Expert Warns Of Danger In Broken CFL Bulbs

KYW Newsradio ^ | January 13, 2011 | Michelle Durham,

[rollo tomasi]

Could Bush not find a pen in time to veto this stuff back in 2007, or did K Street "govern" the domestic agenda for him?



I believe the Senate vote was 53-42, not enough to override a veto.

[DollyCali]

dont like them at all & esp the way they are being forced on us

[Mouton]

“reducing oil dependence”...not the way it is being portrayed. There may be some reduced usage of usage of oil generated electricity but the biggest reduction in the use of energy will come after some die from being contaminated by this crap.

[ops33]

I think that your post is interesting but it would be helpful if you would show what your abbreviations stand for. I know that RGB stands for red-green-blue but don’t know what the other abbreviations mean.

[wolf78]

They don’t even save energy. All the CFLs I’ve thus far bought have burnt out much more quickly on average than incandescents.

Those must be really low quality. Even the ones I bought from ALDI last at least 10-15 longer than incandescents in my apartment.

[KosmicKitty]

Liberal policies are full of unintended consequences!!

This is just one more example.

[rollo tomasi]

The photo was from the signing of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which placed restrictions on incandescent light bulbs so much so that manufacturing the bulbs and placing them on the market would be close to impossible.

Incandescent light bulbs are not banned, but regulated to death starting next year. Bush signed the centralized power grab.

[tnlibertarian]

bflr

[Rocky]

I’ve done a little research on these bulbs, and the amount of mercury in them is much smaller than I realized. Typically, a bulb will contain about 4 mg of mercury. As the bulb is used, much of the mercury bonds with the inside of the bulb (I haven’t been able to find out what compound is formed).

So, you could evaporate the mercury in a reasonable amount of time provided you circulate air over the mercury. The assumption seems to be that opening the windows will create a draft over the spilled mercury. If the mercury was in a recessed area, this might not work. It would seem to be more effective to set up a fan to gently blow air over the area where the mercury is spilled, keeping the windows open.

It would take about ten times as long to evaporate the mercury from a new bulb as it would the mercury from a bulb which has been used for a long time. I wonder whether the professor’s 20 minutes is for a new or used bulb?

[savedbygrace]

As much as I hate to admit it, that has not been the case inside my house. They are lasting WAY longer than any incandescent bulbs I’ve ever used.

But are they ready for outdoor fixtures? Anyone know?

[sionnsar]

I don’t like the kind of light these things give off either...it’s a piercing white. Regular bulbs seem to be more like the color of sunlight.

Buy bulbs with a low color temperature, not high.

[sionnsar]

As a boy I broke two fever thermometers, releasing as much mercury as 60 or so bulbs. In the decade-plus since we lamped our house with them, three have died and gone in the trash.

Playing really fast and loose with numbers, that means in about 190 more years I will have released as much mercury as those two thermometers. In reality it's a bt less than this -- but I expect LEDs to take over within the decade.

[sionnsar]

All the CFLs I’ve thus far bought have burnt out much more quickly on average than incandescents.

Not my experience at all. They last much longer.

Maybe you should check with your electric utility - a poor power-quality factor might be to blame (guessing).

[thulldud]

The vapor pressure of mercury is extremely low. It would take a long time for mercury to evaporate.

True enough, but the rate at which the mercury evaporates is also affected by the surface area of the sample.

A cup of mercury sitting on the table exposes only its top surface to the air, and very little vapor comes off. But tip that cup over and spill it on the floor and you have a different situation.

Mercury splatters enthusiastically, much more so than water, for ex., and it forms lots of tiny droplets that scatter everywhere. Each one of those has its own (approximately) spherical surface which ramps up the evaporation rate quite a lot.

One solution that I have heard of is to keep flowers of sulfur handy and scatter that over the spill. It reacts with the mercury to form the harmless sulfide, which you can sweep up later.

The mercury in a CFL is miniscule, but if that bulb shatters it splatters, and if it was lit at the time, the stuff is already vaporized. So you will get a snootful from it if you're in the area.

[truthfreedom]

Well, nm is nanometers. its a wavelength. Humans can see from 400 nanometers to 700 nanometers. Give or take. Humans can see green better than red or blue.

