"Mayayana" writes:

| Never ever will there be one in my house, work place etc.
| the enviro wackos can have them

I don't think it was "enviro wackos" who pushed
CFL. It was just fuzzy thinking and irrrational obsession
with reducing wattage.

Yep, you have to be wacko to want to pay less for your
electricity and change your bulbs less often...

(Why is there no campaign to
make people mindful about the waste of leaving lights
on unnecessarily?)

Uh, there is a campaign like that.
Besides turning off lights when you don't need them is just common
sense. Do you need the government to spend money to tell you that?

In addition to containing mercury and throwing an ugly
light, CFLs are designed to be left on, used for things like
outdoor night lighting. They burn out faster when switched
on and off.

No they don't.

As I've recounted here before, my driveway lamp accepts 3
small base lights. The lights go on when it gets dark,
goes off when the sun comes up.
For years I had to replace all 3 after
an average of a year. That's one incandescent going bad
every 4 months.

I replaced the incandescents with CFLs years ago.
At least 5 years ago, maybe more. They all still operate.

That's at least 5 years vs. 4 months, bulb turned off every day.

I've had a repeated experience that leads me to think
people are using CFLs simply because most people don't
think things through: I work on a customer's house and have
occasion to deal with lights. I ask why they have CFLs in
their dimmer-equipped recessed lights. On several occasions
I've got the same answer. They say that the electric company
came by for an "energy audit" and replaced all of their bulbs,
leaving them with a pile of CFLs. The customer didn't bother
to think about what they were allowing to be done. They got
a bunch of free bulbs and the electric company people seemed
to know what they were talking about. They've been led to
believe that CFLs are the future and that incandescents are
no longer available. (I'm curious how all this money ended up
being wasted through electric companies. I'm guessing they're
burning through huge "energy efficiency" federal grants paid
for by taxpayers. And how did the federal grants happen?
No doubt a handful of enterprising congressmen, friends of
utility companies, who saw a chance to send a payout to their
friends while appearing to be "cutting edge" thinkers "preparing
for the future".

CFLs in dimmers aren't ideal, but they work. I've seen them.

I was buying up incandescents for *very* cheap at Home
Depot before they phased out. There were few other people
grabbing them. Most apparently thought they no longer existed.
Recently I needed to find a replacement for 100w work lights
and found a very nice solution: There are now bulbs that
look like incandescent and fit like incandescent, but with a
small halogen bulb inside instead of a filament.

Halogen bulbs have a filament:

A halogen lamp, also known as a tungsten halogen, quartz-halogen or
quartz iodine lamp, is an incandescent lamp that has a small amount of
a halogen such as iodine or bromine added.

70w is supposed to be equivalent to 100w incandescent. It's an
attractive light, reasonably priced, and works in existing clamp
lights. (I can still buy 150w and 300w incandescent bulbs, but they've
become absurdly expensive.)

Conserving electricity is part of a rational national security policy.
By using less electricity, we are less dependent on foreign sources of
oil.

Everywhere I've used CFLs I get better light.

The drawback to Halogen is the heat.

--
Dan Espen