How many people have have lived / are living with absolutely terrible light and usage ergonomics (and will do so for years more) because of that stillborn "technology" ?
The kicker is that after 20 years of bad lighting environment, you have a local mercury disposal issue, regardless of how much mercury might have been saved in total emissions over the bulbs lifetime.
How about "good enough" technology, and by "good enough", I mean something that's better than incandescent.
Everyone has their metric, mine is how often I need to replace a bulb. I am a lazy person, I don't want to think about things if I can avoid it, see.
In my experience, CFL bulbs were bright enough, and lasted much longer than incandescent ones.
Plus, they are way less of a fire hazard, and I don't have to worry about scorching my hand on a desk lamp.
Environmentally, they are a disaster though.
Regarding the environmental disaster, why would you think that, given that the same technology was in use in much larger volumes since the 70ies or even earlier in commercial settings, offices and even homes? Lacking only the compactness, requiring external "ballast" and starters.
When I was young we had a large ring, maybe 40 to 50cm diameter under the ceiling in the kitchen, and I disliked it even then for looking "fugly" somehow. Oh, and the ring never lasted more than about half a year also :)
Also, each bulb contains only a few mg of mercury. Tuna has ~0.3 ppm of mercury, so if you eat two pounds of tuna then you'll ingest about 0.3 mg of mercury. I don't think you'll ingest more than 10% of mercury even if you break a CFL, so roughly speaking, "breaking a CFL" is the same order of magnitude as "two pounds of tuna" - doesn't sound that dangerous to me.
Anyone who says differently either uses weird light bulbs, which is a valid excuse, or has a closet full of hoarded tungsten bulbs they wish they could sell, which isn't.
Incandescents were banned, and CFLs were heavily promoted and subsidized to replace them.
Meanwhile, along came a superior technology, ten times as energy efficient, longer lasting, and with a broader range of light which is at least as good.
So all that heavy-handed regulation produced, was an era of inferior light, a mercury disposal problem, and the inability to acquire incandescents for applications such as heating, which they're excellent for. Sometimes a lot of heat and a bit of light is what you want, and most of those devices have an Edison socket.
To head off one objection: any technically competent person could have taken a look at the trajectory of LED technology and said "hold on, CFLs suck, how about we just hang back and wait five to ten years?". LED bulbs were hardly a black swan.
Yeah, that seems about par for the course for this kind of regulation. Sometimes a blind cat catches a dead mouse.
It didn't eliminate any technologies, either. I can still buy incandescents if I insist... but why would I?
My father had a really hard time getting them for an egg incubator a while ago. A problem that was solved by replacing the incubator (more trash).
But that's just anecdote. This being HN, I look forward to the reply which will shortly set me straight on the subject.
Differently from taxes and subsides, prohibiting products is a really impactful action for a government to make, it's not something to be done lightly. And we have had a fashion of really frivolous environment legislation lately doing exactly that kind of thing.
A 40 watt oven bulb, yes, but a 125 watt like you'd use in an egg incubator, reptile cage, or EZ Bake?
What prescribed CFLs were heavy subsidies, not the ban. CFLs were being given away by a lot of state governments. It was a nice kickback to importers, but I'd have trouble being convinced it did much for LED manufacturers.
Around here (Washington state), these 65W equivalent LED floods were subsidized to the tune of about $2 or $3 about five years ago: https://www.greenliteusa.com/DATA/DOCUMENTPDF/35_en.pdf At least I assume they're subsidized by the state; I don't see how they could be that cheap otherwise. They weren't giving them away, but I couldn't argue with the price.
I bought a couple dozen, and out of the half-dozen I installed at the time and another half-dozen I've installed since, none have failed. I can tell they aren't incandescent by aiming an IR camera at them, or by watching the phosphor decay after turning them off at night, but that's about it.
Seriously come on, a 100 W Incandescent uses $25 worth of electricity over it's life. Where a fluorescent to LED unit uses $3 over 2000 hours. And lasts 5-10 times longer.
As CFLs? Nowhere near.
Early LED bulbs had a horrible color rendering index, too. They made things look weird.
Cheap LED bulbs have the same reliability problem as cheap CFLs, too. They both skimp on the heat dissipation. The life of semiconductiors (in the control circuitry, for CFLs) halves with each ten degree Celsius rise in temperature.
Cheap bulbs use cheap, low-spec components close to the edge of their ratings and treat them badly. Irrespective of the base light-producing technology.
The mercury-in-CFLs problem is as overhyped as the asbestos problem (there are hundreds of thousands of miles of asbestos water pipes carrying drinking water) and the idea that plastics are bad for the environment. (In most cases, they're far better than equivalently priced alternatives.)
Finally, I had CFLs in my house for over ten years before LED substitutes became available. Now that LEDs are cheap enough and good enough, I'm using them. But from the late '90s to about 2012, CFLs were it.
When we moved in, I replaced all of the incandescent bulbs with CFLs because we were in that brief period where they were legitimately the best option due to being good enough and cheap enough compared to incandescent. Good LED bulbs (Cree) were still expensive enough that I would have had to drop a few hundred dollars to outfit the whole house.
Good LED bulbs are now common and cheap, and I will replace dead CFLs with them today but for now the existing CFLs work fine and only use marginally more power than LEDs.
As for disposal, I crush the bulbs in a paper bag and then huff the mercury fumes for recreation.
I take exception to this. Bad LED bulbs are common and cheap. Your average $5 bulb from the big box has about 3 common failure modes, all of which are exacerbated by heat. I haven't been able to buy a decent LED bulb at any brick and mortar retailer in years.
Meanwhile my 20 year old sylvania LED bulbs which are basically giant heatsinks all still work great. Now you know why nobody makes those anymore.
