In Defense of the CFL: A Retrospective

Yup, loved the "Trouble with CFLs" theme on the desk. ;)

Hank Lloyd Right

I have one of those yellow ones (and a blacklight) the yellow one is a “bug bulb” for outdoors probably. I loved how the pile of lamps just grew, and grew and at the end covered the whole table 😆 ;-D I have a few still running, they were the high output ones, were mounted vertical and turned on once at dark, and off only for sleep.

Anton

Great video!! But now could you tease us with that orange/yellow CFL down in front, and then not plug it in?!?!?! ;)

Hank Lloyd Right

What about "cold cathode" CFLs? They seemed to work better in fixtures with poor cooling but their warm-up time made them less desireable for general fixtures.

lohphat

I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with family about the CFL "scam" bulbs that constantly died, because they refused to listen to me and stop putting them in the hotbox enclosures or to just leave them on instead of turning them off/on a thousand times a day. Sweet justification in video form! Thank you, Good Sir. Thank you! :D

Honorary Octopus

I still have quite a few CFLs, mostly from 2008 still running. There was another type of bulb out there, that I seem to remember, but never took off. It was a combination incandescent/mercury vapor bulb. When you applied power, the incandescent filament would light immediately and remain on as the mercury vapor filament gradually warmed up, then the incandescent filament would turn off. This was all in a standard base bulb, but I can't seen to find any info on it.

Rich Mazzeo

I have to hand it to those things for longevity and overall trouble-freeness. I think literally ALL of my CFLs I ever owned for my entire 20s were bought by my father around 2003 during a time when the local utility was subsidizing them so that you could get them for like a 10-bulb variety pack for $8-10 or something. I’m from California so temperature was never really an issue. I must have had like maybe 2 of them die. I never really decided to replace them until I got into dimmers and especially Hue which though the profit margins on those stupid things must be insane, do seem to earn it by working quite well and having 100% compatibility with all of the various “smart” systems which are usually always at war with one another.

Daniel Pritchard

I know that you don't normally do followup videos but this really is crying out for one, if only so you can respond to the comments in this one, many of which are repeating the same tired old myths over and over again! Even some which you already cover in THIS video! It is infuriating.

David Glover-Aoki

Just went around and checked 23 CFL in my house - average age 15 years!

Bob BAAL

Maybe I misremember this, but I swear CFL were sold touting energy savings and lifespan. Even if there were "reasons" for CFL's dying early, I never had any which lasted more than a year.

Chuck Sembroski

How in the world did absolutely nobody else commented on "a tweet I twote"?? That's hilarious!

coredumperror

I think what people hated about them was they were more expensive up front (even if they save you energy and eventually money in the long run depending on how much you use them), AND they were FORCED by law to switch to them, rather than allowing it to be a natural progression. People who had dimmable switches all the sudden couldn't dim their lights without their new, more expensive (up front) bulbs flipping out (and all the other downsides you talked about regarding color temp, turn on time, brightness varying based on temp, and heat issues). If they had just waited a little longer for LED tech to be ready, we could have bypassed the disaster of CFLs, and people would have been much more ok being forced to switch. Although personally I liked the iconic twisting shape.

Benjamin Kier

Awesome video. I think it's entirely possible that the reduction of mercury emissions from coal plants driven by lower energy consumption of CFLs could've offset their contained mercury in case it were not disposed of properly. Still, LEDs are clearly the future.

Jake K

Me after every scene: How many more does he have??!? 😂

Tobias Faller

Disposal wasn't/isn't a problem in Germany, any store that sells lights usually has receptacles for CFLs (same for batteries); however, thinking of taking that boxed collection of dead CFLs with you when going out is another thing. My wife still has her own apartment at her father's house which we sometimes use as a weekend retreat. Right after watching this video, I noticed the box of CFLs sitting on a table (for probably years now) which I had completely forgotten about while it is actually in plain sight. It just blended into the general background noise of slight untidiness that befalls rarely used spaces (entropy, nothing you about it ;-).

Dr. Bjoern Bieber

When I worked at Batteries+Bulbs, we had a display of four lamps, one with incandescent, halogen, CFL, and LED light bulbs in them. Same lamp four times, the idea was to show people there wasn’t much of a difference. We also had one single 3-way CFL, but the thing was gigantic so it rarely fit anyone’s lamps. There was also a 3-way LED we had, but it was like $40. This was just as LEDs were hitting their stride, and that happened fast. Within like a year and a half or so, I saw the price of one of our Switch branded LEDs go from $12 to Duracell branded ones for like $5.

