Are energy-saving light bulbs too cheap?

Absolutely agree!

I dislike being forced to have these bulbs which have a goodly number of drawbacks, even if they do save a little energy in the longer term.

Briefly:
Unless you get an expensive version (see Which? best buys and Hannah’s intro) they usually give out considerably less light than the traditional bulb that they are supposed to be equivalent to (this is due to a basic error in calculating the equivalent wattages, which you can read all the scientific details about on many web pages).
Similarly, all but the expensive ones (and not always 100% of them) have a vastly shorter life than the claimed “ten times” and similar used in advertising. This is especially true in fittings where they are switched on for prolonged periods, which of course is exactly where you want them most in order to save energy! Most of the ones I have been given in promotional packs have lasted less than 1 year, where incandescent ones have lasted 2, 3 or even 5 years.
My council refuses to empty the wheelie bin if they so much as think there is an energy saving bulb in it, and the centres for accepting them for recycling are very few and very far between in this area. Most shops do NOT want to take them back and are reluctant if you point out that they are obliged to do so if they sell them.
All, including expensive ones, appear to interfere with TV and Radio reception if used in table lamps near to the TV and Stereo and all seem to interfere with older CRT TV’s and computer monitors. They also interfere with Wireless computer network connections and, irony of irony, stop my Energy Monitor receiving it’s signal from the sensor on the meter!
They cannot be used with dimmer switches, so if you have dimmers installed already you face either having to stockpile incandescent bulbs, have an electrician take out the dimmers (why should we be forced to pay for something we didn’t want doing) or have an electrician replace dimmers with ones that can work with energy saving lamps (extremely expensive and again why should we be forced to pay?)
A great many decorative fittings and table lamps cannot physically accept even the newer, more compact, energy saving lamps – and again why should something we have paid good money for, or maybe even had handed down the family or bought as an antique, be rendered useless by government /EU dictat?

In principle I like the idea of the energy saving lamp, and I do use the (expensive) ones in places where it is convenient for me. However I object to being forced to have something that, like so many products, is pushed onto the market before it has been adequentaly tested and improved.

Not withstanding all of the above, in answer to the specific question on cost, if we are going to have these lamps then yes, the price should reflect the cost of the recycling and therefore sadly yes, the prices at present are artificially low.

Yes and yes.

LED is certainly the way forward and should be the favoured system and the one receiving the subsidy and promotion.

I can agree with a large part of this: the old “jam jar” energy efficient bulbs are / were extremely reliable and I too have one or two in use which have started to dim slightly now as they are just about worn out, but in general these were very good indeed, if expensive to buy.

I perceive that the problem, as in almost all walks of life these days, is that corners have been cut in order to make the bulbs cheaper so that people will buy them. This probably accounts for the majority of the drawbacks such as shorter life, poor quality light and interference (the Phillips branded “Jam Jar” ones certainly have built in suppressors)

It’s good to see some chemistry on this discussion forum, but I don’t believe that 9% of the Earth’s crust is gallium. Reference please!

Quite – and both CFL and LED energy saving bulbs are part of your WEEE. How do you recycle your WEEE? In Sheffield it is very hard to get rid of your WEEE safely and in line with the WEEE directive. Rarrar has the same issue (35 mile round trip is even worse than here in Sheffield, but we too have no public transport access to our nearest WEEE disposal site. There is a strengthening case to say that the government and the local councils are taking a rather different sort of WEEE…………..

I completely agree. We need to consider all lighting and not just ordinary domestic light bulbs.

As you say, the bright orange street lamps are the most efficient form of lighting we have. These lamps also have a longer life than alternatives. The switch to high pressure sodium lighting is probably because the colour is much better. It does not stop there because an increasing number of almost white lamps are being used in street lighting. I assume that these are white SON lamps, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, these lamps suffer from higher purchase cost, shorter life, and lower light efficiency.

Maybe we should have tackled street lighting and office/commercial lighting before worrying about phasing out the old fashioned domestic light bulb. The rising cost of electricity is a good way of encouraging the public to switch to more efficient lighting, as long as we are all made aware of the cost of using traditional light bulbs.

