GE ending production of CFL bulbs
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Lake Girl
Moderator
Potential for liability with mercury content and they are not being disposed of responsibly? LEDs are far more efficient and Globe seems to do a large business on the CFLs (at least in Canada). I know initially they (CFLs) had some fire risk issues but that seems to be resolved.
Good riddance to bad rubbish! CFLs were a horrible technology that can't disappear soon enough, IMO.
Ashful
Minister of Fire
What didn't you like? Horrid color? Cold starts? Failure to live up to advertised lifetime? Hazardous chemicals? Disposal requirements?
You forgot to add "The soffit lights slowly turning from white to a dull orange as the outside temperatures drop below 0F" :lol:
No - I like all that stuff. Does that make me weird?
On a more serious note, this was pretty well written in the playbook. CFL's played an important part in the transition to more energy efficient light, but by far was not the best available technology for the job. It just took some time to ramp up the better tech (LED) to make them competitive in the market.
Highbeam
Minister of Fire
No - I like all that stuff. Does that make me weird?
On a more serious note, this was pretty well written in the playbook. CFL's played an important part in the transition to more energy efficient light, but by far was not the best available technology for the job. It just took some time to ramp up the better tech (LED) to make them competitive in the market.
This^
The CFLs showed us that you do NOT need 60 watts to make a lamp light up. Huge bridge technology that led us to the better mousetrap of LED.
They are dumb now but I don't regret buying them when I did.
Ashful
Minister of Fire
For those who will miss them I have a box of brand new CFLs that will probably go to local transfer station.
CFLs were a decent transitional technology, but LEDs are likely less expensive to make and have additional benefits. I'm not too keen on some LED bulb's color rendering, but they are getting better. We got a box of CFLs from the power company for getting an energy audit. So far they have stood up quite well, have a warm white light and dramatically reduced power consumption. The light is also less directional than LEDs. We only have them in locations that stay on for long periods of time so warm up is not an issue. The longest life bulb is already over 5 yrs. It's on every day for 8hrs in the winter and about 4 hrs in the summer. My shop lights are tube fluorescent and I dislike them much more than the CFLs we are currently using. Considering the CFLs were free we will be using them until they burn out. By then the next generation of LEDs should be out, hopefully at half the price.
Where2
Feeling the Heat
Hang on to them for me, I'll pick them up on my drive north in April... I use them in numerous places around my house in FL. Most notably the 8 bulbs in the front porch light fixtures, and my dock lights. I've got one CFL on the dock that has been running dusk to dawn for 8+ years. Since I have two identical fixtures on the dock, I ran one LED in one of the fixtures for 485 days before it died. I put the old CFL I took out back in, and both are still on tonight.
jb6l6gc
Minister of Fire
For the savings I see I don't mind cfls. I do have some led's as well in the new lights I installed in the basement. In my personal opinion it doesn't matter as long as it's not an incandescent!
jebatty
Minister of Fire
Two of the four pin-tube florescent bulbs in our recessed kitchen fixtures still provide satisfactory light after 20 years of use come March 2016. The other two were replaced in the last two years. No complaint about CFLs from me. They did the job, they saved lots of electricity, and most worked just fine.
The cheapest LED's I've seen were $2.50. The cheapest CFL's are around $1 (not the GE ones). But the cheapest LED's supposedly use 4-5 W less power than the CFL's, a nice improvement from 5 years ago when the cheapest LED's were $20 and used about the same amount of power as CFL's. They're close enough now that the LED's can frequently make up for their higher purchase price.
I'll mostly keep using my CFL's until they die. There's little reason to throw them out. I can't imagine ever buying another CFL, however, and there's a few fixtures I'm putting LED's in for the slightly better overall color quality. So far, I've had no failures of either type in the last 5 years.
CFL's did their job fine until something better came along (and the mercury concerns were overblown), but GE knows sales are plummeting, and they understandably see no point in trying to hold on to part of a dwindling market when they can't beat the generic brands on price.
I'll mostly keep using my CFL's until they die. There's little reason to throw them out. I can't imagine ever buying another CFL, however, and there's a few fixtures I'm putting LED's in for the slightly better overall color quality. So far, I've had no failures of either type in the last 5 years.
CFL's did their job fine until something better came along (and the mercury concerns were overblown), but GE knows sales are plummeting, and they understandably see no point in trying to hold on to part of a dwindling market when they can't beat the generic brands on price.
