficiency of the bulb for a CFL
to generate a redder spectrum.

Don't know how they do it, but the current group of bulbs is right in
there with incandescents for color temperature. Indeed I swapped 10
of them out and told my wife I'd improved on the lighting but didn't
say how. She couldn't see a difference.


What did you pay for the bulbs?

$1.00 a piece at the local grocery on Earth Day. Shop around a bit
and you can find them in packages for a cost of $2.50 per bulb.



Another question is how did you determine that they only disturb the
radio from 5 inches away? The problem with this technology is that the
power spectrum they broadcast is diverse with more power on some
frequencies. You would need a spectrum analyzer to determine this with
any certainty.

Tuning around and listening gets me close enough to certainty. If I
can't hear it and it doesn't disturb listening them it isn't a
problem. The greatest noise was on the AM band and it disappears
within 10 inches of the bulb.