CFL brightness and longevity claims

Hi paul wheaton,

I wanted to reach out to thank you for putting together your video and your experiment. I appreciate the time and effort this sort of thing takes.

I've had my suspicions about CFLs for a while because of anecdotal use in my own home. I don't think I use many lights in my home for 30 seconds or less, but I do seem to change bathroom fluorescents more often than the others.

I think it's great that someone with a genuine interest in economy and nature is making an argument against the received wisdom of fluorescents.

Thanks again for continuing your years-long experiment (and for reporting even "suspicious" results that run counter to your thinking).

Have a great day!

The "long life incandescent" died today.  Day 3705.  It had a total "on" time of 17,784 hours.

The LED is still going.

paul wheaton wrote:The "long life incandescent" died today.  Day 3705.  It had a total "on" time of 17,784 hours.

The LED is still going.

Furtling around in these old threads now basically CFls are dead and gone and lighting has moved on to LEDs in large part...

I'd just like to say top marks to Paul for running the light bulb test for over 10 years, and coming back to report the result 10 years later!

One thing that's happened relatively recently (probably in the last 5 years or so) is ready and reasonably priced replacements for regular tube-type fluorescent lights.  I recently got one for the 4ft one I have in the kitchen.  

O'course another thing that's come along is lighting fixtures wherein the LED light source is not (easily) replaceable and those I think are an abomination.  But the LED "bulbs" and now strip lights have come on a heck of a lot since 14 -odd years ago when Paul first posted about CFLs being crap (and in hindsight, they were: but at that time LED tech hadn't progressed to where it is now).  I well recall the first ever commercially available CFL which Philips sold which was as dim as heck for the first couple of minutes.  Now we have LEDs that make instant light, we can to a fair extent choose the color temperature of the light for different applications and provided you avoid ultra-cheap ones form dodgy stores, they are reliable.   I have had a couple that failed prematurely, likely due to being el-cheapo.  But that was always a thing even with incandescent bulbs - if you bought el-cheapo brand from the bargain store, a percentage of them failed on first switch-on.

My dad changed all the applicable light bulbs out in my current Nevada home for CFLs around 1999 or so. The seldom used ones are all still kicking. I started replacing the heaviest used ones, i.e. 10-12hrs/day for porch and garage timed lighting about 4 years ago. My dad cheaped out on nothing, so they were top of the whatever line at the time.  
He also saved an old Edison that was hanging in the closet of our Victorian Helena home since the house was wired around WWI. Cool.
The argument about incandescent/CFL completely ignores off grid battery application. CFLs win by a long country mile. I still have some NIB 12V DC CFLs, made in Germany. Try finding those now. I hoard them jealously.
LEDs win now. Especially the little rechargeable ones we use for quiet task area lighting instead of those horrific ceiling mounted overheads.
What my CFL experience amounted to in 'savings' or ultimate hours of use, I don't know, don't care. What I do know is the PoS LEDs I have been replacing them with last about 2 years.
Period.