Not on my watch. We use carbon offsetting and clean power in our
office and are working with at least 50% of our clients to go green
and only purchase renewable electricity. That said, even with "dirty"
electricity, the fact is that power stations are under pressure to
become cleaner, both new-build and in operation, so that path of
development is not a dead end. I have the same problem with electric
cars, for now....

On Mar 1, 9:02 am, Victor Roberts wrote:
Paul M. Eldridge wrote:

A local movie complex recently replaced
the halogen PAR38 lamps in its main lobby and hallways with CFL PARs.
What was once a
warm, friendly and visually inviting place took on a dreary, almost
lifeless quality, and [...] these are good quality lamps
with a CRI of 86. [...] a halogen lamp at the same
efficiency as a CFL would provide us with all the warmth and charm of
incandescent lighting without any of the guilt and shame.

I suspect they used the wrong color temperature and perhaps
increased the light level. Another case where bad design
has perhaps lead to making many people believe that CFLs
cannot replace incandescent lamps.

Arrgh.

VR, despite the appearance I may be creating by responding with
contrary opinion to a fair number of your posts lately, I don't have
it in for you. Nevertheless, this what you've said sounds an awful lot
like the reaction I frequently get upon announcing I don't care for
sushi. Someone's *always* gotta take on a patronising tone and say
"It's not _all_ raw fish; you probably just don't like _sashimi_".
Typically they ramble on at length about quality and freshness of
ingredients, variety of non-fish-containing types of sushi, widespread
existence of poor-quality sushi on the local market and so forth
before I interrupt them to explain that I dislike the taste and
texture of the nori (seaweed) wrappers and the granular rice used in
most all sushi. Gee...turns out I do know the difference between sushi
and sashimi, do know the difference between good and poor quality, and
really, actually, genuinely dislike sushi *per se*.


With the help of a qualified lighting designer they should
have been able to find CFLs which would have provided the
same atmosphere. (Perhaps customers also need to convince
the industry to make lower CCT CFLs to match low power
incandescent lamp applications.)

It is quite likely there are many CFLs with which I have no direct
experience, but I have observed a great many different ones, and the
ones I find disagreeable outnumber those I find *tolerable* by at
least one order of magnitude, probably two. The CFLs I've encountered
that I genuinely like, I can count on one hand and still have enough
fingers left to eat a sandwich without making a mess. One is a Thorn
(now G-E) Double-D, which is one heck of a good product. The other is
a Type-A replacement glass-encased unit by Panasonic. Maddeningly slow
startup, but almost a dead ringer for a standard Type-A soft white
once it's up to temp. I suppose I could include a couple of higher-CCT
units I find agreeable for certain applications (but then I'd have to
eat my sandwich with the other hand!). I find most of the lower-CCT
CFLs emit a pinkish-yellow light I find severely annoying. The
manufacturers are just going to have to do much better than they
presently are.

On Mar 3, 2:37 pm, and...@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) wrote:

Burning fossel fuel to power them releases more mercury into
the air than an equivalent CFL contains.

Not on my watch. We use carbon offsetting and clean power in our
office and are working with at least 50% of our clients to go green
and only purchase renewable electricity.

That said, even with "dirty"
electricity, the fact is that power stations are under pressure to
become cleaner, both new-build and in operation, so that path of
development is not a dead end. I have the same problem with electric
cars, for now.

I'm out in the Caribbean this weekend working with a client to
implement cleaner practices and to maintain the standards of
lighting. The truth is that they can't have both without tradeoffs,
but we're really pushing the performance limits. Their engineers have
done a superb job over the past two years to switch over nearly twenty
properties to 2700K integrated CFLs. They have a way to go on dealing
with certain circumstances where CFLs just don't cut it. Of
particular note are applications which need strong accenting, such as
where a PAR38 is typically used for landscape lighting. The PAR38
CFLs are miserable. We're working through each of these cases one by
one (a big call in an organization with over 100,000 lamps in
operation).

Yesterday I read a press release from GE stating that they
were working on new technology that could eventually make
incandescent lamps as efficient as CFLs. The short term
goal is 30 lm/W. I can't find a copy of that press release
at the moment, but it does raise some interesting questions.

I have not had any connection with GE incandescent lamp
technology since I retired in late 1999. There were two
publicly-known technologies they were working on at the time
that, if improved, could raise the efficacy of incandescent
lamps to the 50 to 60 lm/W range.

The first is IR reflecting films, a technology that is
already in commercial use. Considering that 90% to 95% of
the energy generated by an incandescent filament is radiated
away as IR (depending upon where you define the long
wavelength end of the visible spectrum), using IR films to
raise the efficacy of incandescent lamps by a factor of 3 or
even 4 is possible. Low-voltage IR-halogen filament tubes
may already meet the initial goal of 30 lm/W. (Most
IR-halogen lamps are reflector lamps so I don't have ready
access to data on bare filament tubes, but this is what we
suspect Osram is doing with their e-Pro lamp.)

