NY wrote:
"Capitol" wrote in message
o.uk...
NY wrote:
"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%.

Oldest CFLs I bought around 1980 IIRC.Made by Philips.

Gosh. That's before I even went to university, let along before I bought
my first house. I don't remember CFLs as replacement for tungsten bulbs
being in the shops until probably around the mid 90s when I tried a few
and found that they were pretty poor (long time to reach usable
brightness).

By the time I bought my second house in 2000, CFLs were becoming fairly
popular, but sadly I wasn't able to use them because my house had been a
show house and had been fitted with lots of decorative fittings which
all took small bayonet, small edison screw or else *12V* GU10-type
spotlights in the ceiling. I think the only fittings where I could use
CFLs were my own table lamps.


By the way, how do you convince SWMBO that when you want to read in bed,
the best light is a lamp on a bedside table that shines towards the
book, illuminating the pages, rather than an overhead lamp in a ceiling
fitting near the *foot* of the bed. My wife moans that I'll ruin my eyes
with this bright light on the pages and no light in the background, when
the alternative is a bright light directly in your field of view (I try
to block it out with my book) which lights the rest of the room and is
extremely dim on the pages of the book. I feel as if I'm fighting a
losing battle...

Just get used to losing gracefully. You stay happier that way!