The compact fluorescent lamp is, essentially,
no more.
We’ve moved on.
In our search for more efficient sources of lighting,
we’ve gone full-steam-ahead towards the glowing computer chips
we call LEDs.
I’m borrowing "glowing computer chips," by the way,
from a vehemently anti-LED commenter
who thought that was some sort of a derogatory quip,
but honestly I think it’s awesome!
Glowing computer chips?
Yes, please!
Now, I’m not about to go and make a video about
“The Slightly Antique Light Bulb that’s Better than Yours”
because today we are in an objectively better place.
I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that the CFL was a superior light source
to honestly any LED bulb you can find today.
Well, OK, perhaps better than the very dubiously-made
LED bulbs that folks like Big Clive find on eBay,
at least from shock hazards and
prone-to-burning-your-house-down perspectives.
But while these were flawed, problematic, and aesthetically…
suboptimal, in hindsight I think they got an unfairly bad rap.
And in this video, I’d like to explain why.
Let’s begin with why these were a big deal technologically.
The reason fluorescent lighting was a thing 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, store locations,
and other places where a lot of light was needed for a long period of time,
fluorescent lighting made perfect 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’d get a little clever and bend 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 tiny bit of mercury.
When an arc discharge is produced along their length,
the mercury vapor emits a lot of ultraviolet light.
A mixture of phosphors that coat the inside surface of the glass
then convert this largely invisible UV discharge into visible light that we can see,
making the mercury discharge useful for our eyes.
Additionally, the glass itself blocks nearly all of the harmful UV wavelengths.
It takes special quartz glass to produce UV-C germicidal lamps.
Nevertheless many people wrongly assumed that ordinary fluorescent lighting produced harmful UV.
It didn’t, at least not in any remotely meaningful amounts.
This is a bit of a tangent, but the clearest evidence of this
is that the plastic lenses of fluorescent ceiling fixtures generally didn’t yellow with time,
which you’d expect them to and rather quickly if the tubes were producing ultraviolet light.
UV is not kind to plastics.
Anyway, you also need a ballast and starter circuit to drive these tubes.
First, an arc discharge has to be established -
after all, this is a long tube and getting electricity through plasma
from this end to that end takes a bit of effort.
There are many different ways to do this which aren’t important right now,
but once it’s struck you have a new problem.
Being a discharge lamp, you need a current-limiting device or else it will explode.
OK, well maybe not explode, but discharge lamps have negative electrical resistance
and without a current limiting ballast they would rapidly enter a sort of runaway condition
and cause problems.
So, with any given fluorescent fixture, you’ll have a ballast and starter of some sort
driving some 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’s lar-
long.
Four feet to be precise.
Shorter tubes were available, and eventually you also had fun things like the circline tubes
but in general fluorescent lighting was limited to overhead applications where space wasn’t at a premium.
So… shop lights.
Troffer lights.
Surface-mounted light strips.
Et cetera.
Applications that, for the most part, weren’t found in the home.
And if they were, it wasn’t usually in a formal space.
But wouldn’t it be great if we could have the benefits of fluorescent light -
that being longer life and lower energy use -
in more places?
Heck yes it would.
But how to do that?
Well, you could build this thing which I made a video on quite a while ago,
but that’s definitely not the most practical way to go about it.
What we really needed was some sort of self-contained fluorescent lamp
with an integrated ballast that is about the same size as an incandescent bulb,
and with hopefully the same brightness.
And so, these things were born.
This now iconic curly-q design was the final landing spot
after a bunch of different experiments.
See, the ultimate limitation to how much light you can get out of a fluorescent tube
is its surface area.
With these long fellas
that isn’t much of an issue,
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 some twisted thinking.
This 60 watt equivalent lamp has a tube which begins here,
travels in a helix to the top,
then doubles back down the other side where it ends here.
That allows it to occupy a volume smaller than a cube 2 inches or 5 centimeters on each side
while the tube itself is roughly 14 inches or 35 centimeters in length.
This alone is a huge achievement in manufacturing and design.
This is glass, mind you.
We needed a way to mass-produce hollow glass tubes formed into this intricate shape,
and we did it!
But that wasn’t the only innovation, here.
The tube is driven at a higher intensity than an ordinary tube like this one.
That allows its phosphors to glow more much brightly.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between the diameter of the glass
and how intense the discharge is.
