With the rising cost of energy these days there's alot of recomendations to cut your energy usage by installing compact fluorescent lamps.

I bought a few of these things a yr or so ago and have had fifty percent of them fail. One lasted three months, one six and another seven. Had I not been present when the failure occured, there may have been a fire as they spew sparks and smoke out of the plastic base.

I have removed the remainder. DO NOT leave these lamps on unattended. Better yet, replace them with conventional bulbs and practice other ways to save energy.

I'll try to attach a pic of the last one that failed.

My picture of the lamp did not come thru as an attachment in the first post. I deleted the original post and tried to repost.
Now I'm getting an error msg says the attachment already exist.

I use them exclusively for home and work. Some are on 20-24 hours a day. They have never failed or had a problem. And we're talking dozens of them.

I *can* tell you the things that mess them up.

A) reversed wire
B) dimmer that doesn't automatically go to 100% @ turn on (I didn't know it either, but most electronic dimmers (like ceiling fans, etc.) turn on at under 100%... I don't know why that is.

If you have a proper wired socket/outlet, and you take a proper fixture, the compact flo. are a wonderful.

Pete

That is strange... I replied to your post, with experiences and similar to gottadiesel, but now my reply is gone. Your picture of a bulb base was present when I replied...

__________________
RM Smith
1988 560SL

"Where is it again that we are going, and why are we in this handbasket"?

A) Reversed wire? Think AC.

B) Most fluorescents will not work with dimmers.

HUH?? Fluorescent bulbs don't work on AC they work on DC. The ballast is in the base of the bulb.
What I think he meant by reversed wire is the hot wire should go to the base of the bulb.

I never had any problems with fluorescent bulbs. Thay can't be nearly as dangerous as halogen bulbs.

Danny

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Oh brother.

Do you know how many outlets I've come across where the hot and the neutral are reversed? The fixture will still "work" but you are sending the hot to the wrong part of the socket!!! The center of the socket must be hot!

Fluor. light will work @ 100-96% current (because of variations in lines) -- the problem is that, for example, Hunter Fans with remote dimmers, turn on at around 95% of the the actual current comming in. That makes the compact. flours go nuts. You'll see them flicker and do odd crap from time to time. If you turn the light off, and then brighten all the way, you'll see that the flicker stops. At times the humming noise you hear will stop too.

The other thing I forgot to mention is that certain brands are not as good as others. UL listing means nothing anymore. But niether does price at times. In NJ we subsidize this lights, so you can get a great light for 97 cents that is a 5 dollar light if the gov. didn't sub. it.

Hope this helps. If you want to know more about AC current run a google for "ac outlet wiring" http://www.school-for-champions.com/science/acwiring.htm

Good Luck,

Pete

I don't know of a single household-application flourescent bulb that takes DC input. Perhaps the cold-cathode florescent tubes in your LCD monitors, but I'm talking about bulbs that are made to be user-replacable.

Standard flourescent bulbs take a ballast (usually built into the fixture) but it does not convert AC to DC. It's just an inductor, which provides the proper electrical signature to the mains.

Now, it is true that compact flourescent bulbs do not run at 60Hz. They run at radio frequencies, to increase efficiency. Still not DC. That base is more than a ballast.

I have noticed that if you put a compact flourescent bulb into a resistive socket (i.e., very old and dirty), it will make some rather obnoxious noises which will probably make you want to turn the switch off as fast as you can get to it.

In the case of faulty electrical wiring, I believe that they can be very dangerous, whereas an incandescent bulb (including halogen) will show no ill-effects other than a slight dimming and warming of the socket.

If these were all of the same sort, purchased at the same time, then I think a reasonable question might be whether you happened to get bitten by some bad product.

There have been product recalls on at least a couple of compact fluorescent products (maybe more, that's just what I happened to have heard about). One case that I heard about involved items that hadn't earned the UL label they carried. If you still have one unopened, or the packaging from one (I don't archive the packaging from light bulbs), then you might be able to do some research to see if it's a "known bad" model.

You've certainly done the right thing to pull them; can't argue with the fact that yours are failing in a disturbing way. I don't think that it would scare me off from the use of CF unit in general, though. There have to be tons of them in use, so systemic problems will show up.

As a Toledo Edison customer my electric rates are quite high. Two years ago I began to replace bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs as they burnt out. At this time 90% of the house is on compact fluorescent bulbs. Depending on the overall usage my electric bill has been reduced $10-20 per month.

It all has not been wonderful.... Wanting some very bright light I have purchased numerous compact fluorescent bulbs that are equivalent to 100-200 watt incandescent bulbs. These have all been short lived with the longest being two months. Some time ago I decided no to use any compact fluorescent bulb larger than a 75 watt incandescent equivalent. Since then all been great and I am very pleased with them in every aspect. I now purchase mine at 1000bulbs.com.

Powering a CFL 180 degrees out of phase is not going to cause the CFL to fail. However, swapping neutral and hot situations are dangerous and should be corrected.

Most common dimmers (not all) work using a simple potentiometer to set the firing point of a triac. The triac chops the AC wave passing only part of the sine wave it to the load(lamp).

If you were to look at the output waveform of a triac dimmer on an oscilloscope, you will note the peak voltage stays the same. However you will see only a portion of the 60(or 50) cycle per second sinewave.

This chopping of the wave does produce some harmonic content. Radio interference is a result of the harmonics.

One thing I've notice here is the local AC powerlines are rich in harmonics as noted on several receivers all the way up to the 900mhz part of the spectrum. Rendering my location useless for my ham radio operation.

No triac based dimmers at this QTH.

I'm still wondering why my reply to your post, and your picture, disappeared????????????????

I was the first to reply, and your picture of the bulb base, disassembled, was attached.

__________________
RM Smith
1988 560SL

"Where is it again that we are going, and why are we in this handbasket"?

The first two failures where frome the same package. I kept using CFLs from other sources thinking that those were a bad batch. After the third failure (slightly smaller base and from a different source) I pulled the rest.

I have disected one that shows an obvious failure of one of the power bipolar transistors on the inverter pcb. The transistors epoxy case has cracked and it spewed its guts. Several other passive devices were burned beyond recognition as well.
Left unattended the plastic housed base could catch fire.

Now LED lighting...

So, The pic WAS there. Hmmm... I didn't see it so I tried to reply with the attached. No luck so I deleted the original then tried again re-naming the file. No luck.

Here goes again...

Getting this:

cfl0099.JPG:
You have already attached this file in thread : Compact fluorescent Lamps=FIRE!

What the heck... I'm an analog refugee lost in this digital spew...

Yep, It was there... You had a base with the PCB hanging out which looked like electric arc had occurred. Oh, well... Its not the first time this board has had problems. Even if you deleted your thread, I don't think it would delete any reply. I maybe mistaken here, but I thought you had to have admin privelages to remove an entire thread. I do know that if an admin deletes the first post of a thread, it will delete the entire thread. Perhaps you managed to do just that, deleted your initial post, which removed the entire thread.


You can re-post pic if you upload it again under a different name... The only way to do it I think.

__________________
RM Smith
1988 560SL

"Where is it again that we are going, and why are we in this handbasket"?