The second technology area is selective emitters. These can
be tungsten that has light-wavelength-sized patterns that
reduce emission of IR radiation while not reducing visible
emission, or they can be materials that are inherently
selective emitters. The prospect for these lamps was raised
by John Waymouth at LS:5 in York, UK in 1989. Research at
the old Bell Labs and more recently at GE R&D has shown that
it is possible to produce an efficacy gain through use of
patterned tungsten or alternate selective-emitting
materials. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one
has been able to develop a system that maintains this
efficacy gain for more then a few hundred hours at the
temperatures required for efficiency light generation.

This should be an interesting area to follow. Perhaps there
will be more information at Light Fair.


--
Vic Roberts
http://www.RobertsResearchInc.com
To reply via e-mail:
replace xxx with vdr in the Reply to: address
or use e-mail address listed at the Web site.

This information is provided for educational purposes only.
It may not be used in any publication or posted on any Web
site without written permission.

Victor,

There is a third option - higher temperature emitters. There is a nice
review of this in Milan Vukcevich's book "The Science of Incandescence". He
talks about GE's research on ceramic filament materials, especially the
carbides of tantalum and hafnium. Efficacy figures of 40 lm/W for a long
life incandescent lamp are quoted. But he ends up stating such problems as

Victor,

There is a third option - higher temperature emitters.

James Hooker <jdh@lamptech.co.uk> wrote:
Victor,

There is a third option - higher temperature emitters. There is a nice
review of this in Milan Vukcevich's book "The Science of Incandescence". He
talks about GE's research on ceramic filament materials, especially the
carbides of tantalum and hafnium. Efficacy figures of 40 lm/W for a long
life incandescent lamp are quoted. But he ends up stating such problems as

Is this before HIR?
If so, that would actually hit the lower - mid end of CFL efficiency.

I'd assume that mercury would be re-extracted and reused from whatever
waste products it's in.

Mercury is very inexpensive and the amount in each CFL is very small.
The value of the mercury in each CFL is far less than $0.01 and it has
to be cleaned by triple distillation before it can be reused in lamps.
If the mercury is recovered at all it is probably just sequestered to
prevent contamination of ground water.

In message <ebhmu2pvsd0qn3ia5mkan622a8if1k9486@4ax.com>, Victor Roberts
xxx@lighting-research.com> writes
Mercury is very inexpensive and the amount in each CFL is very small.
The value of the mercury in each CFL is far less than $0.01 and it has
to be cleaned by triple distillation before it can be reused in lamps.
If the mercury is recovered at all it is probably just sequestered to
prevent contamination of ground water.

It can be used in fountains...

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/bar/miro/Almaden1.html

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/bar/miro/Almaden1.html

Is this fountain and pool open? It's not the liquid
mercury that is dangerous, its mercury vapor.

--
Vic Roberts
http://www.RobertsResearchInc.com
--

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/bar/miro/Almaden1.html

Is this fountain and pool open? It's not the liquid mercury that is
dangerous, its mercury vapor.

"Daniel J. Stern" <dastern@engin.umich.edu> wrote in message
news:1173134756.594633.93650@q40g2000cwq.googlegroups.com...

On Mar 3, 7:13 pm, Victor Roberts wrote:
[snip]

I wonder if you could really detect which fixture had a CFL
if you didn't know from the start and didn't see it start
up. Have you ever participated in a blind lamp test?

I frequently play this game when encountering lighting devices in
which upon first glance the light source cannot be seen directly: Can
I correctly identify the type of source, CFL vs. incandescent? I make
up my mind what I think it is, then I go check. I don't keep formal
track of my results, but it seems like I am right about 75 to 80
percent of the time.

Based on the above description, I can immediately infer that either you don't
wear glasses of any sort or if you do, you haven't learned how to use them to
your benefit :-)

Those of us who have been blessed with myopia, have two additional tools at
our disposal:

1) Eyeglasses, which show a mini copy of the spectrum of any source when one
looks around the edge of the lens,
2) Unfocused vision, which allows the eye to make a pretty safe guess on the
color temperature of the source.

Using my glasses I can almost immediately tell whether the source is a CFL vs
incandescent. The gap between the Europeum red fluorescence and the Terbium
green bands around the green Mercury line in CFL's is usually resolvable with
glasses of around 4.0-4.5 diopters, so it actually manifests as a mini gap
consisting of two identical narrow copies of the source, one red and one
green. That's an immediate giveaway for CFL's.

On Mar 4, 12:22 pm, "James Hooker" <j...@lamptech.co.uk> wrote:

There is a third option - higher temperature emitters.

...and some interesting modifications of the familiar old Tungsten
filament. For example, Dave Dayton did some very interesting research
some years ago, with positive results, on increasing the efficacy of
filament lamps by doping the filaments with welsbach mantle material.

We set up four table lamps in a room. Three had CFLs
of different color temperature and one had an incandescent
lamp that produced just about the same light output.
The participants had no idea what types of lamps were
in the portable fixtures. The lamp chosen by the majority
of the people was not the incandescent. If I remember
correctly, it was the 3000K CFL.

I wonder if you could really detect which fixture had a CFL
if you didn't know from the start and didn't see it start
up. Have you ever participated in a blind lamp test?