From: black.hole.4.spam{at}gmail.com (Don Hills)

In article
,
"John Beamish"  wrote:
>
>My biggest beef is that I want full spectrum in my basement office ... but
>the bulb price for full spectrum compacts is obscene.

The 2 common CFLs available here are "warm white" and
"daylight". Same price. The "warm white" is
surprisingly close to incandescent in spectrum, and the
"daylight" really is like daylight. (Actually, like indirect
daylight, such as would enter through a window shaded from direct sun.) I
have a couple of big (45W) daylight CFLs in my study, and when I turn them
on during the day the room just gets brighter without the colour balance
changing.

CFLs do have a few problems.
The first is that they take 5 minutes or so to reach full brilliance. The
ones in my study start at about 1/3 of full brilliance and work up. (I
measured with a lux meter.) As such, they aren't as suitable as
incandescent for positions where the lag is a problem and where they're
turned off and on often such as bathrooms, makeup mirrors, kitchen work
lights etc. They're good for hallways, stairwells and porch lights etc.

The other problem with some brands is life. I've had several relatively
early complete failures, but the usual problem is that they become too dim
to be useful at start-up, though are OK once warmed up. This reinforces the
recommendation to use them for "long period" use, not on/off use.
The extreme example is the GE brand bulb in my front porch, it's 4 or 5
years old now. On cold evenings it starts as a dull pink that you can
hardly see by and gradually brightens to normal.

One other odd effect with some: We have one in the main lamp in the
bedroom, which is usually on all evening. For a few minutes after
switch-on, the LED in the infra-red remote repeater glows constantly and
it's "blind" to the remotes. The inverter in the lamp is
obviously operating around 38 KHz (standard IR remote frequency) during
warm-up.

--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
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