Richard Stifle

That ending theme is still the bee's knees. 😎 Enjoyable installment!

KM

My right wing nut job parents hated the very concept of CFL and LED lights. Their explanation had... something.. to do with Communism, but I could never get an actual coherent argument out of them. It would always devolve into some rant about “Guns or Butter”

Virtual Balboa

But they "moved the cheese". It's an unforgivable offense against old people.

Stephen Gillie

Oh man, I remember both Tymnet and Telenet, and I ran a FidoNet BBS in the late 80's / early 90's. Good times! Teletext, however, has nothing to do with those. It was text and very crude graphics transmitted in the vertical blanking interval of analog TV signals. It never really took off in the US but it was popular in Europe. I went to Germany in 1987 or thereabouts and remember being fascinated by the teletext system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Circuitmike

We were fairly early adopter of CFLs back when it cost the equivalent of $20 per bulb! We're now down to a single CFL left and surprisingly it's one of the first we bought still in a bathroom light, probably over 20 years old now. It takes a few seconds to come on, but still plenty bright (40W equivalent). The three main things I didn't like about CFLs were their lumen and colour rendering depreciation as they aged and the way some failed. For example, our living room chandelier takes 5 bulbs and whenever a CFL failed, we had to replace the lot as a new bulb would stick out like a sore thumb. The special shape bulbs (GU10, candle style, etc) initially were fine new apart from the slow warm-up, but as they aged the light gave a greenish cast especially to anything made of wood. Finally, when some CFLs failed, they stunk up the room with a burnt plastic smell.

Seán Byrne

Maybe a filler, but still great!

Clayton Grey

Not all that bad as I remember, but like audio cassettes and VHS they were a distinct improvement.

Jim Hewlett

They didn't like short cycling. Just for fun I put one in my garage door opener. Turned pink, and barely glowed after about a year of on for 2 minutes at a time.

Paul Malloy

🤣 This running gag of every shot an extra CFL on the table, kept me busy 🤣 Where (or why) the hell did you get so many of them?!? BTW: Germocidal Lambs, sounds cool, I need them! 🐑🐑🐑 But now serious (can I?): yes, I'm also still using them, simple: if they keep on working, there is no reason for replacement! My experience: if a CFL survives one year, it takes many years for them to die, the ones I am still using daily are almost 10 years old... (for comparison: most incandescent bulbs that are used a couple of hours a day almost never survived for more than 1 year on me...) And yes, if they die, they'll be replaced by LED bulbs. When I was a kid, we were very early adaptors of CFLs, I still remember those big clunky things where an extra protection glass was around the tubes, and they were simply folded, not double-helix (biologist pun intended) shaped.

MrHammond

CFLs were also a godsend to no-budget film and video content makers. Still today, you can buy a soft box lighting setup with the big daylight balanced CFLs that not only costs less than renting an ARRI tungsten kit, but is low powered enough to use safely on even the oldest house wiring. LED arrays offer so many more options like dialing in color temps, etc... but CFLs remain my go to cheap and easy greenscreen setup.

Buckaroo Bunny Slippers

A nitpick, but I think you've overstated your supposition; my parents' siblings were the only people I ever knew who had problems with new aunts. (I'll see myself out 😁).

Travis Snoozy

Glad you mentioned dimmable CFL's. Here in the UK the company Varilight made the world's first truly dimmable CFL. It needed their own dimmer, but that was fine. Rated to the same as a 100w it was amazing. When I moved home I took it, and the dimmer, with me! Varilight received the "Queen's Award for Enterprise" for this achievement in 2006. And hows this, a CFL you can DIM with a normal switch? Yes they make one that can do this, see their web page: https://www.varilight.co.uk/lighting/switch-dimmable-cfls.php

Colin Grimshaw

Hi Alec! I'm using a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump#Horizontal in the house I am living (and that I've build ~10 years ago). Last year we pumped 11MWh of heat out of the ground with a CoP of 4.2. Let me know if you're interested in getting more information/photos/... I am located in Bavaria/Germany.

Can't wait for teletext!

Justin Tokke

How many 32ndths of an inch in an imperial centimeter? :-)

Kevin Tessner

Regarding "teletext", what were you thinking? Were you considering services like Tymnet and Telenet, which I've used when working in one business office to communicate with another in a different country, but which also offered things like PC Pursuit (Telenet's offering to BBS enthusiasts)? Alternatively, were you thinking more like the French Minitel system (which could also extend into the concept of most of the major bulletin board systems like PCBoard and RemoteAccess that used FidoNet for backend interconnectivity)?

