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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

My house is full of CFLs.

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.

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> Good LED bulbs are now common and cheap

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.

Yup. LED bulbs were good until the market competition caught up. Now they're mostly shit.

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.

Are you sure you bought those LED bulbs in 2000? Philips submission for the LED replacement 60W bulb was only in 2009

I don't know maybe I got lucky but i bought the store brand walmart leds and have used them for a long time without replacing them. the light quality is nice and it was extremely cheap... on the order of the incandescents that they replaced. I want to say it was around 5 or 10 bucks for a 4 pack

LED bulbs were not around 20 years ago bub.

> I crush the bulbs in a paper bag and then huff the mercury fumes for recreation.

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.

Good info to have, Thank you. I am sure people will think twice about huffing mercury fumes now.

yep, i will switch back to only eating it directly, or spread finely and evenly on toast

I'm here to help.

As long they are buried in an airtight vault or have their remains launched into deep space it should be fine.

Though cremation is an option as long if the family agrees to huff the fumes. That's recycling!

>As for disposal, I crush the bulbs in a paper bag and then huff the mercury fumes for recreation.

Seriously though, how do you dispose of them? Save the mercury forever? Is there even a noticeable amount of mercury in them?

According to my county you can just throw CFLs right in the trash. The amount of mercury in them is so small that it basically isn't worth worrying about. I don't live in California however, so your trash service may have different rules.

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.

My experience with CFLs was that they were bad, blue and flickery when they came out. They also made a very annoying buzzing sound. They got a lot better over the years though, and became quite acceptable.

FWIW I don't remember much buzz from even the few bad ones I tried, but the early ones were notorious for taking a long time to come to full brightness. You would flip the switch on and it would pop on at like 25% of its rated brightness and then slowly creep up to full brightness after a minute or two.

If your municipality uses a properly maintained landfill, you can just throw them into trash, after sealing them in a regular plastic bag. Such a trivial amount of mercury will not be significant in the big picture of a landfill. For what it's worth, you can also just trash regular alkaline batteries, there's nothing wrong with that either.

Home Depot and etc. tend to have bins to dispose of them. The following site allows searches for disposal locations in your area: https://search.earth911.com/ , referred from https://www.epa.gov/cfl/recycling-and-disposal-cfls-and-othe... .

Yes if you break one, you can sometimes see a little ball of mercury inside. It is about the size of a BB.

RAD! I think you should watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-239_(film) , if only for the end, where something similar happens :)

When I was in that transition, I’d rotate the CFLs to the low-use locations as I rolled out the LEDs. Still have a few 100w équivalent CFL monsters in the laundry room.

The price dropped like a stone!

> 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.

As an aside -- and I am not attempting to criticize you personally, because I can imagine all sorts of reasons it makes sense -- I find it hilarious to juxtapose going through two houses in four years with worrying about the energy efficiency of your light bulbs.

> going through two houses in four years

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.

Life changed much faster than we (my wife and I) anticipated and we moved out of our first house after three years.

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.)

A scientist spilled two drops of organic mercury on her gloves. This is what happened to her brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7M01jV058

That video is about dimethylmercury, which is chemically completely different than the mercury in fluorescent lights. That's like saying DNA is bad because is has carbon and nitrogen in it, which is what cyanide is made out of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury

Well, obviously, but nearly all compounds containing mercury are toxic, and in many cases highly so, even if there are a (very) few consumer products where there is insufficient data as to relative toxicity. (Perhaps they should give you MSDS for your eye drops or amalgam dental fillings!)

Chubbyemu is a great Youtuber, but I can't force myself to indulge his goofy clickbait titles. My loss as well as his, because he does really nice work.

I agree, but I actually do appreciate the titles, since the videos actually deliver (unlike many Youtubers).

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!)

Yeah, I don't think anyone who's heard Wetterhahn's story will ever forget it. It's somehow one of the scariest things I've ever seen in print, despite the lack of a huge body count.

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