Mike, I share your frustration.

CFL’s have their place. But many applications do not lend themselves to their usage.

Such as:

Cold temperatures: Sorry folks, but it gets a whole lot colder here in Iowa than it does in Florida so CFL’s have trouble lighting in outdoor applications. Bring on that global warming, I freezing here!

Warm temperatures: Applications such as ovens (both residential and commercial) get too hot for their usage. Campus tunnels that have steam pipes in them can get so hot that the CFL bases can warp and melt.

Short duration operations: I installed a set in my bathroom. I was finished with my business before they had any major output. Motion detector lights are another poor application as when an intruder comes by, you want full light output immediately.

With that said, we have noticed a huge difference between the various brands that are available on the market today. We found that Panasonic provided us with a product that “looked” more like an “A” type lamp and had very good life span. We used them to replace lamps in pendent light fixtures in restaurants. Notice that in this application, the lights are turned on and left on for hours at a time. The fixtures were failing due to the frequent lamp changes of the incandescent lamps and the “abuse” that took place with the handling of the fixture during the lamp change. The CFL product reduced the number of times this operation took place.

The Panasonic CFL products are no longer sold in the USA. With the introduction of so many CHEAP CFL products they choose to exit the USA market and sell the product in Europe. We paid between $10 and $15 per lamp for their 28-watt product with an “A” type looking diffuser. I still have a couple of them and I have saved them for my personal use in a couple of hallway fixtures in my home.

I personally use a Sylvania twist product in out range hood at our home. The light is on almost 24/7. We use it as our night-light and when we are cooking. As we have seven kids and we home school, that is why it is just left on 24/7. The Sylvania product lasts about 3 to 4 years in this application.

As you can see, CFL can be used successfully in some applications. But the product is limited as the engineers took a linier product and tried to shove it into an “A” type fixture.

All this time though, people forget that incandescent lamps were not banned. Just that lumen per watt standard was changed. Now incandescent lamps as we know them will go away. GE and the rest of them are working on incandescent lamps that will meet the new lumens per watt requirements. GE has said through their reps that they are on track to meet the guidelines in time.

Also, LED products are making headway. But the majority of the medium base screw applications do not have the correct photometrics to maximize the benefits of this light source. The big gains with this technology are realized when they design the fixture around the light output of the LED engine to maximize the light to where you want the light. Now that is change we can live with! As for the other changes, I’ll keep my guns, my Bible, the rest of the constitution, and my incandescent lamps; and you can keep those changes.

Sorry for being so detailed in my post.

A Very Merry Christmas to all of you.