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Don Klipstein

In ,
wrote in part:

I'll have to give Steve's idea a try. I've have several indoor flood
type CFL's go bad within a few months and am not at all impressed with
them. On the other hand, I have some of the spiral types in my
garage and they have worked fine.

One of the biggest problems is there is no std of labeling to help
anyone figure out what applications these are good for. They need a
std along the lines of they take X seconds to reach 60% of full
brightness. Right now, they vary all over the place. The flood
types I bought are a joke. In my kitchen they take about 2 mins to
get to any reasonable brightness. Now, if you knew that up front,
you could still use them in applications where that is not a
problem. But having consumers buy them and find it out later sure
doesn't help getting them adopted.

By-and-large, CFLs are of higher quality if they have the "Energy Star"
logo and/or are of one of the "Big 3" brands (Sylvania, GE or Philips).

Getting better ones may help with getting them to last longer. CFLs
easily overheat in recessed ceiling fixtures, which may be the problem
with your floods burning out early.

As for starting dimmer and taking longer to warm up - that mainly occurs
in types with outer bulbs. A CFL only works well when the coldest point
on the tubing is in a specific temperature range. In CFLs where the
tubing normally gets hotter, the mercury amalgam formulation is optimized
for that higher temperature - and then the tubing needs to warm up to that
higher temperature.

- Don Klipstein )