Mitt Romney's wild exaggeration is a joke, but the lack of 100 watt (and soon 75 watt) bulbs pisses me the hell off. CFLs are *not* a valid replacement - as was pointed out above, the color temperature may be OK but the spectrum is often terrible; you see every color but only half of each one; the worst bulbs (and it seems to be impossible to figure out which are OK and which aren't) cast a ghastly light that makes it nearly impossible to read or judge color, and makes everybody look like zombies.

Combine that with the fact that 'instant on' with CFLs in my experience means 'instantly turns on at 20% brightness, achieves full brightness in three minutes'. We've got a CFL in our entry room that works about as well as a half-lit candle for the first 45 seconds it's on - which are the only 45 seconds you're in the room, as you traverse it with five bags of groceries and a randomly-oscillating probability field of a four-year-old boy.

LEDs often seem no better; even if I could afford them, it's a crap shoot with color quality, again. I got several quite-expensive ($200+) photo LED panels for my work, and they're fantastic. The $30 consumer bulbs that are supposedly as bright as a 75-watt incandescent and 5000k? My ass. I put one over my dining room table as a test, and I could literally barely read. The light was maybe 70% as apparently *bright* as a 100 watt incandescent bulb, but it somehow managed to turn a copy of The Economist into a mimeographed version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The other problem with most LED lights is the light *distribution* - even the ones labeled specifically to have full distribution act like spotlights. This, of course, means that your bathroom sconces suddenly light up a 100-square-centimeter area of the ceiling and fill the rest of the room with the equivalent of a 20 watt incandescent, but over random shards of the frequency spectrum.

High quality LED lighting can be done; the photo lights I have are proof. They're brighter than the 1500-watt halogen work lights we have, the light is great, and the damn things can run on *batteries*. But whatever they're putting in consumer bulbs is freaking awful - expensive as hell and nearly worthless for illumination.

So now I'm stuck with a choice between cutting the brightness of my house by 25%, using CFLs that probably will make my eyes bleed but some of them are OK and who knows which ones, or spending $2500 on photo light panels and lag-bolting them to the ceiling...

The only other option seems to be figuring out a way to use three-way bulbs in normal sockets. I'm not sure what happens if you do this (maybe you only get the lowest wattage, or the highest?) but the damn three-way bulbs are still widely available in 75/100/150. I've tried the normal-form-factor halogens, too. The package said that it was 72 watts, 100 watts equivalent. But it's a not CFL, I think yay, good light!

Well, I get home and feverishly screw the thing in, and lo, dim, eyeball-burning light. They managed to combine the power consumption of an incandescent with the unbearable spectral response of a CFL - genius! And why so dim? I read the box further about the '100 watt equivalent' claim. Turns out the 72 watt halogen bulb is 1150 lumens is 'equivalent' to the 100 watt tungsten at 1300. I guess the 72 watt bulb's lumens are brighter than the 100 watt bulb's lumens, and I just can't tell. *rolls eyes*

At any rate, I don't philosophically oppose government regulation in situations like this. It's often needed to provide a prime-mover impulse for something everyone knows they ought to do but the market won't support due to a kind of tragedy-of-the-commons effect; seat belts in cars are a good example. The small percentage of people who refused to spend more for a car with belts, combined with the larger percentage who'd just go 'meh' and default to no-belts, was enough to tip the balance so that belt-including manufacturer A would be at a slight disadvantage vs. old-skool manufacturer B; in an industry where every percent is crucial, a forward-thinking but slightly more costly option could be critically damaging business-wise. The problem is solved by the government saying, OK, kids, everybody do this at once and we're all even.

But in this case, the problem is that there really *isn't* an alternative that does the job. There just isn't - or if there is, I can't find it or can't afford it. All this is is a regressive tax on the poor that lowers quality of life for everyone who can't afford a kitchen bulb that's good enough for Annie Leibovitz.

If this plastic does the job, sign me up - recycling be damned. I just want to light up my fucking house.

How many commentards does it take to change a plastic light strip?

Michele Bachmann felt so outraged ... that she introduced the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act

And you wonder why the US is in such a mess with kooks like Bachmann in office?

LEDs are fine

But you have to pay proper money for them. The 2700K Philips ones we have are all excellent; brighter than the quoted incandescent equivalent would suggest, good colour and spectrum, instant-on, no failures. Sainsbury's usually have them for £10 each.

The cheaper LEDs, like the MR16 ones we have in the bathroom, have bad spectrum (purples and greens are enhanced) and 2/10 failed in the first year.

CFLs almost universally suck; the much-recommended Megaman ones actually have the worst warmup time of almost three whole minutes. The best CFLs we have are the 20W GE spirals, which are about as good as a 60W incandescent. Provided you don't have to look at them.

Now if they could *print* the electronic ballast along with the lamp.

That would be pretty impressive.

Just saying.

