unfortunately, that seems to be what we're being made to live with, plus the fact that CFL's of equivelent brightness don't fit in many existing light fixtures, and they get dimmer over their lifetime until many don't give rated amount of light by the time they've reached half the rated lifetime

Bill

Yes it's true, but you get used to it. I think the CFLs are worth it. If you're in and out of a room that quick, you probably don't need the full brightness anyway.

Kevin

I was purchasing those types of bulbs before they ever became mainstream and am just thankful they are now being made of a size equivalent to incandescent bulbs. The old style ones were not and not all my lamps could be accomodated.

When I think of all the fixtures in my home taking numerous bulbs, and think that I am replacing each sixty watt one with a thirteen watt one, I don't mind the little lag in time. The savings are well worth it and the wait over a day's time for the bulb to come to brightness only amounts to seconds. I'm not in that much of a hurry :-)

Hopefully the LED bulbs will be. They are still fairly expensive now.

10 years ago, I changed all the bulbs I could with CFL's, about 30 of them, there were a few fixtures that couldn't find any then that fit. Over that time, I think 2 burned out, and a couple were broken with baseballs or tipped lamps and normal kid stuff. I did this all at once, and my electricity bill dropped, from one month to the next, by over 10%. Those bulbs have paid for themselves many times over. Somebody else I know recently switched theirs and figured out the actual watts they were saving which the same as running an 800 watt space heater.

I got used to the time it takes to brighten up, and don't even notice now.

Do your CFL's all have mercury?

I think the general average is about 4 mg mercury per bulb, and thats going down to less than two (see link), compared to 500 mg in a standard thermometer. Or compared to the 453,592,370.00 mg of the stuff that the two coal fired power plants just south of me throw off every year.

Here is a link that might be useful: not that much

I've been using cfl's since they first came out in early 80's. I still have one of the originals under the house ... a huge heavy glass one. I don't find the warming up period a great problem. I only really notice it in the cold weather. They cost $28 when they first arrived in the shops but they had a special and I got them for $14.

Marshall

I have concern for workers' exposure to mercury that discarding the spent bulbs creates. Inevitably the bulb will be broken in disposal and the worker processing it will be exposed.

There are CFLs that are almost instant - my son has some. But they're not the ones you get at Home Depot - they're more expensive and only (as far as I know) available online. They have a higher quality ballast than the usual ones. I don't have the URL right now, but I'll get it from my son.

I wasn't aware anything about recycling the bulbs. Where do you send them?

That's what I'd like to know. I, too, am concerned about the mercury. Are we jumping from the frying pan into the fire by switching our bulbs for CF's?

I take my CF lightbulbs to IKEA. I've also found the website earth911 dot org helpful when I wanted to know how and where to recycle certain things. (I just typed into the search box what I wanted to recycle and my zipcode.)

Mercury in bulbs is not such a bad thing. Burning coal in power plants emits huge quantities of mercury in to the environment, so it works out that reducing electric consumption with fluorescent bulbs causes much less mercury to be released. Also, the mercury in the bulbs is a small quantity, comparative in size to the ball in a biro pen, and because it's contained you can recycle the bulbs and recover the mercury to use it again without emitting it in to the environment. Bulb recycling in EU countries is now mandatory, it's illegal to throw them away in the rubbish (although I'm sure quite a few are).

Anyway, even without recycling and recovery of the mercury, regular bulbs cause much more mercury pollution over their full life cycle than the new energy savers.

Here's a good link to find out more about disposal of and cleaning up after broken CFL's: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf

I think we should skip CFL's altogether and go to led light bulbs. The white house used led lights for all of its christmas lights this year and I know cree led chips are getting upto 1000 lumens per one led! I bought a c creane light bulb from home depot that was total crap, then i got a 60 watt Led replacment from www.freeliteusa.com and it uses the new cree chips and it is awesome, probably the best led light bulb I have seen. They have some other brighter ones that i am going to check out but the bottom line is there are places out there starting to offer led incandescent light bulb replacements and you won't see good leds in the stores because walmart does not want to sell you a light bulb that lasts 100,000 hours! And
cfl's are hurting us with mercury in landfiles.

Here is a link that might be useful: Led light bulbs