Agreed. Though at $1.99 for 60w LEDs at our local Ace this week I did pick up one just to try it.
jebatty
Minister of Fire
My take on using CFLs until they die is quite different. For quality of light and convenience, LEDs are very good on all of color, instant on, great cold weather performance. LEDs are better lights. Next, the length of time the CFLs may last before dying will end up costing more in electricity use than the cost of making the switch to LEDs now. Then I found a great outlet for the CFLs: give them away to people who are in financial need. I recently visited a disabled friend barely making it on public assistance and noticed the number of lights (all incandescent) that were out in her apartment. I offered the CFLs, free of course, to bring light into her home. She jumped at the opportunity. Now I also have given away most of my CFLs to people in a similar situation, and will give away the others as the opportunity presents itself.
semipro
Minister of Fire
I've been looking to do the same thing. Seems like its "all good" if we can squeeze a little more life cycle out of those CFLs and save some power -- and shed some light!
Yeah. Shopping for LED carefully is important. Now it is pretty easy to find warm/soft white 2700/3000K temps and CRI>=80, which seem to be pretty standard stock. Now I look at lumens/W. Some are still as low as 65 lum/W, like a CFL, while others are in the 85-105 lum/W range, and you actually need to do math to figure out the latter.
I like the 100 lum/W guys just because they run cooler and I figure they will last longer for that reason, esp in a poorly ventilated fixture. Some of my first 'cheap' CREE leds have started to fail.
I like the 100 lum/W guys just because they run cooler and I figure they will last longer for that reason, esp in a poorly ventilated fixture. Some of my first 'cheap' CREE leds have started to fail.
semipro
Minister of Fire
Ashful
Minister of Fire
Interesting. One thing I've noticed is that many here in the Green Room like to compare real-world CFL lifetimes, which are noticeably shorter than advertised lifetime, to advertised LED lifetimes. In other words, "we know CFL's don't live up to projected lifetime, but we'll just assume that LED's do." This has the potential (very high likelihood) to invalidate all long-term cost calculations and comparisons.
Do you think these Cree LEDs that have failed are meeting their advertised lifetimes, or are they falling short?
CFL lifetimes can be all over the place, depending upon the build quality of the bulb, where it's installed (near doors often means vibration, small enclosed fixtures cause high operating temps, etc) and how the power quality is in the home (some homes have lots of interference on the lines that play havoc with the tiny little circuit trying to push steady current to the electrodes, or big transients from appliances starting and stopping). From talking to various people who use them or tried them and gave up, it appears to me a small, but non-trivial minority have consistent problems with them, but most people do not.
I've not had a single CFL fail in the last 5 years, and I don't recall any failing in my previous home, either. Some of those in the common areas of my home easily exceed 3 hours per day, putting them easily over the 5,000 hours normally expected for a CFL. A couple of my LED's are probably right around 5,000 hours, too, because I put them in the fixtures that are on the most.
I expect a similar trend for LED's as CFL's. Some of them will fail early due to defects. Most should get in the ballpark of the expectation. The most likely failures would be in the power supplies or the solder joints hooking everything together, which is primarily a matter of quality control by the manufacturers. The industry has done quite a bit of testing of the actual emitters, and the failure rates on those are extremely low. They usually very slowly and predictably lose brightness as the phosphor coating breaks down over time.
When Philips won the L-Prize for one of their high-performing LED's a few years ago, they first had to pass 7,000 hours of testing at 110 degrees F, and the trends for brightness, color drift, and power consumption were extrapolated to 25,000 hours, with a requirement that less than 10% fail. Since the DOE had already set up the test, they kept it running. They finally ended the test at 40,000 hours. The lights were still producing 95% of their original rating, with zero bulbs failing in any manner. Dimming failure was considered dropping below 70%, so they had a huge margin beyond expectations.
Phillips probably cherry-picked components for their test bulbs, but that kind of margin leaves a lot of room for worse performance before bulbs are actually consistently failing.
We have been getting 2+ yrs out of CFLs in our kitchen where they see the most hours. That's better than the 1.5 yr average for the halogen bulbs that used to be in the same location. I now have two LED bulbs in there with this cluster of 7 ceiling can lights to see how long they last by comparison.
FWIW, I have a CFL in our garage door opener now for a couple years and it's doing fine. Previously I had a GE halogen in it that only lasted a month.
FWIW, I have a CFL in our garage door opener now for a couple years and it's doing fine. Previously I had a GE halogen in it that only lasted a month.
One had the glass bulb separate from the base....glue failure...the bulb fell off in the fixture after a few hundred hours. The other just dropped its lumen output >90% after maybe 2000 hours. Out of maybe 10 bulbs in this $4/bulb class.
I figure the other 8 will make up the average.
Same here, although I just put it in my garage where nobody can accidentally touch it! Still works great.
TE
Lake Girl
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