In Defense of the CFL: A Retrospective

The compact fluorescent lamp basically no longer exists. We have moved on. In our search for more efficient lighting sources, we have moved full steam ahead toward the bright computer chips we call LEDs. By the way, I'm borrowing "shiny computer chips" from a vehemently anti-LED commenter who thought it was some kind of derogatory joke, but honestly, I think it's awesome! Shiny computer chips? Yes please! Now, I'm not going to make a video about “The Slightly Older Light Bulb That's Better Than Yours” because we are in an objectively better place today. Honestly, I wouldn't suggest for a moment that the CFL was a superior light source to any LED bulb you can find today.

Well, okay, maybe better than the very dubiously made LED bulbs that people like Big Clive find on eBay, at least from the point of view of the risk of electric shock and the prospect of your house burning down. But while these were flawed, problematic, and aesthetically... suboptimal, in retrospect I think they got an unfairly bad reputation. And in this video I would like to explain why. Let's start with why these were a big technological problem.   The reason fluorescent lighting came about in the first place is that the technology produces much more light per unit of electrical energy than is possible with incandescent bulbs.

Fluorescent tubes also had a much longer life than the typical incandescent lamp. The efficiency and long life made fluorescent lights more economical, so in applications like office buildings, stores, and other places where a lot of light was needed over a long period of time, fluorescent lighting made a lot of sense. But for many years, the form factor was... rather commercial. Long fluorescent tubes like these were the de facto standard for many decades. Sometimes we were a little clever and folded them into a U shape or maybe even a circle, but that was it. Now, these tubes are filled with a low-pressure mixture of various gases and a pinch of mercury.

When an arc discharge occurs along its length, the mercury vapor emits a lot of ultraviolet light. A mixture of phosphors coating the inner surface of the glass converts this largely invisible ultraviolet discharge into visible light that we can see, making the mercury discharge useful to our eyes. Additionally, the glass itself blocks almost all harmful ultraviolet wavelengths. Special quartz glass is needed to produce UV-C germicidal lamps. However, many people mistakenly assumed that ordinary fluorescent lighting produced harmful UV rays. It didn't, at least not in remotely significant quantities. This is a bit of a tangent, but the clearest evidence of this is that the plastic lenses of fluorescent ceiling lamps generally do not turn yellow over time, as they would be expected to do, and quite quickly, if the tubes were producing ultraviolet light.

UV rays are not kind to plastics. Anyway, you also need a ballast and a starter circuit to drive these tubes.   First, an arc discharge must be established; After all, this is a long tube and passing electricity through the plasma from one end to the other requires some effort. There are many different ways to do this that aren't important right now, but once you get it done, you have a new problem. Being a discharge lamp, it needs a current limiting device or it will explode. Well, maybe they don't explode, but discharge lamps have negative electrical resistance, and without a current-limiting ballast, they would quickly go into some sort of uncontrolled state and cause problems.

So with any fluorescent fixture, you will have a ballast and a starter of some type that drives a certain number of large tubes. As a result, fluorescent fixtures tended to be... large. This is a basic shop light and as you can see it is big. Four feet to be precise. There were shorter tubes available and, over time, there were also fun things like circular tubes, but in general fluorescent lighting was limited to overhead applications where space was not at a premium. So… shop lights. Troffer lights. Surface light strips. Etc. Applications that, for the most part, were not found in the home.

And if they were, it was usually not in a formal space. But wouldn't it be great if we could have the benefits of fluorescent lighting (longer life and lower energy consumption) in more places? Hell yes it would be. But how to do that? Well, you could create this thing I made a video about quite a while ago, but that's definitely not the most practical way to do it. What we really needed was some kind of self-contained fluorescent lamp with an integrated ballast that was about the same size as an incandescent bulb and, hopefully, the same brightness.

And that's how these things were born. This now iconic curly-q design was the final landing spot after several different experiments. Look, the biggest limitation on how much light you can get from a fluorescent tube is its surface area. With these tall guys that's not a big deal, but if you want to get the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb in the same amount of space using a fluorescent tube, it takes a little twisted thinking. This 60 watt equivalent lamp has a tube that starts here, travels in a helix to the top, and then bends down the other side where it ends here.

