Another reason to hate CFLs ...

Agreed on all points. The lifetime of the CFL bulb seems to be dramatically less if the bulb is enclosed in any manner (covered lamp or reflector). See upper bar graph for 1,000 hr test at:

80% of the bare bulbs made it past 1,000 hrs (which still sucks), while only about 35% of the covered bulbs survived. If you run a lamp for 6 hrs per day (evening only), then 1000 hrs is only about 6 months. Not exactly my idea of "long life" CFL bulbs, many of which claim 6,000 to 15,000 hr lifetimes. If the 20% failure rate at 1,000 hrs figure is assumed, then after 5000 hrs, all of the test bulbs will be dead.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Cool stuff. Always interesting to "see" that what we perceive is not always (or often) 1:1 with what's really there.

Make Magazine vol 24 (due out any day now) will have a DIY article on a hand-held diffraction grating spectroscope.

(Note that as of today the link shows volume 23; subscribers should have received an email link to number 24).

There's also

It's kind of clunky (basically a kid's toy) but it does have an adjustable scale so it can be kinda-sorta calibrated using a known spectral line from a fluorescent lamp.

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

But can it grow superb colas?

--
Shit! I thought no one knew, goddammit!
http://preview.tinyurl.com/29p4ody
Me, jacking off! http://preview.tinyurl.com/3xpntge Available For
Lessons!

Bad, bad idea. That halogen bulb is not going to last very long.

Who asked you?

--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

Our eyes adapt very nicely to different color illumination. For example, we see "white" light from a flourescent fixture, while the light is heavily green tinged when viewed on an uncompensated photograph taken with a digital or film camera.

I've resisted subscribing because I know that I'll spend the rest of my life building and playing with interesting toys. Sigh.

Some more on the Star Spectrometer.

Kinda overkill for this application. All you need is a slit and a glass prism.

If you want really simple, there are diffraction glasses and slides:

If you're really into crude, you can use a DVD as a diffraction grating:

Ummm....

Black bulb???

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

You don't have to ask him, just put anything out where he can find it.

As to the hybrid lamp, probably a good idea if it was designed as a "transition" to give light while a slower (more efficient?) CFL comes up to full brilliance.

Otherwise it may just be another product for a need we never knew we had.

Jeff

What is it about UseNet that attracts "human beings" who have nothing better to do than behave in a nasty, insulting fashion to anyone who displeases their sense of arrogant self-importance? What do your friends see in you two, anyway?

I've had private communications with Mr Plow, who made it clear he has the absolute right to say whatever he likes, for whatever reason, and no one has any right to question or criticize him. He doesn't want friends; he just wants to be surrounded by people who will graciously allow him to abuse them.

You wouldn't dare spew your nastiness directly in the face of any member of this group. You're sniveling cowards hiding behind the physical anonymity of a UseNet group.

What rotten "people" you are.

PS: Posting anything in a group implicitly opens the subject for discussion.

So bipolar, not triacs, from the philips pdf. Also 105 deg C not F for the caps, previously stated

Yup, a lot of what we see is really what we perceive, and we're rather easy to fool.

Some illuminating illustrations of this are over at:

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

On 10/24/2010 8:32 AM Arfa Daily spake thus:

[snip]

First let me say that I totally believe you and your tale of woe concerning CFLs vs. incandescents.

But as someone else here pointed out, this merely points to what is apparently the comparatively poor availability of decent CFLs in your island nation compared to other places (U.S., for example). More's the pity.

And yes, contrary to your strenuous assertions to the contrary, there

*are* compelling environmental and energy-conservation reasons to switch to CFLs, and damn fast too. Not just some empty-headed notion from tree huggers.

But it would be in the best interests of UK citizens if they were presented a decent range of alternatives to incandescent bulbs before being forced to give them up. The process actually seems to be going pretty well on this side of the ocean, with many people switching on account of a good range of inexpensive alternatives to the old heat-producers.

--
The fashion in killing has an insouciant, flirty style this spring,
with the flaunting of well-defined muscle, wrapped in flags.

- Comment from an article on Antiwar.com (http://antiwar.com)

People like you have real issues. I have had 100% CFL's in my home for decades. Guess what, they are better than candles. I will be switching to LED's when they are available for all around use.

--
LSMFT

Simple job, assist the assistant of the physicist.

I've been buying various brands of CFLs in the U.S. for about 5 years, and initially, they seemed more problematic than they might be worth. The early ones were slow to attain their full brightness, colors of light were yellowish and reddish, and typically failed within a year.

The CFLs that I've found to provide "good" lighting, are the daylight or sunlight versions (various brands). Most of my lighting in living areas have fixtures that orient the lamps base-down, and the result is bounce lighting from overhead and adjacent wall surfaces. This type of lighting is very agreeable to me, and I don't particularly like to have a lamp shining directly onto something I'm looking at, unless I'm trying to get a close look at something within a piece of equipment.

Placing a cool or soft-white CFL near a 6000 degree daylight CFL, with both lighting a white wall, should reveal a very different color of light coming from the cool/soft lamp. The cool or soft-white CFLs were making many colors appear to be different in my comparisons.