You see this as we moved from the old T12 tubes down to
T8 tubes and eventually T5 tubes.
I’m not exactly sure why that is, hopefully one of you will let us know down below.
But there’s also one more trick up its sleeve.
Its electronic ballast.
Fluorescent lamps operate on the same AC power that everything else does.
Because the voltage crosses the zero point 100 or 120 times per second,
lamps run on traditional magnetic ballasts are actually pulsing at that frequency.
This periodic dark time limits their output,
but electronic ballasts get around this by first converting the incoming AC power to DC
and then driving the actual tube at very high frequency AC.
The frequency is so high that the phosphors don’t have time to decay between pulses,
and the effect is the lamp is constantly lit and does not pulse.
This not only boosts it output further,
but also eliminated the potential for eyestrain issues that old-style fluorescent lights
could cause in some individuals.
I actually made a video about that quite a while ago now.
So. These were pretty neat little things.
I keep using the past tense but you can still buy them,
they’re just very much out of fashion at this point.
But they were a big deal.
Bringing the advantages of fluorescent light to more places was,
I would argue, a great thing.
However, they weren’t received with unanimous praise.
And deservedly so, we’ll discuss that shortly.
At the same time, though, a lot of the hatred for these things just…
didn’t make sense.
At least, not holistically.
The biggest problem with these things?
They’re nuanced.
And we know how easily the general public engages with nuance.
See, I have a pet theory that a large percentage of the aversion to CFLs
came from people who really just… didn’t know that much about lighting in general.
I would argue that the CFL was really the first mainstream way
to get non-incandescent color temperatures in the home.
Sure, fluorescent tubes weren’t unheard of in the domestic environment.
They found their place in garages and shop spaces,
sometimes kitchens had them and linear over-the-mirror sort of deals in bathrooms were kinda common.
But prior to the CFL, those sorts of odd applications defined what “fluorescent” light was.
Fluorescent light was that cooler, gray-blue light you saw at the office or in the store or maybe the basement.
And see, here’s where my theory comes in,
if that was how you imagined fluorescent light,
maybe you weren't even aware of the CFLs
like this that mimicked the light from an incandescent bulb fairly well.
Yes, I know there is and can even see the difference,
but I would put money on there being lots of folks out there
who wouldn’t know this was a fluorescent light source
unless they could see the bulb itself.
Their imagination is that
*this* is fluorescent, and when the very idea of color temperature is a new concept to a lot of people,
I’d bet there was a lot of confusion that led to undeserved
and sometimes misplaced hatred of these little fellas.
No matter how hard store displays worked to show how warm the light actually could be.
Again, this isn’t meant to be a love letter to the CFL.
They were bad in a fair number of ways.
But even I, a really picky person when it comes to quality of light and color temperature,
don’t have a problem with most CFLs.
Some were better than others, yeah, but at their peak
a nice 2700K CFL in a table lamp like this?
No problem.
About the worst thing I ever notice is a slightly pink, 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 it and I just couldn’t see that color cast anymore.
Of course, color rendering index isn’t fantastic.
It’s really expensive to develop near-perfect phosphor formulations
so nearly all lamps were good but not great.
But I don’t think I’ve ever run across a warm white CFL
that messed with colors to the point that I could notice without being hypercritical.
I still have some CFLs kicking around without any intention to replace them until they fail.
In many applications their limitations just don’t matter
so I’m not about to bother upgrading them needlessly.
But, and this was in my opinion their Achilles heel,
the suitableness of CFLs was very situational.
They wanted to be and were sold as general purpose light bulbs
but couldn’t actually be used as such.
Some fixtures were absolutely unfit for CFLs,
despite the fact that CFLs could fit inside them.
Similarly, some uses for them were impractical,
and others would shorten their life considerably
leading many folks to believe that they didn’t last as long
as the incandescent lights they were supposed to outlive tenfold.
And yeah, often they didn’t!
But in most cases that wasn’t really their fault.
Let’s start with those untimely deaths.
Here’s a fixture that seems perfectly appropriate for CFLs.
Plenty of clearance for the lamps, not a problem.
Except yes a problem!
This fixture is enclosed.
CFLs didn’t get anywhere near as hot as the incandescent bulbs they replaced,
but they still got hot.
Trap one of ‘em, or worse multiple,
inside a glass bowl with no airflow at all
and you’ve made a torture chamber for them.