That allows it to occupy a smaller volume than a cube measuring 2 inches or 5 centimeters on each side, while the tube itself is approximately 14 inches or 35 centimeters long.   This alone is a great achievement in manufacturing and design. This is glass, of course. We needed a way to mass produce hollow glass tubes with this intricate shape, and we did it! But that wasn't the only innovation here. The tube is driven at a higher intensity than a normal tube like this. This allows your matches to shine much brighter. There appears to be an inverse relationship between vessel diameter and shock intensity.

You can see this as we move from the old T12 tubes to the T8 tubes and finally to the T5 tubes. I'm not exactly sure why that is, I hope one of you will let us know below.   But there is also one more trick up his sleeve. Your electronic ballast. Fluorescent lamps run on the same AC power as everything else.   Because voltage crosses the zero point 100 or 120 times per second, lamps powered by traditional magnetic ballasts actually pulse at that frequency. This periodic dark time limits their output, but electronic ballasts prevent this by first converting the incoming AC power to DC and then driving the actual tube to very high frequency AC.

The frequency is so high that the matches do not have time to disintegrate between pulses, and the effect is that the lamp is constantly on and does not pulse. This not only further increases its performance, but also eliminates the possibility of eye strain problems that older fluorescent lights could cause for some people. I actually made a video about that quite a while ago. So. They were quite nice little things. I still use the past tense but you can still buy them, they're just out of fashion at the moment. But they were a big problem. I would say bringing the benefits of fluorescent lighting to more places was a great thing.

However, they were not received with unanimous praise. And rightly so, we will discuss it shortly. At the same time, though, a lot of the hate for these things just...didn't make sense. At least, not comprehensively. The biggest problem with these things? They have nuances. And we know how easily the general public interacts with nuances. Look, I have a pet theory that a large percentage of the aversion to CFLs came from people who really just... didn't know much about lighting in general.   I would argue that CFLs were really the first widespread way to get non-incandescent color temperatures in the home.

Of course, fluorescent tubes were not unknown in the domestic environment. They found their place in garages and commercial spaces, kitchens sometimes had them, and linear offerings above the mirror in bathrooms were somewhat common. But before the CFL, those kinds of strange applications defined what "fluorescent" light was. Fluorescent light was that cooler blue-gray light you would see in the office, the store, or maybe the basement. And look, this is where my theory comes in, if this was how you imagined fluorescent lighting, maybe you didn't even know about CFLs like this one, which mimicked the light from an incandescent bulb quite well.

Yes, I know it exists and I can even see the difference, but I would bet there are a lot of people who wouldn't know it was a fluorescent light source unless they could see the bulb itself. Your imagination is that *this* is fluorescent, and when the very idea of ​​color temperature is a new concept to a lot of people, I bet there was a lot of confusion that led to some undeserved and sometimes misplaced hatred towards these little guys. . No matter how hard store displays tried to show how warm the light could really be. Again, this is not intended to be a love letter to the CFL.

They were bad in many ways. But even I, a very picky person when it comes to light quality and color temperature, have no problems with most CFLs. Some were better than others, yes, but at their peak, a nice 2700K CFL in a table lamp like this? No problem. The worst thing I've noticed is a slightly pinkish and occasionally green cast to the light, but it's really only noticeable when you have another light to compare it to - if an entire room is lit with the same CFLs, my eyes would acclimate to and just be done with it.

I couldn't see that color tone. Of course, the color rendering index is not fantastic. It is very expensive to develop near-perfect phosphor formulations, so almost all the lamps were good, but not great. But I don't think I've ever encountered a warm white CFL that altered colors to the point where I could notice it without being hypercritical. I still have a few CFLs kicking around with no intention of replacing them until they fail. In many applications, their limitations simply don't matter, so I won't bother updating them unnecessarily. But, and this was in my opinion their Achilles heel, the suitability of the CFL was very situational.

They wanted to be and were sold as general purpose light bulbs, but they couldn't actually be used as such. Some luminaires were completely unsuitable for CFLs, even though they could fit inside them. Similarly, some uses for them were impractical and others would shorten their life considerably, leading many people to believe that they did not last as long as incandescent lights that were supposed to last ten times as long. And yes, they often didn't! But in most cases that wasn't really their fault. Let's start with those premature deaths. Here's an accessory that seems perfectly appropriate for the CFL.

