I found one of these in Home Depot yesterday.

[randomness]

One of my current obsessions is finding compact fluorescent bulbs to replace incandescent bulbs. Unlike most sane people--but like certain of my friends--I prefer to use the energy efficiency of the CFL to provide more light with the same amount of energy rather than generate the same amount of light with less energy.

This 68W behemoth from TCP, Inc. , rated at 4200 lumens, claims to provide the same amount of light as a 300W incandescent, yet can be installed in any fixture which can safely accept a 75W incandescent.



Energy Federation Incorporated and Conservation Mart both want $24.50 for it, but Home Depot had them for $14.50. Lighting Supply Co. has them for $24, in both 2700K and 5100K versions. (The other vendors are all selling the 2700K version.)

One big detail is that the bulb itself is rather large: it's nearly 10 inches long and about 4 inches in diameter, so it won't physically fit in a lot of fixtures. Still, although I didn't pick one up yesterday (I wanted to do some comparison shopping first), I want one. I'm sure I can find someplace to put it.

Comments

[cme]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Oh boy oh boy.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

coool.

my main gripe with the CF bulbs is that they don't work with normal dimmers. (are they dimmable at all? i haven't checked into it in a few years.)

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

My cool find recently was that Tags in Porter Sq. has colored compact fluorescents- red, green, purple, yellow. I didn't buy any that day, but I'm thinking about where I could use them. :)

[ceo]

I'm a big fan of the CFLs that have a polycarbonate shell around the bulb so you don't release mercury vapor into the room when you drop one. Unfortunately, the ones I've found so far have an annoyingly long warmup period.

Hippeh!

[ddreslough.livejournal.com]

(in Cartman voice)

We use CFLs in the summer, but I have to admit, with a kid and her rowdy friends sometimes flinging things, I live in fear of the mercury vapors. I don't use them in her room. In winter we do use incandescent bulbs because Clay's weird sleep problem seems to be less with them.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

I use what is probably that exact bulb; I'm with you on the more light for the same energy. I put it in a deep photographic flood reflector and point it at the ceiling. It works very well. Make sure the reflector is deep enough and placed high enough that you don't have to look directly at the bulb. You want to look straight at it about as much as you want to look at a 300 watt incandescent.

The problem with green tech (do CFCs qualify?)

[fin9901.livejournal.com]

Do CFCs use rare earth elements? Apparently the problem with a lot of 'green' tech is that they rely heavily on rare earth elements, which are almost all mined in China by criminal gangs in mines that pollute the environment horribly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/business/global/26rare.html

It doesn't do much good to clean up our local environment if by doing so we're trashing other parts of the globe.

[chain saw with a magician (from livejournal.com)]

Amen. I still have a bunch of these:

http://www.1000bulbs.com/42-Watt-Compact-Fluorescents/

which I bought when I was trying to solve this same problem 5-6 years ago (those were the brightest I could find at the time). They've held up extremely well - I'm still on some of the original ones - except for mechanical damage, to which the larger CFs seem more vulnerable.

Some of my guests complained about the 6500k color temperature ones, but 5000 seems fairly unobjectionable.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I so want to like compact fluorescents, but so far all of the ones I have largely suck the big kahuna. They either take forever to warm up to acceptable light levels, or have a funky spectral output that drives me batties.

There's just something so utterly satisfying about incandescent lights.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

The PITA I run into is that I haven't found any that fits within the volume of a standard incandescent bulb, and I have a number of lamps that don't allow much tolerance beyond that.