On Sun, 24 Oct 2010 02:28:14 +0100, Arfa Daily wrote:

As if any more reasons were needed on top of their horrible startup
characteristics, their ugliness, their sick coloured light, and their
inability to last for a fraction of the claimed lifetime :-(

Like most of us, I suspect, I have hundreds of component drawers, which
over the years have become mixed up and confused, so in the
circumstances of work being very quiet at the moment, I decided to have
a major tidy up and clear out of redundant components. As a first move,
I decided to rationalise the resistors, and re-store them by individual
value, rather than in groups of values in the same drawer.

Now the other day, the bulb in my Anglepoise bench light failed, and as
it was the last 60 watt pearl one I had - nowhere stocking such an
animal any more due to EU ecobollox intervention - I put in a CFL that
had come free in a cornflake packet or some such nonsense. Once it has
warmed up in the morning - at least one coffee drinking time needed for
this - it seemed to work reasonably well. Until, that is, I started
trying to identify the resistors in my old drawers to move them into the
individual value drawers in the new location.

The spectrum from this lamp is so poor and discontinuous, that it is
almost impossible to resolve red from brown from orange, or violet from
blue or grey. Absolutely bloody useless. If I can't find any more 60
watt pearl bulbs on the 'net, then I'm going to modify the lampholder to
take a low voltage halogen downlighter bulb, and hook it to a 12v
transformer.

Arfa

I like the 6500k CFLs for security lighting and my bench light. I'm very
surprised at the longevity of the outdoor 23 watters. They have been in
use dusk to dawn in all kinds of weather, all mounted inverted and in
some sort of shroud one actually totally enclosed in a globe. Only one
has failed after two years and I expected it to fail, the globe enclosed
CFL. None of these 4 outdoor lamps are rated for inverted use either. I
did some reading on inverting a CFL and the base temperature increases
dramatically when the lamp is inverted. So I would expect cheap
electrolytics to dry up in no time.



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