Are your Compact Fluorescent bulbs really helping?

http://www.evaneco.com/?p=874 ^

[truthfinder9]

They may lower your bills, but don't really do much for C0₂:

The U.S. Energy Star program says that if every home in America replaced one normal light bulb with a fluorescent...it would be equivalent to taking 800,000 cars off the road. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's less than 0.1 percent of registered cars worldwide. Plus, transportation accounts for only about one-fifth of global emissions anyway.

Just the increase in the amount of coal that China will burn by 2020 will send as much C0₂ into the atmosphere as 3 billion Ford Expeditions, each driven 15,000 miles a year.

An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems, p. 7.

[ANGGAPO]

I guess I am doomed.

[najida]

I’m happy with the ones I’ve put in.

[ElkGroveDan]

I’m not going to use them just because the greenies are trying to make me.

Ditto.

[PAR35]

“Do the F-bulbs work with a regular dimmer switch?”

Click here: http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&upc=4316821710&pid=_Froogle

Then click on ‘specifications’. Look like they are a little less that $10 each for use in replacement applications, and that they’ll last about a year at 16 hours per day.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

THANK YOU! You know, you just can’t do that with the tubes and their ballasts. Unless they changed the design on those too.

[Does so]

"...Just the increase in the amount of coal that China will burn by 2020 will send as much C02 into the atmosphere as 3 billion Ford Expeditions..."

How much of that coal will be used to manufacture fluorescents?

BTW: Last month's BMW club magazine says that BMW will be replacing the presently-mandated air conditioning "freon" with CO₂.

This is a privately-owned automobile manufacturer—going green!

[Cyber Liberty]

There are 7 15-watt bulbs that emit the light equivalent of an 80 watt incandescent bulb. In total, they consume about as much as a 105 Watt incandescent light bulb, so I don’t worry about flicking the switch and lighting up the backyard in the summertime.

I am confused. You're burning 105 Watts of power to get the equivalent of 80 Watt lightbulb? The math's off somewhere, there FRiend...unless that's 7 80 Watt lightbulbs you are replacing.

Can LED lightbulbs work with dimmer switches? I know the flourescents don't, but nobody seems to care.

[Slapshot68]

“I know the flourescents don’t, but nobody seems to care.”

I care and you are mistaken.

http://www.1000bulbs.com/Dimmable-Compact-Fluorescent-Bulbs/

[webheart]

a light that high disperses very quickly

It sure does! 983,571,056 feet per second quickly.

[coconutt2000]

LOL, yeah - kids have a penchant for reaching out and touching things that give off light. That’s why you have to watch them around fire.

I hesitate to say the LED’s give off no heat. I think they do, but it is such a small amount that they don’t normally register to our sense of touch.

[Democrat_media]

Just don’t drop these new bubls as they have mercury in them. Might be messy to clean up and you might poison your family.

[dearolddad]

Have you actually had them last that long, I haven’t.

My experience has been lousy. I put 2 CFL's above the sink in a new house, after replacing them twice within a year I decided to go back to the standard type.

[Cyber Liberty]

That’s good news. Thanks for helping me out. There was a thread several months ago and I asked that, and nobocy could tell me where to find them.

[BubbaBobTX]

I have experienced the same thing they don’t last as long as they are suppose to. The same guy that rates them must do the gas millage tests on cars.

[kempo]

I put a couple of them in my garage door opener about a year ago and they still work. The other kind wouldn’t last longer than a couple of months. They couldn’t stand the vibration.

[Democrat_media]

“My experience has been lousy. I put 2 CFL’s above the sink in a new house, after replacing them twice within a year I decided to go back to the standard type.”

You mean the liberal media lied and said these CFL’s last 9 years? What a shocker that the media would lie again.

Also these CFL bulbs have mercury in them .So if you drop them good luck with getting the mercury out of your house and not poisoning your family. Global warming is a liberal media Hoax.

The government should not tell us what kind of bulbs we have to use. That is against freedom. Government planning has always been a disaster.

[jrd]

I replaced all my old bulbs with the new one...the power company raised their rates to offset the loss of everyone else doing it last year. Today they raised them again...who are we helping here? sure not the consumer!

[Stonewall Jackson]

I sell these things for a living. Don't let the 5-7 years thing fool you. Read the fine print. In teeny, tiny writing on the back of the package it says that they'll last that long if they are used 3-4 hours a day, 2-3 days a week.

Sure, if you have a cathedral ceiling that's twenty feet tall, I'd recommend putting them in way up there so you only have to change them once every 12-18 months.

In addition, you have to be extremely cautious with them concerning the mercury they contain. One of my coworkers and I have both been treated for mercury poisoning we got from handling broken bulbs and their packaging and another coworker is currently undergoing treatment. Trust me, it is not fun.

[Secret Agent Man]

I put them in, I think if you get a bulb that is close to the comparative wattage of a regular bulb, you won’t notice much of a difference.

My bills have remained steady. The thing that was not factored in is that you may save on your bills IF the energy rates stayed the same. Every year my energy rates go up. So staying about the same in my bills despite the rate increases, I have to believe they are helping to keep my costs from going up more.

The other part about it is that I like the fact they can light my house without 90% of the energy they use being turned into heat energy. If they could make a regular bulb that had the same efficiencies and most of the energy it used was not converted to heat, I’d consider that bulb too.

[cubreporter]

don’t know...don’t use ‘em.