I cannot answer the question why coloured tungsten bulbs are not yet being phased out. All I can say here is that while I agree with the general principle of phasing out tungsten bulbs, I don’t agree with the way the Government is going about it. For instance, 150 W tungsten lamps were removed from shops before there was any suitable plug-in replacement. (There is now – 30 W low energy lamps are available, but still not easy to find.) If a coloured light is required, it should be possible to make low-energy equivalents more widely available. Also, it is possible to get coloured covers that slip onto low energy lamps.

In the case of street lighting, though the low pressure sodiom lamp is overall the most efficient in terms of lumens per watt, the high pressure version is a much more compact light source, hence it is easier to use mirrors and lenses to direct the light where it is required – and not where it is not. So the effective efficiency of the high pressure lamp is much the same – and the light quality is better.

Commercial and corporate users have for years been continuously improving the design of lighting fittings and one rarely sees tungsten lamps used here. It is domestic users that are dragging their feet. In fairness though, I should say that the range of light fittings available in shops targeted for the domestic market is abysmal. Most of these seem to copy designs more suitable for ancient gas lighting, and even the more modern designs send light all over the place, including up into the light sky.

Denis McMahon makes some really good points and I agree with pretty much all of his post.

There is one point that I am a little uncertain on though: the one about the relative merits of the different types of street light bulb.

Denis states that with the use of mirrors, etc, these are as good os or better than low pressure SOX lamps. But doesn’t that imply that we are replacing whole fittings too (which I know to be the case) and isn’t that generating vast amounts of WEEE and causing monstrous waste of public money for what, by Denis’ own estimation, is simply achieving the same end result as keeping what we had?

This comes back to a point that I have made countless times in so many different places, not just on Which? convo, about campaigners rigidly sticking to just one (often quite small) aspect of a “green product” and conveniently ignoring many other aspects that actually undermine the case.

I absolutely and utterly agree with Denis’ closing point though: the range of domestic lighting products in shops now is minuscule compared to what was on offer in the 1980’s and early 90’s, so little wonder that low energy compatible fittings are not so easy to come by and people are keeping older fittings that may not 9or may) take low energy lamps because there is nothing else to buy that they would give house room to!

You might have been unlucky with a miniature CFL reflector lamps. I’ve only bought one, but it has lasted far longer than ordinary 40W reflector lamps. Reflector CFL lams are relatively expensive, so I don’t think they could be regarded as being sold too cheap.

You raise a good point about the longer time span between replacements and indeed when my father died 14 years ago one of the first things I did for my mother was to fit CFL’s in every fitting that would accept them for precisely this reason, and it has been a big help.

However, CFL’s don;’t run cool at the base of the bulb where the starter circuit is, so the advantage that you refer to is only partially there. This was highlighted last October when my mother had her house rewired and the electrician showed her the perilous state of the lamp holders, some of which neither of us had looked at closely for over 7 years where bulbs had not failed, and so we’d not noticed that they had deteriorated so much that as soon as he tried to remove the bulb the whole thing completely fell apart. Some of these were in fittings that had only been bought new after my father died, so within the last 14 years.

YOu also mention the savings in fittings that are in use for long periods of time, but I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on that one because, as I stated in a post further up this board, it is in those fittings that I have been able to observe the premature failure of a great many CFL’s of many brands and ages, as opposed to fittings that are used for shorter periods of time. Indeed, only since reading this board, I have noticed on the carton of a Phillips branded CFL that was bought within the last 6 months a bit of small print against the quoted expected lifespan which states that this is based on the lamp being energised for 3 hours per day in a non-enclosed fitting, This seems to suggest that the manufacturers are well aware that the life is shortened by prolonged use.

In reply to your point, Mordenman, about the price of low energy lamps – at present there is a plethora of them, especially around the 11 W size, in both supermarket shelves and household cupboards – thanks partially to all the “freebies” we have had and also because they do last a lot longer and need to be replaced much less frequently. Basic market forces of supply and demand apply. I don’t favour the idea of setting a minimum price. We are supposedly a competitive market place. Resale price maintenance had a good purpose in the early post-war years, but it was abolished long ago, to the delight of Which? and other consumer organisations.

