Re: Do good energy-saving bulbs exist?

[Laurence Mason <laurence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We are in the process of migrating from "proper" bulbs to
CFls. We are
switching to the Megaman candle bulbs which claim to be the same as a
40/45W tungsten - and they probably are. The colour is not the same but
I guess we will get used to it. Mostly we don't have any dimmers and the
one room where we do they are used only as soft start so I will replace
them with standard on/off.

The advantage the megaman ones have over the cheap Tesco ones is that
they are virtually the same size as the tungsten (so they look all right
in fittings) and they also last 15,000 hours rather than 8,000. I
thought I read somewhere that it was the switching on and off that wore
them out so the statement about assuming so many hours per day use might
be a way of relating to switching on and off rather than pure on time.
Yes they do take time to come to full brightness.

Of course now we are saving all the electric running the bulbs we have
to burn more oil to keep ourselves warm instead and in the summer it
tends to be lighter in the evenings so we don't need the lights on anyway!

NZ has recently changed it's mind over the transition:

http://national.org.nz/Article.aspx?ArticleID=29097

Regards,

Laurence

Neil Ball wrote:
> Was the dimmable CFL from Varilight? This works well enough with my
Helvar
> Digidim system (which has all of the dimmers set to trailing edge
dimming)
> although it is not smooth as it dims - it kind of steps in stages as
it dims
> down and up. It is completely useless in a fitting that has a leading
edge
> dimmer, it goes out completely while still quite bright and is not
really
> controllable. I?ve still to source a Megaman CFL which promises a
stepless
> dimming range of 10-100% although again I don?t know if it will be
dependent
> on the type of dimming technology used. I did notice that both
companies
> recommend switching them on full for at least a minute before dimming
for
> best results, not really what you want with a scene-setting lighting
control
> system.
>
>


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