Comments by "SeanBZA" (@SeanBZA) on "In Defense of the CFL: A Retrospective" video.

  1.  @FakeJeep  Well hard to make a flourescent discharge lamp dimmable, they do not respond well to simple dimmer circuits. While you can definitely dim the long tubes, with an electronic ballast with dimming input, making one compatible with a wall dimmer is like having a McLaren F1 sports car, and expecting it to drive 300MPH on model T Ford wheels and tyres.
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  2. Phillips did make a nice range of lamps that were A shaped, to replace the A shape incandescent lamp. Just they cost around twice the price of a regular CFL, and had 20% lower light output due to the glass outer envelope. However they also used the glass bowl as part of the gas path, so were fiendishly complex to manufacture as well, and take 10 minutes warming up to full output. Still got one in a desk lamp, where it is visible and quite useful. Of course I prefer the old carbon filament lights i have over them, and the tantalum filament ones as well for orange light.
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  3.  @stevenclark2188  Funny thing is the manufacturers of the CFL lamps mostly reused the same form factor for LED, often also including using the CFL glass to hold LED arrays, and the same base castings as well. Even those who made the incandescent lamps got in on it, reusing the old stem base machinery and the blown glass bowls to hold LED strips now, imitating the incandescent lamp look. Fun fact is that those glass envelopes used to be made at a glass factory and packed in wooden crates, with the only protection being an oil film from the moulding machine, and shipped by rail to the assembly plants. Less than 1% breakage from this method, and all your breakages are fully recycled as well, as the glass factory got all the little bits of glass from the manufacturing process back in the box as well.
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  4.  @AileTheAlien  Had them for around 30 years now, and still use them in places, and also have a lifetime supply of good quality spare lamps CFL and LED is the thing where name brand counts, and sad to say not one US manufacturer is on my list of good any more, especially GE and Sylvania, who are no longer worth the premium, as they are all made by the lowest cost supplier for them. CFL I still have lamps made in Europe, and bought lamps last week that are good, made in Poland.
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  5.  @MattMcIrvin  More LED technology could not produce bright light without multiple emitters, so you had the corn cob style using hundreds of small chips run correctly. They last quite well, though with drawbacks of poor shape and of course the whole fitting was exposed live conductors. As technology improved you could get the same light output with fewer parts, and thus the lamp got smaller, to the point now where you have a 60W equivalent with only 5 massively overdriven LED units, with a life that is under 1000 hours. Ironic in that we replaced a technology, that had easy to manufacture parts, with a new one which requires a dozen billion dollar manufacturing plants to make it, but which has exactly the same cartel forcing you to buy the product over and over, while they have the knowledge how to make it last essentially forever.
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  6. The tubes shrinking from T12 to T8, and then to T5, was a result of increasing phosphor efficiency. The T12 phosphor was essentially the same phosphor since they were initially developed in the 1920's, and was very limited in operating temperature and allowed light emission. Thus you needed a certain area of phosphor to get a defined light output. Later improved phosphors allowed both higher light output, and higher operation temperature, and also the smaller diameter tubes allowed a reduction of volume of gas fill, and also a drop in the amount of mercury in them, so the mercury went from almost 100mg for a T12 lamp, to 5mg for T8, and down to under 2mg for a T5 tube. CFL units are at around 0.2mg of mercury per lamp typically, ironically making recovery of the mercury near impossible, as it is so little. The biggest killer of them in enclosed and any fixture is that most of the power dissipation is in the filament ends, where you have to heat up the emitter material, so generating all the heat right by the electronics, and also in a nice insulating plastic enclosure. green PCB at manufacture ends up at EOL as being charred black, along with pretty much the entire inside of the lamp. Drawback of LED units is that they are also full of large amounts of toxic metals, Gallium, not so bad but still a heavy metal, and Arsenic, part and parcel of the Gallium Arsenide used to make the light emitting diode chips used in there, plus of course the phosphors are pretty much the same ones used in the flourescent lamps, and those are also a witches brew of heavy metal oxides, enclosing the GaAs chip. Flourescent linear lamps are easy to recycle, mostly glass, a bit of nickel wire, some strontium and tungsten, and a little fill of aluminium and copper from the ends, plus the water soluble phosphor inside, because it is deposited using a water based slurry. Crush up the tubes and wash them, and the wash water has almost all the phosphor and mercury, because it tends to bind with the phosphor (which is why you see so many T5 lamps that are pink, because the tiny amount of mercury in them has been adsorbed onto the phosphor coat strongly), and then you simply use eddy current sorting to pull the metal parts out, and melt them down again, and the glass goes into a furnace to make new ones. CFL units harder to recycle, you have to separate the electronics and the tube, and then mostly just recover the copper and dump the rest, and the same for LED lamps, if recycled only the copper is stripped, all the rest is just more waste to be dumped or buried somewhere. There was a brief period where CFL units had replaceable glass, as the idea was to reuse the electronic unit ballast and have a simple east to replace light emitter, but the integrated CFL quickly killed that as they were cheaper to make. Still have a few of those units around, and they will outlast the LED units very likely, as I also have a good supply of the PL flourescent lamps they use.
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  7.  @BRUXXUS  0.2mg, you get more mercury in a fillet of mystery fish from the golden arches, and you are eating that as an organic form. The CFL dose is mostly bound up in the filament and the phosphor by the time it fails, with very little getting out the tube unless broken.
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  8.  @alexatkin  Race to the bottom price wise, meaning they cut corners on every part inside. If a part is 0.001c cheaper, but will only last 1000 hours, it will be used instead of the part that lasts 10 000 hours. Same applied to every part, including the light emitting part, where the current is so high you get appreciable lumen degradation within 100 hours, but the initial spec is still met, and lifetime is slashed. LED the same, you get all sorts of claims for 100k hours, but the actual LED units will never be run at the rating, instead run at 5 times the 100k hour current, and run so hot that they are just short of melting themselves free of the board. If you are lucky they will do 2000 hours of running, as the manufacturers know almost nobody actually writes the install date on a lamp, and keeps the invoice (printed on thermal paper that fades to invisible in 6 months as well) to claim for the failures, plus the QC on them is essentially zero in the plant, just a check the unit is assembled externally before putting in the box.
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  9.  @playgroundchooser  Well, where I live cold weather performance is never an issue, unless they are in a freezer it would be highly unlikely they would get anywhere near freezing. Hot weather cooking them to death is more of an issue, have had a few melt the cheap plastic they were made from.
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  10.  @playgroundchooser  Not a worry in a fitting made of ceramic and cast iron outside. worst damage would be cleaning the soot off the fitting, and getting the remains out. Of course being built of brick and concrete fire is a lot less of a worry than in the USA, where the houses are made of kindling and fire accelerant, just waiting for the spark. Been in 2 structure fires, and smoke was the biggest worry, not the structure.
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