Funk Babblings

You've all probably heard by now that there's a worldwide movement for governments (starting with Australia, a proposal in California, and Canada, the EU, and India may jump in) to ban traditional incandescent light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescents, with the goal of reducing energy use and wasted energy, and from there mitigating global warming.

Generally excellent goals that I support.

But the compact fluorescent technology being sold today just isn't entirely ready yet.

This was made even more clear to me today when I needed to replace three bulbs in the house. I happened to already have one CF on hand, the only one sold at the local stores. It emits approximately the light of a 60W incandescent.

Trouble is that none of the bulbs I need to replace are 60W bulbs. One is a 75W, so the CF is too dim. Another is a 40W, so the CF is too bright. The third is a three-way (30-70-100 or 50-100-150, I don't remember which), so not only is my CF the wrong brightness but it won't adjust brightness like the old 3-way bulb, and I've never seen a 3-way CF in a store (nor have I seen one that works properly with a dimmer).

And all that ignores the weird fluorescent color temperature, which I could probably get used to, and tendency to exhibit a 60 Hz flicker, which I'm rather sensitive to. (I tend to like LED lights better, but they're not bright enough to light a room yet.)

So far the best use of CFs in my house seems to be some enclosed in-ceiling fixtures, except that those are explicitly disrecommended due to heat issues. (Strange, since CFs are cooler than the old bulbs.)

So on the one hand I encourage efforts to move toward less wasteful energy usage, but on the other hand I'm frustrated that people pretend that CFs are ready to be a direct replacement for incandescents in all cases.

(If you can ignore a few comments about "fanatic environmentalists" and the like, this article actually makes a decent comparison between the two types of lights.)