It’s the final switch off for incandescent light bulbs

Fair comment if you are comparing exactly the same product. There are some cheap lamps on the market and I’m not sure how safe they are. I would be worried about fire risk.

I bought some Philips CFLs for 10p each from B&Q, albeit more than a year ago. I’ve seen the same ones on sale for more than £2. I will agree that B&Q is not usually the cheapest source.

If there was more demand for CFLs there would be more competition and prices might fall. The trouble is they last so long, at least for some of us. Even if you had to pay £10 per lamp you would recoup this in electricity savings. That is easy to calculate.

I think as far as pricing is concerned, the fact that for the first umpteen years of the aggressive campaigning to get us all to change over the Energy Companies were subsidising the cost of CFL’s so that they were being sold more cheaply in the shops, a fact which seems to have escaped the notice of many of the population until prices started to go up …..oddly at the same time that the first tungstens went off sale, what a strange co-incidence that was?! …. is probably why the larger stores are still selling at over-inflated prices. (I.e. to keep their profit margin where it was when the lamps were being subsidised.)

Of course, the cheap lamps in pound-shops may (or may not) be inferior quality too, I don’t know.

I do know that with every other “green” initiative or technology that I’ve had anything to do with, you have to buy the more (or most) expensive of whatever it is to stand a chance of making any real savings in the long run. I’m stopping short of saying that I believe that to be the case with CFL’s because I simply have not, and won’t for some time be, used enough of them. I have have a good number of bitter disappointments with cheaper CFL’s, especially the less-well-known brands, and I’ve had fantastic experiences with the Old Phillips ones, but bitter disappointments with newer Phillips ones. At present the best I have first-hand experience of are Crompton and Sylvania ones. Since mum’s house was re-wired almost 2 years ago all of her lights have had these brands in and all are still operating, even though she has lights on an awful lot of the time. That said, they still have had to be 30w plus to give the level of light that she used to get, and still requires for reading an needlework, from 150w and 250w tungstens, and getting hold of 30w of higher cfl’s is not as easy as I think it should be.

You are right in saying that dimming an incandescent lamp makes it last very much longer but your guess that it will use much less power is completely wrong. Incandescent bulbs operated below full brightness are extremely uneconomical, though this is not well known. I am surprised they have not been banned for this and other reasons.

The traditional use of table lamps and wall lamps with smaller lamps at full brightness is far more economical. Dimmable CFLs can flicker. Beware that some LED lamps are unsuitable for dimming.