CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy.
LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did.
Perhaps you like to kvetch and grouse about small inconveniences; the world is not and never was a perfect place. Most of us just take the pebbles out of our shoes and move on rather than whinge on about how shoes back in the day didn't have rocks in them.
So you live with a box filled with fragile glass tubes with mercury in them that you keep putting more glass tubes with mercury in for three years? When you take them to the hardware store, do you double bag them to keep the mercury from leaking when the tubes inevitably shatter against all of the other bulbs? Is that mercury ever recovered in "recycling", or does it just poison a land fill for the next thousand years?
> CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy.
Please tell that to my IKEA and other CFLs that were lucky to last one year. And a properly made incandescent can last many years as well. In fact, when I was a kid, my family restored a 200+ year old home that had a very, very old bulb in it (it was large and looked like an old Edison bulb -- it was bigger than my fist) that still worked great -- it was nice and bright and probably on the order of 150 watts. It was probably from the 1940's, because there were old magazines from the 1940's stacked underneath it. (Great old mags like Popular Mechanics that had ads for "Buy U.S. War Bonds" in them).
CFL's used to (and still) cost a lot more than incandescents. Four to ten times as much when the mandate was introduced, and they were almost as unreliable as cheap incandescents, and produced a horribly cold blue light.
For incandescent bulbs, yes, the heat issue is an issue, and the fact that they're much, much less efficient, but they didn't contain dangerous metals or present a serious environmental hazard when they were disposed of.
LED bulbs did actually exist 20 years ago; in 2000, a friend gave me one (I tried it out and was decidedly not impressed), and I saw them in Fry's for $25+ dollars in 2000 dollars. They were not very bright and had some real issues (and big heat sinks, interestingly enough).
But I miss incandescent bulbs, and believe that the market would have moved us over to LED's soon enough. I would have chosen LED's now over most incandescents, but I'd still prefer incandescents for a few types of uses.
The irony is that the really inefficient incandescent bulbs -- bright and hot halogens -- were not banned; only the run of the mill $1 bulbs (in fact, literally, you could buy a 4 pack of Sylvanias in the dollar store, because that's how I bought bulbs in college).
That's the problem with these mandates: they just harm the poor people, because people who create these mandates are definitely not poor and don't really care -- but these technocrats know better, because of some future energy emergency that never materialized. The CA blackouts wouldn't have been close to mitigated by everyone switching over to CFLs, but it probably helped corporate interests and whoever manufactured all those CFLs clogging up landfills.
And now we have at least a century's worth of oil just in shale that wasn't even accessible 25 years ago, and the sea levels never rose in 2014 as Al Gore so confidently predicted. (I wonder if he bought property in Miami after the prices dropped!) Is this push toward electric cars just another greenhouse warming, ozone depleting, nuclear winter, DDT-thins-bird-eggs proto-catastrophe? We don't know, but it seems clear that the science on macro-events is settled only in hind-sight. Personally, I think we should ban volcanic emissions.
I agree, some CFL bulbs, and some LED bubls, and some incandescent bulbs fail well before their rated lifespan. Some companies put sawdust or melamine in baby formula. The world isn't a perfect place. There are some incandescent bulbs that have lasted 100 years. Regardless, in general, LEDs and CFL last longer. Whataboutism isn't really a good faith argument.
CFLs (and hey, why are we talking about CFL? You should be buying LED) are somewhat more expensive, but I've been able to buy replacements (that have lasted years at this point) for roughly the same price as quality incandescent.
>LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did.
Correct from political and marketing perspective, but not from consumer perspective.
Integrated CFLs contain the tube and ballast in a single unit. The tubes will last very long time, the ballasts will fail quite frequently, more often than incandescent.
Same with LED bulbs. The LED itself will last very long time, but the electronics driving it will fail much sooner than CFL ballasts.
So, yes, CFL and LED will last longer if we want to be pedantic on naming, but to the consumer it means nothing. Will the new CFL or LED bulbs that I screw in last longer than my old light-bulbs?
I will even take it a step further, LEDs are constructed to fail sooner in some countries - https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
They cost orders of magnitude more than incandescent bulbs. I used to get incandescents 4/$1.00 on sale.
They don't last a lot longer. I haven't kept stats, but it feels like I am still replacing bulbs about as often as I ever did.
They contain mercury and need to be disposed of as hazardous waste. And if you break one, now you have mercury in your house.
LED bulbs don't seem to have the "warm up" period that CFSs need to achieve maximum brightness, but you have to be carful about buying the right color temperature because most of them are very harsh bright blue/white. Again I am replacing them routinely. Maybe in theory they should last a lot longer but in practice they seem to be made of minimally adequate components that don't hold up. And they cost even more than CFLs. I just paid $16 for four LED bulbs for the bathroom. Incandescents would have cost me a few dollars.
The only advantage of these bulbs is the reduced electrical usage. But how long will it take to save $16 on my bathroom bulbs? $16 at KWh/$0.15 buys me 106KWh. Assuming the old incandescents would draw 240W, thats 440 hours of operation. My bathroom lights are on maybe 30 minutes/day? So roughly 2.5 years later the LEDs come out ahead, and by then I am needing to replace at least one or two of them in my experience.
It's been my experience that in general LED bulbs last way longer than the CFL / Incandescent bulbs they're replacing. There have been some cheapo CFL / LED bulbs that didn't last very long, but that was also the case for incandescent bulbs as well (cough $0.25 bulbs). There's always been cheap junk in the world, some of it is packaged to look the same as quality products.
Yes, it is slightly tedious to match color temperatures, but that was the case with incandescent bulbs as well. It is also slightly tedious to find bulbs that are compatible with dimmers.
On the whole, though, these new bulbs are far better than the things they're replacing, and eventually even you will come to use them without noticing.
LED might a similar relationship to fuel cell cars since they work like the old kind and don't have huge disposal problems.
Any way to get hydrogen can generate electricity, usually more efficiently.
Electricity is easier to generate, distribute, and store than hydrogen.
Fuel cell cars also need batteries because they're not able to deliver large bursts of energy.
Maybe hydrogen / fuel cells might be better for very large mobile applications (ships / trucks / trains) but that's an open question.
They're no a reasonable alternative to BEVs. If anything, hybrid cars are the CFL, having all the drawbacks of both modes and few of the advantages of either (the ability to refuel quickly from anywhere with gas stations is the sole selling point, and it is a big one).
Unless you think BEVs are the "final car," and there are no fundamental future advancements to ever be made, something like fuel cell cars are going to happen.
On balance, CFLs were lower energy and safe enough for general use. They were much better than their contemporaries for the environment.
Incandescent < CFL < LED. I don't see a problem with recommending new solutions as they are found, nor recommending LEDs over CFLs.