i blew out a CFL!
 

yup, a "100 watt" CFL i had in my laundry room finally gave out. it was a dual socket fixture, but i only put one bulb in it. but this CFL had quite a track record:

new house: 2 years
old apartment 2: 3 years
old apartment 1: 2 years

i bought a 12 pack of these bulbs about 7 years ago i think, on sale at a Sam's Club. this is the first one to go out. maybe i should start looking at the newer style ones, i keep hearing they give off better light.

Way to keep track of your lights! I don't think in 7 years I'll remember squat.

I do have some old CFLs in the basement. They start up real slow. The new ones I've bought recently are to max brightness in 30 seconds I'd say.

Nice! I should start putting stickers on my bulbs to measure their life. I've not had one go out yet though.

the other 11 still fire up immediately. i do have 1 newer, smaller cfl in a desk lamp, and its a lot "whiter" than the old ones, but both styles work just fine for me :cool:


its funny, at the apartments i would take all the regular bulbs out when i moved in and stash them. when i moved back out, i'd swap them all back in. i'd put the cfl's back in the original box, and move them with me.

i've only got about 3 or 4 regular bulbs in the house now. when they go out, i'll buy another "value pack" of cfl's. luckily, my kitchen already has a 4' fluorescent fixture with 2 tubes. just a couple bathroom lights and another desklight are still reg bulbs.

never kept the reg bulbs in long enough (anywhere i lived) to see what i was saving.

I think the shortest life for CFL is 10000h, so 7 years is around 4h per day. I don't remember about the number of switch-on of CFL.

I saw some 15000h CFL last week but they were twice the price of 10000h.

The only broken CFL I saw by now is one which broke while we moved 2 years ago. I don't remember if I had CFL 7 years ago before our previous move, so this broken CFL had between 3 and 5 years. Our older CFL are where we switch on light less often, or in stock as we are changing the old 2700°K by 6500°K where we switch on light more often.

Denis.

Tony that is awesome! I am of course referring to the fact that you were able to recall how long and where you had the CFLs in use.

I like the sticker idea SVOboy!

thanks!

my job requires a lot of maintenance/repair, so i have gotten used to marking new parts with month/year of install. i just used a very fine-point sharpie.

then it just carried over into stuff at home

my mom gave me an extra cfl she had laying around. i guess its the "new" style. it has the same coil shape (looks identical to my old ones), but it gives off a real "white" light that has a bluish tint to it. i put it in my living room. its not as "bright" as the old one and i have mixed feelings on the "color", but i may grow to like it.

that blueish color is what my wife doesn't like about the CFLs. I've got her convinced to using the "natural" looking ones. Now that I have proof (thanks Tony) that they last YEARS, she doesn't have an argument anymore :)

went to sams club and bought an 8-pack of "60 watt" cfl's for $8 and change. decided to step down from "100 watt" bulbs this time around. some of my ceiling fan lights are 60 watt fixtures, and the bigger cfls didn't fit very well in them. oh yeah, they are the "natural" light kind, not the "blue"

i have a 3 bulb ceiling fan set that i'm about to put in my living room, that i got as a hand-me-down (needed new sockets). it has a much bigger fan than the single bulb fan set that was up there. gonna put the "60 watts" in there too. i know more bulbs = more energy, but i only use the overhead light when i need the whole room lit up well. otherwise i have some small endtable lamps.