Early on, I was glad to discover that CCD and digital camera devices worked very well with the higher light temperatures of 5000+. Around 6500 degrees works very well for my eyes and camera images, in my experience.

In the workshop, I found that the light from cheap workshop/garage cool/soft-white fluorescent twin tube fixtures was slightly uncomfortable (for my eyes), and that issue was fixed by also having a few regular incandescent bulbs in the work area. The result was an improvement but not as good as sunlight CFLs (for my eyes).

-- Cheers, WB .............

Thanks for the links, Jeff. Very interesting reading, as always. The last one shows very clearly why the human animal is 'at ease' with daylight, incandescent light, light from fire and so on, but in some cases - notably

*me* for instance - not with the light from CFLs. The discontinuity and lack of general 'body' to the spectrum is very telling. Also, interesting to see the spectrum from regular linear flourescent tubes. Those diagrams show me very clearly why I don't have a problem with the light from them. That just leaves (and begs) the question of why, when broad spectrum phosphors are obviously readily and cheaply available, as evidenced by their use in linear tubes, they are not using them in CFLs, instead pissing about with limited bandwidth emission triphosphor coatings, which produce the objectionable light quality that I, and others like me, are being forced to endure. Do the CFLs on sale in other parts of the world, in fact use linear tube phosphors ?

Arfa

"Rich Webb" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I wonder whether colour blindness has anything to do with this, and the reason why some of us seem to have a problem with the colour rendition of CFLs, whilst others don't ? Long ago when I was in senior school, I was tested for colour blindness, and was declared red blind and green insensitive (I think) which I understood to mean that I couldn't pick out certain shades of green amongst other colours, and couldn't see some shades of red at all. In normal everyday life, this has never caused me any problem, and as far as I am concerned, I see and distinguish colour as well as the next guy, (although maybe differently in perception) but that is assuming the natural condition of daylight, which all of the 'traditional' light sources, including linear flourescents, mimic reasonably well, at least at the lower end, and in terms of the spectra being reasonably 'bulky' and continuous. However, that is not the case for the typical CFL spectrum, which is *extremely* discontinuous. Could it be that the zero emission dips in the spectrum, correspond wholly or in part, to spectrum sensitivity deficiencies in my eyes, causing my colour blindness to become significant under that light, and leading to some colours all but disappearing to me. That would certainly account for why some blend colours like orange or violet on the resistor colour bands that started all this, become indistinguishable (to me) from the single colour components which make them up.

Arfa

Yep. It took me literally 20 years to get used to using ordinary fluorescent desk lamps.

Dunno, but I can guess that incremental improvements as a sales tool might be at work. If the industry produced the ultimate perfect CFL light, that lasted forever, it might as well close up shop after about

10 years. So, we have incremental improvements in order to inspire us to "upgrade" our lighting. Perpetual obsolescence is the price of technical progress.

This might help: 2700K (warm tone) 4100K (Cool White) 5000K (Natural Day Light) 5500K (Full Spectrum) 6500K (Day Light) from:

Presumably, you're looking for 5500K, which is commonly available. For example:

I don't know exactly which phosphors (or mixes) are currently in use.

I had the not-so-great idea of using my digital camera and some software as a spectrograph. I found what I thought was some suitable software:

It's really cool software, but never obtained anything like the CFL spectra on the various web pages. Seen any software that will take a solid color, from a JPG of a CFL lamp, and break it up into spectral lines?

Drivel: I was defrosting the fridge with a screwdriver and hammer, when I managed to puncture the cooling coils, releasing the gas. I hate days like this.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

My first wife did that circa 1974. You can patch the coils and refill them, HOWEVER what I did not learn until a few years ago is that you have to to empty the coils with a vacuum pump before you add new refrigerant.

Adding new refigerant to a system with air in it does not work very well.

You also may want to not mention this to anyone, don't you need a permit to release refrigerant into the air in California?

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
To help restaurants, as part of the "stimulus package", everyone must order 
dessert. As part of the socialized health plan, you are forbidden to eat it. :-)

shades

well

'bulky'

spectrum,

dips

them

Color vision is usually tested by seeing whether people can /distinguish/ colors, rather than identify them. Human males sometimes suffer from red/green "color blindness" -- difficulty in distinguishing them. My father had that problem; fortunately I didn't inherit it.

Peter Wensberg, a vice-president at Polaroid, reported that Dr Land ran the entire book of color-perception charts past him, and said he was the first person he'd met who failed every one. Whether this meant Mr Wensberg could not see color at all, I don't know. But he couldn't /distinguish/ them very well.

A co-worker once asked me to help with selecting colors for a page he was designing. It turned out he had red-green problems. I showed him a fluorescent-green pen. "What color does that look like to you?" "Orange". I don't know what "orange" looked like to him, but he couldn't distinguish that green from orange.

It isn't clear how the lack of red in fluorescent lamps would interact with red/green blindness.

For what it's worth, conventional "linear" fluorescents, regardless of their color balance, have never looked "right" to me. The better CFLs are the first fluorescents that look fairly natural.

I just use a garden hose hooked to the hot water heater.

(Ever since I ruined on with a screwdriver)

Jeff