Tim Watts wrote
Lieutenant Scott wrote
Tim Watts wrote
Lieutenant Scott wrote
-0000, wrote

I see a few places are stocking 100W incandescent bulbs again.

I thought they had been banned under EU regs.

Personally I welcome them. They are brighter than their "equivalents".
Instant on, and a hell of a lot cheaper now the subsidies have rendered
the so called more efficient lamps so expensive.

Get an LED lamp and stop using the CFL ****. Instant on, 50,000
hour life, bright, any tone of white you want, virtually no heat
produced, virtually no electricity used.

Possibly, if you buy a decent brand (eg with Cree, Nichia or Luxeon LEDs).

It's Cree I have.

Good - you shoudl be OK then (assuming it's not a rip off).

If you buy cheap chinese crap from B&Q, you can
look forward to LED chips failing in short order.

Also the colour index is even more a minefield than CFLS.

Nonsense. With LEDs you can choose warm white, cool
white, etc, etc. I've not seen much choice with CFL.

I said Index (CRI if you want to be pedantic), not colour temperature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

Filaments were so much simpler - no dimmer problems, and your
choice was limited to crap vs OK vis a vis lifetime. A GLS 100W
filament while it worked generally behaved like any other GLS 100W
filament.

Filaments use a fortune in electricity and are very hot so tend to damage the light socket.

What?? I have never seen a heat damaged lamp socket.

I have, tho not much now that I changed the high power ones over to ES floods.

You are also restricted in what shades you can use when
using 100W ones (and even 60W).

And in the old days, we mostly only had BC fittings to worry about...

BC is a bit big and clumsy in my spotlights.

My point being we've gone from a simple choice of one
main fitting (not counting tubes), not to 2 or 3 to suit
smaller fittings, but half a dozen just for mains direct drive:

BC
SBC
ES
SES
GU10
G9

Yeah, much more of a mess than it used to be.

ELV is just as bad

Then there's various fluorescent fittings T4,T5,PLS,PLC,PLT, 2D 2pin, 2D 4pin, GX53

It's mad...

Yep.

My kitchen has ES fittings (they were there when I moved in),
but I bought some ES to BC adapters for a quid each so I can
use up the free CFLs the energy companies keep giving me.

Ours give you a choice, you can have either.