Replying to your point about the colour differences in your bedside lights and your earlier post about colours available for fluorescent tubes, manufacturers are unlikely to imitate exactly the colour of tungsten lamps, and I don’t think they should even try. I’d like to see wider available of compact fluorsecent lamps in other “whiter” colours. I tried a daylight lamp round various rooms in my house – I admit I was taken a bit aback at first by the appearance, but now I have then in several rooms and I no longer notice the overall colour. What I do continue to notice is dynamic colours of various articles (including magazine covers) – blues are bright and radiant; yellows are solid, not pale and washed-out.

I believe one reason why other colours have not been promoted for the domestic market is because of the way the eye perceives colour, regardless of whether the amount of light is actually sufficient to see well. Blue tints are perceived as less bright than yellow tints. Hence, with CFLs struggling to match the claimed brightness of tungsten equivalents, manufactures promote the yellow tints to try to reduce this problem. Of course no marketing department is going to admit that!

It is unlikely that the big supermarkets and d-i-y- outlets will stock alternative colours in the near future. They are still trying to move huge stocks of existing types, at a loss, so will not want to risk burning their fingers again on products of unproven demand. If you look around, you may find them in independent hardware and electrical retailers, by mail order or on-line.

Whether a Compact Fluorescent Lamp can be used with a Passive Infra Red sensor depends, I suggest, more on the design of the sensor than on the lamp. A similar comparison applies to time switches. I have been using CFLs on both time switches and a PIR sensor for many years without problems.

Briefly, if the sensor or time switch has electromechanical contacts (which may be actuated by solid state circuitry) to switch on or off the load, than a CFL should be OK. This includes most time switches that plug into 13 ampere sockets, including the rather old-fashioned, but still available, rotary turret-switch type. PIR sensors that connect permanently to the mains should be OK too.

Time switches that fit on the wall in place of ordinary light switches will not do. They require a resistive load in series to power their own interrnal electronics. A tungsten filament lamp (including halogen) provides this; a CFL does not and will likely cause malfunction.

Many CFL manufactures are over-cautious on this point, to cover themselves against warranty claims. In practice, most time switches and PIR sensors will work with CFLs.

Dimming ordinary incandescent lamps can prolong their life considerably, but it is a false economy. By far the biggest cost is the electricity used, not the price of the lamp.

If a 150 W bulb is dimmed to give light output equivalent to a 60 W bulb, it will consume a lot more than 60 watts. It will cost you more that using a 60 W bulb would.

Although the anti-green lobby is forever pointing out that CFL lamps cannot be dimmed, I find in practice this is not a major issue because dimmer switches are not widely used. They do have their uses, particularly in conjunction with reflector lamps, but I am wondering why Mr Williams is apparently using them so widely and what he is trying to achieve.

A big room can be lit in a subdued but very cheerful manner with two or three table- or standard- lamps fitted with low-wattage lamps and placed to cast light where it is most wanted. Whereas to light the same big room from a single central lamp dimmed creates a dingy, dowdy appearance. Similarly, fit out a kitchen with under-cupboard lights and you hardly need a central light; working surfaces are brightly lit but you have a stunning overall atmosphere of light against dark.

Anyway, if your really want CFL lamps that can be dimmed, they are available (see Which? reports). They cost a little extra, but still work out cheaper than tungsten filament bulbs of similar light output.

If you look at reviews of reflector bulbs (e.g. on Amazon) you will see that others have had the same problem.

I contacted Which? about the pictures you mention and hope that future tests will be carried out under more realistic conditions. It is very well established that certain components used in electronic circuitry will fail much sooner if allowed to get hot. Desktop and laptop computers use fans to prevent overheating and would not last long without them.

If fixtures are designed so that the electronics are kept separate from the heat generated by the lamp, the reliability will be much higher, as is seen with modern fluorescent tubes with electronic control gear. The problem is trying to produce lamps that are direct replacements and a similar size to incandescent bulbs.

Manufacturers are partly to blame for not pointing out the need for ventilation of CFLs. I hope you can get a refund.