I still find it amazing...

that the replacements for incandescent lights contain all the circuitry in their bases to convert the AC into the required supply for the light... surely it would make far more sense to have a decently specced conversion unit that then runs the required supplies to the lights and thus removing all the excessive gubbins that currently gets sent to hazardous waste landfill because of the mercury in the tube... then the mass going to landfill will be far smaller and far fewer resources are required to manufacture the bulbs themselves...

if people went onto LED lighting for their homes, then the lighting circuits could be plain 12V DC.

Virtual skylights of plastic fantastic?

I've always wanted something like this. I think it would be amazing to take out many of the suspended ceiling panels and replace them with light panels from this technology. It would have the feel of having skylights in the office. You could conceivably even create whole seamless lighted ceilings. It'll finally feel like we've moved into the 21st century.

There's a lot of emotion here regarding something so mundane.

Really, government could have worked their way around this ludicrously emotive issue by a simple type approval specification. For example, an industry standard stating that devices for providing artificial illumination should have a visible light energy output to input energy ratio of greater than 0.7 if they are for individual sale on the open market. This should be in addition to something along the lines of... should have a rated MTBF of greater than 5 years continuous use, have a manufacture energy consumption of less than XXX Joules per unit. The toxic chemical specs are already covered by the likes of RoHS and other similar legislation.

Hats off to the bio-lumo-panel johnnies! Well done. I look forward to tiling my ceiling in inexpensive and efficient illumination units.

Grow Up

The whole point of energy-saving lighting is that we cannot simply keep wasting irreplaceable fossil fuels on producing unwanted heat just for the sake of a bit of wanted light. You might find it inconvenient that you aren't allowed to buy certain kinds of light bulb anymore. Well, tough: the rules are there for other people's benefit. You might also find it inconvenient that you have to drive your car on the public roads and go the long way around, rather than taking a short cut through someone else's land. They probably like it that way.

When (and it's coming within our lifetimes: generating capacity per person is steadily decreasing) electricity is rationed and you can choose between having a 100W filament bulb on for an hour or a 20W CFL on for five, I'm betting the energy-saving option won't seem so bad.

Not so fast!

The article makes it sound as if you'll be able to go to your local hardware store or home improvement centre next November and buy these things. Even though the article says they're going into production next year, I seriously doubt it. Five years from now is more likely. We've seen lots of pie-in-the-sky technologies touted in magazines in the last 40-50 years that NEVER made it to market, and many more that have taken a decade or more while mass production and reliability concerns were ironed out.

Electroluminescent film technology isn't new. It's been used for night lights and instrument panel backlighting since the the 1960s at least, although those early versions haven't been bright enough to use for general room lighting. They've all suffered from degradation in humid environments. Where they're theoretically supposed to last for 25 years or more, I've had to throw a number of electroluminescent lights away after 5-8 years as they turned black along the edges and the overall output of the lights decreased to the point where they weren't even good enough to use as a night light. It remains to be seen if that problem has been solved in this new, brighter version.

The hum and flicker problem with fluorescent tubes was solved long ago with electronic ballasts that switch at 10 kHz, far too fast for the eye to see and using components that inherently don't vibrate and emit sound. A wide variety of phosphors are available that emit everything from natural daylight to incandescent light color temperatures. Even the latest LED lights can't compete with fluorescents in energy efficiency. I expect fluorescent lighting to be with us for a long time yet.

Finally, to replace fluorescents, these lights would have to put out 50 to 100 times more light per unit area. Fluorescent lighting, although uniform and shadow-free, is surprisingly DIM. I've suffered with eye problems for decades due to having worked in fluorescent-lit office environments, and by actual measurement found their light output to be about 1-2 percent that recommended in the Westinghouse Lighting Handbook for paperwork at a desk. That, more than their color or flicker, will cause eye fatigue and eventual eye damage.

I'll believe it when I see it and after I've had a chance to measure actual light output in a realistic application.

CF aren't that bad

When I had my house built, 20+ years ago, I opted for recessed, dual 13W CF fixtures in the kitchen and hallways. Over the strenuous objections of my wife, who claimed they were cold, harsh and flickered. I installed 2700K bulbs, which to my (color blind) eyes looked indistinguishable from incandescent. She admitted they did to her as well. And the only time they flicker is when they are failing.

Granted, we did get a batch of Philips "green" (low mercury I assume) bulbs, which on average, lasted less than a year, but other than that we get many (10+ in some cases) years from them. The best part is the power use, 1/4 that of incandescent, and the rebate I got from the power company which pretty near paid for the whole install.

Yes, I'd do it again. Fluorescent, because of the mercury and lack of aggressive recycling, is not my first choice, but I can certainly live with the quality of the light. I look forward to testing the "plastic lights"

Poor recycling

CFL's contain far more in the way of unpleasant chemicals than incandescents.

incandescents always ended up in landfill, but this presented no particular problems.

Almost all CFLs still end up in landfill. Most people have no idea that they should be recycled, and no readilly available method of doing so. I pass my local tip most days, so no big deal to drop in. My elderly mother in law cannot walk the 50 yards to the other end of the block of flats, where the recycling bins are - so everything has to go in the nearby landfill bin. To get to the tip she would have to take a taxi, cost around £15. Not going to happen.