I’m hoping that the spotty reliability is due to the infancy of the product. I’ve had several of these buggers burn out in a matter of weeks. I”ve had several that take at least a minute to warm up to 80%, then slowly it gets to 100% from there.
As a counter example, I have a pole light in front of the house that has burnt through bulbs at a horrific rate. But one of these new bulbs has not lasted over two years and is going strong. That is WAY better than any other bulb I had put in there prior.
I don’t put any of these new bulbs that are less than 75 watt equiv, unless it’s in a hallway, which doesn’t need much light, IMHO.
The round vanity lights you use around bathroom mirrors are now CFL’s in disguise. I put a set of these in my daughter’s bathroom, which made the room light up something eerie. Then she started coming down with headaches in the AM. Swapped the bulbs out, and the headaches disappeared.
Kinda wondering how long its going to take some bedwetter to pass a bill calling for a garbage inspector to make sure you aren’t tossing these things in the trash.
The ones under my house went in a matter of weeks after installing them. The one I put outside in the porch light has held up the best of all of them. I figured the quality of light doesn’t matter much out there.
The other issue I have with them is the size of the base. I can’t get them into a lot of fixtures that would have taken an Edison bulb.
1. A CFL has a bunch of electronic components inside it.
2. CFLs are all made in China, from Chinese components.
3. China OEMs and component makers are notorious for cheaping their products to the Nth degree. Their cheapness accounts for much of the component burnout in CFLs.
Importers have well-defined quality standards, but it's really hard to hold such distant suppliers to them. The traditional way for high-quality brands is to set up their own factories in which they can put all the stringent standards in place at the point of origin.
Maybe as Chinese industry matures, you will be able to get quality on a job-shop basis--as long as you know which shops to use.