[MD Expat in PA]

I’ve had the same CFL bulb in a table lamp in my living room for over two years now. It’s turned off and on regularly and for a time I had the lamp on an auto timer. I used a CFL in the laundry room at my old house that I kept on 24-7; it was still going strong at 3 years. I don’t like the warm up time for CFL’s but otherwise I have no complaints about them. I also have a halogen desk lamp that I’ve owned for at least 6 years now. I leave that on all the time and the halogen lamp has not yet needed to be replaced and that was even after sitting in a storage unit for a year, if only my TV had faired as good.

Of course with all that being said, I don’t want the government to mandate what light bulb I can and can’t buy or use. On the other hand I like saving money over the long term. If I were ever in a position to custom build a house, it would have a conventional HVAC system but I’d also look into solar panels and geothermal heating and not because I'm a "greenie" unless being a greenie is liking to hold on to the green.

[dila813]

The lower wattage ones work a lot closer to what they advertise on the packages.

I believe they are taking the case of a 11w bulbs and extrapolate this onto the higher wattage bulbs.

My desk lamp lasted the longest, it was one of the last bulbs in my frequently used light fixtures to fail. It lasted almost 3.5 years before it finally stopped working.

The thing that makes the cfls fail is turning them on and off. If you leave them on all the time, that isn’t a normal case.

I suspect, if you left an 11w bulb on without switching them off, you would perfectly replicate their results on the package. That just isn’t the real world though.