Marc Chametzky

I have a stash of pink CFL bulbs. The color is perfectly flattering and I’ve been on a quest to find an equivalent LED; at least the LEDs are dimmable. Nothing makes your skin glow like the soft warm light of a pink fluorescent!

David Larsen

Not sure what lead me down this road, but I did fall for the trap of "omg, mercury!!!1!!!1!1!!!! if it breaks, open a window and leave the room for 343443432234 hours!!!!" (ok, maybe not that bad, but still it felt like it was a really dangerous thing). And with klutzy me, I just knew I'd be breaking them. Ironically, I don't think I ever did, and when one of my LEDs die, I can never crack them open to see exactly what part died :P And the part about the cans not being instant-on really hit home. My grandma has them in her kitchen still and having light in the kitchen requires either patience or planning ahead :P

Jason Wellband

I actually just replaced my final CFL last week. It didn't fail, I just had replaced a lamp elsewhere in the house so had a spare 1000 lumen LED bulb. The CFL light was fine but it took a few minutes to get up to full brightness, and it was in a room where I frequently used need to go into at the evening to quickly find something. Never had an issue with the temperature, but having to save failed ones until I next visited Ikea to safely dispose of them really annoyed me.

Brian Condron

My major issue with CFL's comes from bulbs that are not 'new', being used in places where the air gets 'cool' like the mudroom of the house, or the garage. In these places, you could flip the switch, wander into the room or garage, fumble around in the dark, then only as you go back through the door the CFL finally strikes and begins to produce a very weak glow.. if it was left on, it would gain brightness over the next 10 minutes... but that was often much later than needed. This experience is only rivaled by the florescent fixtures I encountered in Papua New Guinea, where the entire usage of the bathroom was in the dark, and only when fumbling for the light switch to turn the fixture off, would it begin to flicker on.. *sigh*...

My parents have a Geothermal Heat pump in the house I grew up in. I believe it is an "open" geothermal design, in that the water supplied to the heat pump is from a well, and once it passes through the Heat Exchanger, it is 'disposed of' to the outside for watering lawns or gardens. The water source could be 'closed' though, and recirculate though burried pipes. It essentially is still a heat pump, just dumping or extracting the heat from a water source that is ground temperature. There is less to look at in the system, though, since it is a single unit in the basement with just a couple more PVC pipes feeding through it. The water outlet can range greatly in temperature, with the inlet temperature being almost always 60ºF. When heating the house, it is naturally chilled to somewhere around 40ºF, and when cooling the house, it is heated to nearly 100ºF (both estimated, I have never taken actual temps of the outlet temp, only observed as a child.) Whether it is sourced by fresh water, or recirculated, it is sourcing or disposing of its energy to a ground temp source.

I watched this entire video from a room currently lit by (overhead) dimmable CFLs. From memory in service for 10+ years, with daily use, including dimming them. They don’t dim as much as an incandescent will, without going completely out. But it provides usable range for switching my lounge between “I need light to see something” and “I just want a little background light while I watch a film”. Another non dimmed fitting in this room, used much less frequently has had CFLs for longer, but has killed 3-4 of them in the same decade or so. I suspect I’m going to swap that one for a LED bulb soon. And yes I’ve deliberately retained incandescent bulbs in places like the passage which needed quick short duration light, frequently. CFLs were pretty obviously unsuited to that application

Ewen McNeill

I'm affiliated with a facility that built a new auditorium and lobby area around 15 years ago, with dozens of commercial grade CFL fixtures. Each fixture has a dimmable ballast, and around eight years ago these started to fail. New ones that are compatible with the leading edge dimmer panel that was installed along with the bulbs are expensive, around $70-$90. And though the dimmers may claim to dim from 3-100%, some bulb form factors won't even dim to 50% before flickering and going out.

Alex, I feel you fail to address that CFLs perhaps lied about their light output / weren't available in high enough wattage. For a long time 60W CFL bulbs were standard, but they were never bright enough compared to 100W standard bulbs. It was difficult to find a 100W CFL equivalent, and even then I think they weren't as bright. I also say that CFL phosphors were not very good for the majority of CFL time, and that the good CFL phosphors only became good towards the end. No one things of office lights as pleasant!

Paul Han

He's got a FEW around the house. heheh

Don Eitner

For me the area which always had a slow start with CFLs was in my central hallway--kind of important for getting around the house at night. It's a bit of an odd fixture behind a flush-mount plastic difuser so part of the problem was probably the fixture itself.