The electronic components in their integrated ballasts are only rated to a certain temperature,
which can easily be exceeded in fixtures like these.
And so, premature lamp failure was almost a given in enclosed fixtures,
and to be fair the packaging for these usually warned you that they weren’t suitable in enclosed fixtures
(but who reads the packaging?).
This is actually still something of a problem with LED bulbs,
but many of them on the market today have electronics and temp sensors designed to limit their output and prevent overheating
which allows them to be used without worry.
But even simple orientation could be a problem with CFLs.
If a fixture had its socket at the top and thus the bulb was hanging,
a CFL would find itself with its ballast above the tube.
The tube is the part that gets hottest, and since warm air rises,
well the ballast gets pretty hot.
This wasn’t always a problem - there could be enough airflow depending on the fixture's design.
But often enough it was.
More premature failures.
Another thing that would kill them quickly?
Frequent short use.
Now, this problem didn’t necessarily need to be a problem.
But, because we humans are impatient fickle things,
we didn’t like bulbs that behaved like this one.
A delay between switch-on and light is certainly annoying,
but this is much easier on the electrodes at the ends of the tube.
This programming allows thermionic emissions from the filaments at the ends
to help strike the arc.
It’s the easiest way to do that,
and the most gentle on the electrodes.
This particular bulb spent many years in a fixture on a timer
and has undoubtedly racked up many thousands of hours,
yet it still functions.
But to the average person this was just annoying
so instant-start ballasts became the norm.
These essentially just blast a high-voltage charge right through the tube.
And this does make for a delay-free start,
but it comes at the expense of harming the electrodes.
Each start wears them down a tiny bit,
and while a long operating session may 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 great irony here was that the instant start ballasts
made them seem more practical for these short-use applications,
but in actuality it made them much worse.
The CFL was really best suited for general living space illumination
that would be left on for long periods of time.
But of course, much of that came from ceiling light fixtures like these
which would harm the bulbs but in a different way.
Where they could really shine were in table and floor lamps,
a lot of outdoor fixtures like these carriage things would do OK also…
Really, just any fixture where it wasn’t upside down and had decent airflow would do alright.
But what about recessed cans?
Those are always hanging bulbs upside down.
Well, this wasn’t the only style of CFL.
In their heyday, we were brute-forcing CFL tech into all sorts of weird and interesting places,
like these imitation flood lamps
(some were even made to look like actual PAR lamps)
or, my particular favorite,
these teeny tiny things that IKEA sold at one point
(with an intermediate base to be just that extra bit of annoying)
Still, even in suitable applications where they wouldn’t overheat and die,
CFLs still had drawbacks.
A big, unsolvable issue was that when you first turned them on,
they hadn’t yet gotten their Fulbright scholarship.
Fluorescent lamps take time to warm up
as not all the mercury is a vapor when they’re cold.
For general purpose lamps like these at room temperatures,
this wasn’t a huge deal.
They’d be about half their normal brightness when cold,
certainly not at their best but not unusable by any means either.
And usually within just a minute or so, they’d be as bright as they’d get.
But, for whatever reason, most of the specialty bulbs that came about over the years
would start out with next-to-useless brightness.
Just take a look at this little “flood” thing.
This is at room temperature but hasn’t been started in a while.
Turn it on
and that’s barely anything.
In fact you can see the pink tinge brought about by the bit of neon in there used as a starter gas.
Sometimes this would be purple suggesting argon was the starter gas.
Anyway, after a while it is nice and bright, but this is annoying.
In my experience, nearly every non-standard CFL behaved just like this
be it flood. Globe. A19 mimics.
These weird little things.
Really anything that wasn’t the standard exposed curly q.
I’m really curious about why cold starts seemed to be much worse in these specialty bulbs,
especially since these floods, for example, are really just a standard lamp with a special shade.
I have no idea why these should have darker starts than these ordinary lamps yet they do.
Only thing I can think of is that having the tube enclosed led to higher operating temps thanks to a lack of airflow
which required different vapor pressure characteristics which ultimately meant weak, slow starts.
And then, regardless of type, using CFLs outdoors was…
interesting.
In cold temperatures, they’d be *very* dim at startup and could take several minutes to reach full brightness.
For something like a porch light that’ll be on all night,
well that’s not too much of a problem but when it gets *really* cold,
well they start to lose brightness.
They can’t actually reach their operating temperature when it's that cold,
and on cold enough days they may not even be able to start at all.