The light put out by a CFL bulb is nothing at all like sunlight. Incandescent bulbs, standard old fashioned bulbs, are very similar to sunlight, except that sunlight puts out more blue than incands do.

The easiest way to explain this, I guess, is by looking at the spectrum charts of sunlight, incand, and cfl.

This chart contains the spectra of sunlight, tungsten (standard incandescent), and white LED, but not CFL.



By looking at the chart, you'll see that noon sunlight seems to peak around 500. Tungsten seems to peak around 700. But all wavelengths are there. With mercury vapor lamp, you'll see that there are 4 main peaks, and basically nothing otherwise. With scanning laser, you'll see 1 peak at around 660nm. Nothing else. White LED does give full coverage, but is weak at the edges - deep blue / ultraviolet / 400nm, and deep red / infrared / 700nm.

Here's a cfl spectrum chart.



Notice all the ups and downs, with 3 main peaks. Not at all continuous, not at all like sunlight. It can be difficult to find spectrum graphs for all the various bulbs out there. Apparently xenon/halogen bulbs do a fairly good job of approximating sunlight. Xenon adds blue to the overall reddish, but continuous, spectrum of halogen. I haven't been able to find a chart for a haloxen (a brand of xenon/halogen bulb), but it'll certainly be more continuous than cfl.

Industry and the government really seem to want us to use cfls, even though they give off terrible light efficiently. So they use the Kelvin measuring system. I don't really understand Kelvin (or K) all that well, but if you go to Lowes or Home Depot or Walmart looking at CFL's you'll notice that they'll typically say 6500K for daylight or cool white and 2700K for warm white. They typically don't want to show you the exact spectrums, because they're clearly not natural at all. The Kelvin system is basically an averaging system, I think. The more blue they put in, the higher the K, the more red, the lower the K.

[hinckley buzzard]

Look at the picture of the guy. He looks like Meathead--and sounds like him too.

[hinckley buzzard]

I have outdoor cfl spotlights, which have lasted through two Ohio winters. I have a bunch of the smaller ones indoors too, as I find them economical.

I don't get the resistance to this bulb, except for the eventual loss of choice to buy incandescents, which I agree sucks and is unnecessary. As for this hysterical crap about disposing of cfl's safely, I ignore it. That's what wastebaskets are for.

[Old Student]

“They don’t even save energy. All the CFLs I’ve thus far bought have burnt out much more quickly on average than incandescents.”

Not actually correct. I’ve cut my electric bill in half, and held it there, despite the normal inflationary price increases of the past five years or so.

Admittedly, I haven’t kept track of my cost for new bulbs, but I also haven’t had to buy one in the past two years, at least. I had never gone as much as three months without having to replace a lamp before I got the CFL’s.

I have three teenagers who seem to have a religious dedication to not turning off light switches. ;)

Naturally, YMMV.

OS

[ops33]

Thanks for the info.

[truthfreedom]

Sure and thanks for requesting more info. I find this stuff interesting, not all want to hear about this stuff.

A better, cheap alternative to incands would be LEDs. LEDs are more efficient than CFLs, but not as cheap. LEDs are slightly more efficient, provide more light where you want it,
more directional, and have better light. CFLs are almost as efficient as LEDs, the light isn’t as good, but are much cheaper. LEDs are about $2 a watt - CFLs are about $2 for a 26 watt bulb. This is a fairly standard, but sufficiently
bright, 3watt white LED bulb for $5.
http://cgi.ebay.com/E27-White-3-LED-Bulb-Spotlight-Light-Lamp-3W-Save-Power-/290522215729?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43a4793531

Here by the way is a link to colored cfls. These are similar to “party bulbs”, but with an important difference.
http://cgi.ebay.com/6w-30w-Purple-accent-bar-night-light-fluorescent-bulb-/360332183677?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item53e578c87d
CFL party bulbs are typically standard cfls with a coating on them. Red, green or blue. They aren’t efficient, because that coating blocks other colors. These bulbs here appear to be somewhat rare. No coating. I believe that these are single (or dual) phosphor bulbs. They make red, green and blue single phosphor bulbs, as well as purple, which is red and blue phosphors.