Plenty of space for lamps, not a problem. Except yes, a problem! This accessory is attached. CFLs didn't get as hot as the incandescent bulbs they replaced, but they still got hot. Trap one of them, or worse, several, inside a glass container without any airflow and you've created a torture chamber for them. The electronics in their integrated ballasts are only rated for a certain temperature, which can easily be exceeded in accessories like these. So premature lamp failure was almost a given in closed fixtures and, to be fair, the packaging for these usually warned that they were not suitable for closed fixtures (but who reads the packaging?).

This is actually still a problem with LED bulbs, but many of them on the market today have electronics and temperature sensors designed to limit their power and prevent overheating, allowing them to be used without worry. But even simple targeting could be a problem with CFLs.   If a fixture had its socket at the top and therefore the bulb was dangling, a CFL would find itself with its ballast on top of the tube. The tube is the part that gets hotter and, as the hot air rises, the ballast gets quite hot. This wasn't always a problem: there could be enough airflow depending on the design of the device.

But quite often it was. More premature failures. Another thing that would kill them quickly? Frequent and brief use. Now, this issue didn't necessarily have to be a problem. But, since humans are impatient and fickle beings, we didn't like light bulbs that behaved like this one. A delay between power on and light is certainly annoying, but it is much easier on the electrodes at the ends of the tube. This programming allows for thermionic emissions from the filaments at the ends to help generate the arc. It is the simplest way to do it and the most careful with the electrodes.

This bulb inparticular spent many years on a timer device and has no doubt accumulated many thousands of hours, but it still works. But for the average person this was just annoying, so instant-start ballasts became the norm. Basically these just throw a high voltage charge through the tube. And this allows a start without delays, but at the cost of damaging the electrodes. Each start wears them down a little bit, and while a long operating session can help restore them, when used in places like a closet or bathroom where the light is only on for a few minutes at a time, that opportunity simply doesn't exist. .

The big irony here was that instant-start ballasts made them seem more practical for these short-use applications, but actually made them much worse. The CFL was really best suited for general lighting of living spaces that would be left on for long periods of time. But of course a lot of that came from ceiling lights like these, which would damage the bulbs, but in a different way. Where they could really shine was in table and floor lamps, many outdoor fixtures like these carriages would work well too... Actually any fixture that wasn't upside down and had decent airflow would work well.

But what about built-in cans? They are always bulbs hung upside down. Well, this wasn't the only CFL style. At its peak, we forced CFL technology into all sorts of strange and interesting places, like these knock-off flood lamps (some were even made to look like real PAR lamps) or, my particular favorite, these tiny things that IKEA sold in one. period (with a middle base to be a bit more annoying) Still, even in proper applications where they wouldn't overheat and die, CFLs still had drawbacks. A major and unsolvable problem was that when you first excited them, they had not yet obtained their Fulbright scholarship.

Fluorescent lamps take time to warm up, since not all mercury is vapor when cold. For general purpose lamps like these at room temperature, this wasn't a big deal. They would be about half their normal brightness when cold, certainly not at their best, but also not unusable by any means. And usually within a minute or so, they would be as bright as they could be. But for some reason, most of the specialty light bulbs that came out over the years would start out with an almost useless brightness. Just take a look at this little "flood". This is at room temperature but hasn't been started in a while.

Turn it on and that's hardly anything. In fact, you can see the pink tint caused by the piece of neon used as starting gas. Sometimes this would be purple, suggesting that argon was the starting gas. Anyway, after a while it is nice and shiny, but this is annoying. In my experience, almost all non-standard CFLs behaved like this, whether due to flooding. Balloon. A19 imitates. These weird little things. Really anything that wasn't standard exposed the curly q. I'm really curious why cold starts seemed to be so much worse on these special bulbs, especially since these floods, for example, are really just a standard lamp with a special shade.

I have no idea why they should have a darker start than these regular lamps, but they do. The only thing I can think of is that having the tube closed led to higher operating temperatures thanks to the lack of airflow, which required different vapor pressure characteristics, which ultimately meant weak and slow starts. And then regardless of type, using CFL outdoors was... interesting. In cold temperatures, they would be *very* dim initially and could take several minutes to reach full brightness. For something like a porch light that will be on all night, well, that's not a big deal, but when it gets *very* cold, they start to lose their brightness.

