"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Andy Burns wrote:
Capitol wrote:

Some of my CFLs are 30years old. The modern CFLs die like flies IME.

Were CFLs available as long ago as 30 years? My impression is that they have
only been available for about 10-15 years - maybe that's when the government
and energy companies started promoting them more.


My impression (and it is only an impression - I didn't keep records) is that
early CFLs took much longer to reach working brightness and failed sooner.
When you turn on a light from the switch by the door when you go into the
room, you want that light to be bright immediately so you can see your way
to reach other lights in the room. So I tended to keep the main light as
tungsten and use CFLs for the table lamps etc. Nowadays, with modern CFLs,
that's no longer a problem. The ones we use now get *sufficiently* bright
instantaneously, even if they still a bit of time to reach the final 10% of
their brightness, whereas older ones came on at about 30% brightness
instantaneously and then took about 5 mins to make up the other 70%.