Don Eitner

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that. Early failures are by no means fixed with LEDs. One thing I've observed is that when an LED is to fail early, it will usually do so *quite* early which in a way is handy. I bought a bunch of filament-style globes (14 in total) and I had 2 of them fail within three months. The other 12, though, are all still fine almost five years later.

Technology Connections

I've always had good experience with CFLs. However, I knew from a long time ago that heat kills them. I've always refused to put them in fixtures that would be certain to kill them quickly. When I was young, we moved into a house that had a bunch of CFLs. This was in the late 90s and was my first experience with CFL bulbs. They were the magnetic ballast style, with straight, replaceable tubes. Since they took forever to turn on, I figured we could move them around so there was always one incandescent bulb in each fixture to provide instant light. For being 12 or so, it was pretty brilliant of me. Many years later, I bought a 3-pack for my room which had a 3-way horizontal open fixture (glass diffuser that screws on the bottom - normal 70s style). Several years later, I moved out and into a place that had a single fitting in my bedroom. I put one of the bulbs in, which promptly died about a week later. I replaced it with the second, which also died a week later. The third also died a week later. The replacements I bought lasted for at least a couple years before I lost track of them. Those bulbs were nothing if not reliable - all failing effectively at the exact same time. I'm currently using a single CFL. I bought it about 7 years ago, and it's been in constant use for about 6 of those years. It's always been in a floor lamp facing upwards, and has always been used for 8-14 hours per day on average. It is usually cycled 1-2 times per day. I keep expecting it to die, but it just won't. Funny enough, its twin died years ago, but was a different brand. As for the dim start... I actually found it pleasant at one time. We had two floor lamps in our living room, and having that low brightness first thing in the morning was a welcome side effect.

Quinton Wilson

When I bought my house in 2009 CFLs were easy to come by and about 1/3 the cost of an equivalent output LED, so I bought all CFLs for my house. Even the ones which died "early" lasted 2-3x as long as any incandescent ever has for me, and I've still got 2 CFLs in use in the house (they weren't installed in 2009 but purchased between 2009 and 2015). I always knew that the mercury poisoning claims were bunk--that there just isn't enough in a single CFL to be a hazard (eat some fish and you'll probably get an equivalent dose of mercury but nobody panics about that). My main gripes with CFLs were the slowness to come to full brightness and that extra bit where the electronics are located made even the smallest CFLs I could find too small to fit my bathroom fixture. Today LEDs are much, much more affordable than in 2009 and I'm quite happy with them. I've even had a few LEDs die prematurely (like, within months) so that's not just a CFL thing either.

Don Eitner

I've had one of those 3-ways. I think it's really just an integrated dimmer with two fixed lower brightness levels. One of the rare instances where decent dimming tech made it to the consumer market, but as I recall those were *not* cheap!

Technology Connections

Oh man, I've got a whole box of dimmable PAR38 CFLs somewhere that were hilariously bad. They would maybe go to 60% brightness before going out. I do still have a few going strong, including a 3-way CFL in a floor lamp. That's a mystery to me, because it's still just one tube. Must have two pairs of electrodes.

Emily Elam

In my experience, buzzing was uncommon. In most lamps, if it was there it was so slight that you'd have to have your ear right up next to it to pick it out. There definitely were exceptions, though. And the few terrible dimmable ones that got tried in the house over the years were among the worst of those offenders. Actually, now that you mention it, I think overall I have *more* bulbs that buzz now that I have LEDs in most places. Especially where I have dimmers - they do dim wonderfully these days, but I have plenty that buzz a fair bit at the middle brightnesses.

Technology Connections

I was very amused by the increasing number of CFLs on the desk haha!

Nate072

For some reason I have a negative memory of these bulbs buzzing and annoying the crap out of me. Maybe it was just one bad bulb in a spot where I couldn't easily change it. Did these bulbs hum a lot or was that just me? Also love the little gag of adding more and more bulbs to the table over time :D

Ian Spence

Heh, well this one is benefitting from age-old research. Not much new got dug-up, and it touches on a lot of things that got mentioned here and there. So in that sense I feel like I've cheated a bit, but I also know that I'm undoubtedly wrong to think that way. Although... it's not often I just espouse one of my pet theories. I do feel kind of weird about that, but I hope I've made it clear that it's purely my own conjecture.

Technology Connections

Even your "filler" content is well-produced, researched, and high quality. Just take your time doing what you need to do, everybody understands that stuff happens and things come up.

Steets