They actually can't reach their operating temperature when it's that cold, and on cold enough days, they may not even be able to start. It's not ideal. And, as you can imagine, their propensity to die from overheating meant that in hot climates they would be even more at risk depending on the situation. Oh, and of course, there's the elephant in the room. Mercury. It is not a big thing! Now, in a sense this problem was exaggerated. The amount of mercury they actually contain is miniscule, and it's not like if you broke one you'd have to leave the room in a panic and call a HAZMAT team, otherwise you'd wake up the next day with an extra finger.

An accidental breakage was not a four-alarm fire type event. But on a large scale, disposing of them in landfills is not good. They should be recycled, and unfortunately efforts to do so (particularly in the US, it seems) were quite sloppy. Some stores had receptacles for you to return dead bulbs - IKEA was particularly good at this - but many places left you wondering how to deal with a bulb that left you in the dark. You can never achieve 100% capture with anything, and while estimates for how many ended up being recycled are all over the place, it's pretty bleak at best.

Most of them were disposed of improperly. Hurrah. There are only two ways to solve that problem: make it easier or perhaps incentivize recycling (too bad policy makers haven't managed to do that) or... eliminate them altogether. And fortunately, that's where we find ourselves. LED bulbs are still e-waste, to be clear, but they don't contain mercury and that's a big plus. Overall, the LED bulb solved all the problems that CFLs had (except maybe the RF interference problems). One particular thing that LEDs brought us that was never really solved with CFLs was dimming. Sure, dimmable CFLs existed, but in my experience they always sucked.

I don't know what was so hard about that - at my old job we had TONS of ceiling fixtures in the hallway that had fixed ballasts and replaceable lamps like these, and handled dimming well. I guess it was too expensive to figure out how to do it in ballasts built into lamps. Dimmable LEDs are everywhere now and come in all kinds of fantastic styles with various functions. Some of them are even... smart. I think they know algebra. We have improved the design of LED lamps to dissipate the heat they generate well and to keep it under control when that is not possible.

Color rendering today is generally much better, even in basic lamps, and can be really excellent in premium products. We are definitely in a better place today. But these things? They didn't stink. They were important. Miniaturizing fluorescent lights into these tiny things was a feat in itself and I really appreciate it. CFLs also eventually spurred the development of warm white phosphorus formulations that weren't terrible. I mean, this circular tube is just horrible! That's not a nice warm glow, GE. It's sick. These were simply…misunderstood. I bet many of you can remember some of these that continued to work;

In fact, maybe they are like me and still have some strong ones. When used in a proper application, they really weren't that bad. If anything is to blame for his reputation, I think it is that his abilities were overrated. Many of them died too young simply because of the way they were used, and it is not the fault of the user! Manufacturers just want to sell you light bulbs, so they're not likely to help you figure out those details. And again, and I know I've said this a million times, it's not that I miss them. Even in the best case scenario, they would lose production as they age, often causing color changes.

They still need time to warm up, especially when it's cold. Fading is still rare and terrible when it exists. But I don't look at them with pure hatred. I actually really like what they accomplished. The end. ♫ underrated smooth jazz ♫ I wouldn't suggest for a moment that the CFL was a higher light...damn! I missed a break. It's going REALLY great! ...to produce UV-C germicidal lambs. Never - Lamps. Not lambs. Germicidal lambs? What are those? First, and the arc discharge. Don't mind me, I'm just thinking about how I'm going to leave this. Anyway…Anyway, all of you….

No, I don't want to be too dismissive of myself. First, an arc discharge must be established after…damn, how many times will I record this line? From one end to the other it takes a little effort. There are a lot of... There are a lot of different ways to do this that aren't important right now, but I missed a word, so I have to restart. Anyway, you also need a ballast and a starter circuit... Anyway, you also need - Anyway, you also need a ballast and a starter circuit to drive... this is REALLY annoying. With these long guys, that wasn't a big problem, but if you want...

Stop making so much noise! Did you enjoy this light content? I know I did. My mind was filled with all kinds of twisted ideas. Okay, that sounds bad. Oh.