BeigeJournal

I have finally attained my goal of eliminating incandescent lamps from my home. The only ones left are a few old flashlights, the new ones being LED; the Lava Lamp; the light in the microwave oven; and the light in the refrigerator, which doesn’t run very many hours, assuming that the light does indeed go off when the door is closed.

Home Depot sells spiral-tube CF lamps with the Commercial Electric brand name. The 14 watt version is tiny, smaller in most dimensions than a standard incandescent. Though the ingenuity of fixture designers to devise fixtures that just won’t fit any CF lamp is seemingly endless, these will fit just about anything, even the range hood and the small ceiling fixtures in the hall and bedroom closet. They are quite bright, roughly the equal of a generic 60 watt incandescent, as the manufacturer claims. They also sell a rather large 42 watt lamp that is quite bright, and some intermediate sizes. I do not yet have any long-term reliability data. I’ve had a few Commercial Electric CF flood lamps in use for a while, with one case of infant mortality. Unlike the fluorescent torchieres that have ballasts that you probably are not going to be able to replace, the CFs are reasonably cheap and are easy to replace, so occasional failures are far more tolerable. I also have a number of GE CFs that have been reliable thus far. Color temperature on all of these is on the low side, but not excessively so—the light is a bit yellow, but not orange. There is a 19 watt daylight color Commercial Electric spiral available that I have not tried.

All of these have rather low power factors of just over 0.5, according to my measurements. Residential customers, at least in the United States, are not generally charged for power factor, and the efficiency is so much greater than incandescents that current for equal light output is less even with the low power factor.

I have overall experienced extremely poor reliability from fluorescent torchiere lamps, but I have two in the living room that have lasted years, indeed, outlasted the original tubes. Usually, though, the magic smoke leaks out of the ballast within a few months, so I’m not going to be buying any more. There is an old table lamp with a compact fluorescent lamp in the living room as well, and a single-tube T12 fixture above the bookcases. This all totals 190 watts. The dining area now has a table lamp with CF and a cheap but reasonably good-looking floor lamp from Target with a tall, cylindrical shade covering three CF lamps. The two fixtures total 99 watts. The kitchen ceiling fixture was replaced with a fluorescent a few years ago, the over-sink fixture is an old and crappy fluorescent, and now I’ve found CF lamps small enough to fit the hood over the stove.

The bathroom is all fluorescent now, with CFs over the mirror and two Commercial Electric CF flood lamps in the ceiling fixtures over the tub and toilet. One of those replaces a heat lamp, which besides being expensive to run is not really desirable in the summer.

The computer room has an assortment of fixtures. One very cheap Target torchiere-style floor lamp meant for a standard incandescent but equipped with a CF. One CF flood pointed up from a can fixture. A magnifying glass with circular lamp surrounding the lens serves also as general lighting. A fluorescent desk lamp adds extra light. An old fixture, once alarming orange, now spray-painted white, with a large frosted glass dome, looking slightly like a water tower, holds another CF. The glass cover is entirely closed, making this a rather hostile temperature environment for the ballast of this over-20-watt lamp, but the GE CF in there has lasted years nonetheless. 94 watts total for the room.

The last room to go fluorescent was the bedroom, formerly lit with a 300 watt torchiere. It now has a 42 watt spiral-tube CF in an old table lamp that I’m planning to replace with something a bit nicer-looking, and, most importantly, with a white rather than yellowish shade, and a cheap Target torchiere-plus-side-mounted-light, with a 42 watt CF on top and a 14 watt on the side. Although the top shade looks pretty big, it isn’t tall enough to fully conceal the big, high-power CF. The flexible goose-neck on the side for the extra light is a bit on the flimsy side, too, though it will do. 89 watts for now, but a third fixture with a low power lamp, probably 14 watts, may get added to the set eventually, if I decide I want more light. The X10 arrangement still isn’t final. I have another wireless remote on order from Smarthome, which I think will be all I need. I’ll probably spend more time in there now that the lighting is more efficient.

The hallway light, which does get significant use, is now a 14 watt spiral CF, as is the walk-in closet, even though it doesn’t get much use. The CF lamps, they are cheap these days.

When shopping for light fixtures it always amazes me that virtually nothing is available that shows any sign of fluorescent awareness other than the fluorescent ceiling fixtures, many of which are quite ugly and of very poor quality, though some are not bad. In the commercial world we see better fixtures. My place of employment has very nice ceiling fixtures, in a number of styles, in the new building. As far as portable fixtures go, there exist fluorescent torchieres, usually hard to find and in my experience all too often very short-lived; some fluorescent desk lights, mostly of very poor quality; and anything that can accommodate a compact fluorescent well does so by accident. CFs have been around for many years, and in general are longer than incandescents and are wider near the base, where the ballast is. Accommodating them is not hard, but lamp harps are usually narrow at the base, often interfering with the ballast, and any fixture long enough that a longer, higher-power CF doesn’t stick out the end was probably not designed to be long enough for a CF but rather is simply so large, for stylistic reasons, that a dog could hide in there, and so too, quite by accident, can a CF lamp. One would think that by now someone would be making fixtures specifically designed to accommodate even the bulkiest of compact fluorescents with ease and advertising this feature, but if anyone is, I don’t know about it.

I’m also amazed at how little thought is generally given to the problem of getting light from the bulb out of the fixture and into the room. Quite often where you might expect to find a polished reflector you find flat dark paint. Surfaces you’d expect to be translucent are semi- or completely opaque. Efficiency, clearly, is not considered important, or even considered at all.