At this point, I shop for LEDs at IKEA. Tad more expensive, but they don't break after couple of months because someone soldered them on their knee in the middle of a Shenzhen marketplace (been there, seen that), making them overheat and eventually pop something off the circuit board.
And then I know people who got so pissed at LED bulbs they switched back to incandescent. Because turns out that the ban on incandescent bulbs in my country worked for about a year or two, before the stores got flooded with boxes of these, each with a label telling you it's not suitable for use at home, but only in storage buildings, etc. Which got the sellers off the hook, and also got the manufacturers off the hook for quality issues. My mother had a brief moment of weakness, but after two of these "legal" incandescents literally exploded over our heads, shattered glass flying everywhere, I convinced her to go back to buying LEDs.
Seriously though, how do you dispose of them? Save the mercury forever? Is there even a noticeable amount of mercury in them?
Of the CFLs I installed over the years I've had mixed results. Some are 15 years old and still going strong. Others I have had to replace more than once, although usually with LEDs now. The LEDs have mixed results too, with them being far more susceptible to heat failure in enclosed fixtures. Annoyingly they're usually built around a number of LED elements wired in series, so if any one element goes bad the whole bulb goes dim or fails entirely.
I know people used to complain a lot about CFLs being flickery and having bad color balance, but I only ever had one pair of bulbs (from a two pack) that were really bad in that regard. The pack I bought from WalMart for reasons that are lost to time. They were truly atrocious, one was orangey and the other more blue, and if you looked out the side of your eye you could see the flicker. They also died within a year thankfully, even though both were in well ventilated fixtures. My final point is that I've had much worse luck with CFLs mounted upside down (with the base pointing up). Except for the Wal*Mart specials and one enclosed outdoor fixture I think all of the ones I have installed right side up are still working.
You shouldn't do that. Mercury is very dangerous, and it takes so long to clear from your body that acute exposure often results in lifelong poisoning.
Though cremation is an option as long if the family agrees to huff the fumes. That's recycling!
> When we moved in, I replaced all of the incandescent bulbs with CFLs
I did that when I bought a house in 2014. Then when I built a house in 2018, I did all LEDs.
Huh? You make it sound like they wore out the first house and then disposed of it. Your comparison of moving to worrying about light bulbs seems totally misplaced.
Honestly, we thought we'd stay in our first house longer.
As far as house #2 goes: It was new construction, and wherever bulbs were provided, they were LED. We even have some LED fixtures where there's no bulb. (Meaning, it's assumed that the fixture will work so long that there is no "bulb" for me to change. When it stops working I need to replace the entire fixture instead of a bulb.)
That one did cover the changes in her brain and behavior until the point of death, and the intensity of the delivery adds a lot of drama to what is otherwise a clinically dry recitation of symptoms and effects.
You don't forget it too quickly, and you take extra precautions with all forms of toxic compounds (even if you hopefully are not dealing with dimethylmercury!)
I remember when we switched my old workplace from fluorescents to LEDs everybody at complained for weeks about headaches and sore eyes.
What incentive do I really have to use other bulbs?
It depends on where you live.
If you're next door to the Three Gorges Dam or the Itaipu Dam, perhaps your hydro power cost is insignificant. But for most of the world the cost of electricity (over the life of a bulb) to power a 40W incandescent bulb compared to a 10W LED bulb far exceeds the price difference between them.
https://www.hydropower.org/maps/worldhydropowerstatistics
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://www.kfw.de/stories/environment/climate-change/intera...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/these-3-maps-show-wha...
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_co...
40W incandescent, $1 cost, 1,000 hours life. 10W LED, $5 cost, 10,000 hours life. Electricity $0.12 per kWh, my cost is about USA average.
In 10,000 hours of use, incandescent cost is $10 for bulbs, $48 for electricity. Total $58.
In 10,000 hours of use, LED cost is $5 for bulb, $12 for electricity, Total $17.
$17 is much less than $58.
In reality a 40W equivalent LED would use closer to 8W than 10W, and would last longer than 10,000 hours, and costs less than $5, so the comparison result would be skewed even more toward LED.
Now what happens if you live in Germany. Electricity is €0.31. Which is 3x what I'm paying. So now the electricity comparison is €124 for incandescent, €31 for LED.
I really don't understand this incessant need to convince people they should switch to different lightbulbs, when my choice in lightbulbs in no way impacts anyone else. I live in a place with 100% renewable power. As far as i'm concerned, the simplicity and lack of chemicals in the bulbs I choose, outweighs the potential energy savings as far as that goes.
My choices come down to what I prefer and what I feel my impacts are based on those choices. I've thought it out and this is what I choose and I shall keep on doing so until I no longer can and the lobbying has forced incandescents entirely off the market.
Besides that, they are under 10 dollar now, and as stated elsewhere lasting longer, using much less energy, and depending on the model/brand give acceptable light. Though there is trash on the market also.
Have you ever heard of the story of Sam Vimes boots? https://moneywise.com/a/boots-theory-of-socioeconomic-unfair...
Or much older "Wer billig kauft, kauft zweimal!"(Who buys cheap, buys two times!), you get what you pay for, and so on.
Maybe it doesn't impact you so much because energy is cheap where you live, so you don't (need to) care/think about it(for now).
OTOH I indeed don't really need them anymore (maybe as a temporary spare) because meanwhile I also upgraded everything to warmwhite(2700k) retrofit filaments, which saves much energy and doesn't flicker at all.
They are Osram(by name only, meanwhile chinese owned) "PARATHOM Retrofit CLASSIC A" and "B". No smarts, no frills, no dimming. Just the right light. I'm using the clear ones from 2.5W to 8W. Compared to anything I've tried before they are excellent, and the first ones meanwhile about 3 years old? None of them broke so far.
[1] https://www.ledvance.com/professional/products/lamps/led-lam...