Not ideal.
And, as you can imagine, their proneness to death by overheating
meant that in hot climates they’d be even more at risk depending on the situation.
Oh, and of course there’s the elephant in the room.
Mercury.
It’s not great stuff!
Now, in some senses this problem was overblown.
The amount of mercury that’s actually in these is miniscule,
and it’s not like if you broke one you’d need to exit the room in a panic
and call a HAZMAT team else you’ll wake up the next day with an extra toe.
Accidental breakage was not a four-alarm fire kind of event.
But at scale, disposing of these in landfills is not good.
They should be recycled, and unfortunately efforts to do this
(particularly in the US it seems) were pretty sloppy.
Some stores kept receptacles for you to return dead bulbs,
IKEA was particularly good at this,
but plenty of places left you in the dark on how to deal with a bulb that left you in the dark.
You can never get 100% capture with anything,
and while estimates for how many ended up being recycled are all over the place,
in the best case it’s quite bleak.
The majority of these were disposed of improperly.
Yay.
There are only two ways to fix that problem:
make it easier or perhaps incentivize recycling them
(shame on policymakers for not getting that together)
or… eliminate them entirely.
And luckily that’s pretty much where we’re at.
LED bulbs are still e-waste, to be clear, but they don’t have mercury in them
and that’s a huge plus.
In general, the LED bulb fixed all the problems that CFLs had
(except maybe for RF interference problems)
One particular thing that LEDs brought us that
really just never got figured out with CFLs was dimming.
Sure, dimmable CFLs did exist 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 lobby that had
fixed ballasts and replaceable lamps like these,
and they handled dimming just fine.
I guess it was just too expensive to figure out how to do that in lamp-integrated ballasts.
Now, dimmable LEDs are everywhere,
and they come in all sorts of great styles with various features.
Some of them are even… smart.
I think they know algebra.
We’ve gotten good at designing LED lamps to dissipate the heat they generate well,
and to keep themselves in check when that’s not possible.
Color rendering these days is generally much better,
even in basic lamps,
and can be truly excellent in premium products.
We are definitely in a better place today.
But, these things?
They didn’t suck.
They were important.
Miniaturizing fluorescent lights into these tiny things was a feat of its own,
and I appreciate it greatly.
CFLs also finally spurred development
of warm white phosphor formulations that weren’t terrible.
I mean, this circline tube is just horrid!
That is not a warm and pleasant glow, GE.
It’s sickly.
These were just… misunderstood.
I bet many of you can think back to a few of these that just kept on truckin'
in fact maybe you’re like me and still have some going strong.
When they were used in an appropriate application,
they really weren’t half bad.
If anything is to blame for their reputation, I think it’s that their abilities were oversold.
A lot of them died too young simply because of how they were used,
and it’s not their user’s fault!
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 like a million times,
it’s not like I miss these.
Even in the best of cases, they would still lose output as they age
which often lead to color shifting.
They still take time to warm up, particularly when they're cold.
Dimmability is still rare and awful when it is there.
But I don’t look back on these with pure hatred.
In fact, I’m quite fond of what they managed to accomplish.
The end.
♫ underappreciatedly smooth jazz ♫
I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that the CFL was a superior ligh…
darnit!
I missed a pause.
Goin’ REAL great!
...to produce UV-C germicidal lambs. Neverth -
Lamps. Not lambs.
Germicidal lambs?
What are those?
First, and arc discharge ha- [tube hits table and clanks]
Don’t mind me, just thinking about how I’m gonna put this down.
Anywa…
Anyway, you al…. [mumbling] nah I don’t wanna be too dismissive of myself.
First, an arc discharge has to be established [tube clanks on table again] after… dang [laughter]
how many times will I record this line?
From this end to that end takes a bit of effort. There are many… [grumbling under breath]
There are many different ways to do this which aren’t important right now,
but I missed a word so I have to restart.
Anyway, you also need a ballast and starter [lamp clanks]...
Anyway, you also need -
Anyway, you also need a ballast and starter circuit to drive [lamp clanks]...
this is REALLY annoying.
With these long fellas, that wasn’t much of an issue [tube clanks repeatedly] but if you want to get...
Stop making so much noise!
Did you enjoy this light content?
I know I did.
It got my mind swirling with all sorts of twisted ideas.
OK that sounds bad.
Yikes.