In Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” two swindlers promise the Emperor a glorious new suit visible only to the wise and competent, but invisible to all others; naturally, the Emperor claims he can see it perfectly.
So do his ministers and when he wears the suit on parade, so does the adult population of his kingdom. It is only when an innocent child shouts that the Emperor wears no clothes that the populace confronts the truth; however, the monarch was still too proud to admit he’d been duped, so he just kept marching.
Well, the little boy in me believes it’s time to shout the truth; compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) stink! CFLs are the early mainstay of a movement to reduce energy use, but they fail in almost every aspect of their primary function – to be a plug-and-play replacement for incandescent light bulbs.
I was bamboozled like everyone else and made the switch, but now I’ve spent so much time and money – directly and indirectly – on those terrible CFLs that I’m going broke saving the planet. I can’t see anything to boot. Sure, they use less energy, but so does turning off the light switch and wandering around in the dark, which is like having CFLs, only cheaper.
CFLs generate nowhere near the effective amount of light indicated on the package. Lumens – schumens, who cares? For whatever reason – the color temperature, the excruciating long warm-up time, the failure to fit most fixtures properly, or the inefficient pretzel shape – the amount of light you get is a lot less than you bargained or paid for. This means you often have to up-lamp, replacing incandescent bulbs with bigger “equivalent” CFLs.
The up-lamped CFLs are physically larger so they do not fit many fixtures properly putting the light in the wrong place and they generate more heat, shortening their life especially in closed fixtures. My long-life CFLs are constantly burning out and when you consider the hidden costs of tax credits and ladder-climbing accidents, these premature failures are actually very expensive.
You can’t put them in a cold area either; it takes about a week for a CFL to get to its rated light output in low temperatures. Additionally, the words, dim, dimmable, and dimmer add a completely new set of expensive and frustrating problems to the CFL world; is full-on, half-on, and full-off really dimmable?
Do I have to say that CFLs are Ugly (note the capital U)? They look exactly like what they are – a kluged attempt to make technology fulfill an ascetic function because there was big money to be made merely by saying the word green. The second-generation CFLs, where the wizards fixed this problem by putting a glass or plastic cover over the pretzel, just makes it big and ugly: add an inch to make it the CFL stunted version of dimmable, and the size and heat issues get worse.
As for the planet, I’m sure that all CFL users are carefully collecting those burned out and rejected mercury-contaminated units and driving them to the hazardous waste disposal at the dump instead of just throwing them in the trash, aren’t you? Add those trips and disposal to the cost of the CFLs.
Saving energy is a good idea so I’m anxiously awaiting better and cheaper LEDs because CFLs are not ready for primetime and probably never will be. The government is the Emperor and the Emperor has no light bulb, but they will just keep marching – corporations need the tax credits.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
