What have I done?

[da]

I was just in the Student Centre, and one of the groups that was tabling is giving out free compact florescent bulbs. The goal is giving one bulb to every Canadian household, and they say they have the sponsors to do that.

I took my bulb, looked at their website, and was impressed enough by it to go back and ask a few more questions and whether I could give some out to my non-student friends and colleagues. For my troubles, they handed me a teeshirt and a bag of 50. :)

If you see me face-to-face in the next month, ask for your free bulb.

I might just start carrying a few around and giving them to strangers- I see very little downside to that, other than a little bit of talking-to-strangers phobia, which I'm trying to counteract by talking to strangers (win!). The package has non-embarrassing marketing materials, and the form-factor of the bulbs is smaller than a regular incandescent, which is an improvement on most of the CF bulbs in our house. They also claim to be instant-on, which is also an improvement. [edit to add: not instant-on, but maybe half a second, which is acceptable.]

(Boy, they might have made a mistake by handing me 50... how many unconverted lights does our house have?... hm, OK, not many.)

The women I spoked to said roughly half the people who took bulbs were also putting their names down to be contacted about becoming a volunteer.

Comments

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

Sh. can't stand the frequency of light those emit, so although I totally don't notice, this household is going to remain a CF-free zone, alas.

Oh, well, our electricity is cheaper :)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Hm. Perhaps if the country tries banning incandescents as Ontario is (going to try) doing, Quebec will refuse on principle.

Shame about the light frequency. I guess it's a much narrower band, even the "sunlight" CFs, though I bet eventually they may get around that problem too. I wouldn't want to have to design them. :)

[psychedelicbike.livejournal.com]

What you're used to is an incandescent light bulb, with a fairly faithful blackbody radiation curve. Fluorescent bulbs, well, fluoresce, at several distinct wavelengths. These fluorescent wavelengths have been chosen to combine and give something that looks like a complete white spectrum to the human eye, but they are of course only distinct wavelengths, and this may cause some objects to reflect light differently, and change colour.

The good news, though, is that there are many different "colours" of CFLs, which whave different phosphors in the bulb, to fluoresce at different frequencies. Have you looked at the light emitted from any of the "warm" CFLs? Be sure to look at different brands, because it's likely that the perceived colour temperature will be slightly different on each of them.

We've purchased some more expensive CFLs, as well as some from the dollar store. The dollar store bulbs look positively blue next to the more expensive ones.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Just another data point:

I did a bulb comparison last night, and I have a hard time telling the difference between the light from these CFs and an incandescent. Surprisingly so. They say "2700k" on the box, which suggests they're toward the warmer end of "warm white bulb".

Still, I know from vision issues, and that might not help S. at all. ;-P