chasfm11 wrote:jimlongley wrote:puma guy wrote:I was just at my local Home Depot to get some stuff I needed and decided to pick up some light bulbs. They only sell one variety of 100w bulbs. 4 for 5.97. The cheap Phillips I used to buy are on the bottom in 60W and 75W only, with no 100w at all and no sticker on the shelf for 100W. There were only about 7 -10 of each so I bought several. I was using the compact florescent bulbs but I got tired of paying through the nose for a 6 year bulb that lasts a year.
Started before bambam and his minions, 100W incandescents are pretty much gone, and 75W on the way out. CFLs and LEDs are the future.
If you are only getting a year out of a CFL, you have issues with your electricity.
Not true. I have had CFLs in some of my outside lights for several years. They are burning out in about 9 months. The electrical current to the outlet is solid at 124v. The CFLs cycle on a photo eye daily. The CFLs are inside reasonably large glass enclosures.
My limited experience suggests that CFLs only have longer life if they are on and don't go through a lot of on-off cycles. YMMV.
First of all, "The electrical current to the outlet is solid at 124v." is not even possible, current is measured in Amps, not Volts. If the voltage at the outlet is "solid at 124v" you have something special going there because the voltage should fluctuate some as the loading changes up and down the primaries. But be that as it may, voltage is just one little part of what your electricity consists of. There are several other possibilities that crop up in the world of electricity, such as excessive harmonic frequencies on your power lines (which you may even be causing yourself) or even a poorly conducting neutral which can show a voltage drop at the outlet that "seems" normal while still causing issues with sensitive devices, and even though they haven't told you so, CFLs are sensitive.
Heck, even CFLs can cause problems with CFLs. Because of the way fluorescent lights operate, they have a tendency to rectify the currents that flow through them, causing the frequency of the current to change some as it flows (this is oversimplification) and what comes out of the light may be significantly different than what went in. One of the biggest noisemakers the power industry has ever had to deal with has been buildings with huge numbers of fluorescent bulbs, such as large businesses, schools, and factories. And of course the power companies don't monitor the frequencies present on their transmission lines, so they depend on the phone company to tell them when they have a problem because they are interfering with the telephone system. And then it's a fight to get them to fix it.
The power companies MUST deliver 120v +/- 5% and 60Hz +/- 1% and anything outside those norms must be fixed.
One problem being that the power companies SAY they don't carry anything but 60Hz, that their systems are designed around 60Hz and will only 60Hz. Of course that's not true, but that's their mantra. So the guy with the machine shop down the road using synchronous motors and rectifying voltages back onto the line, and the school down the street, and your local Home Depot, all can be contributing to noise pollution on your power grid, and it CAN and WILL have a deleterious effect on consumer electrics and electronics.
And then there is the good possibility that you have one of those poorly conducting neutrals I mentioned above (or poorly conducting phase wires for that matter) where although your standing voltage, measured by that meter you stuck in the outlet, looks normal, as soon as it is under load, the story changes significantly.
If I were you and losing CFLs at that rate, I would go through your electrical system and make sure all of your joints are tight, then monitor your voltage for a period of time, and then see if you can borrow or rent a spectrum analyzer (I wish I still had mine, but the phone company owned it) and see what OTHER frequencies are getting delivered to your house (assuming you are not generating them yourself.)
BTW, my computers and the big TV (which are noisemakers) are isolated from the power grid by my uninterruptible power supplies, so that they don't get excessive noise from outside and don't put any out there either.
ETA, by the way, your electric eye might be killing your CFLs for you, if it opens only one side of the line when it turns off, if so then there is ever so little capacitive leakage that occurs through the CFL. Go out on a really really dark night and shade the CFL from ambient light and turn off the electric eye (if necessary shine a flashlight in it) and see if the CFL is glowing ever so lightly. If it is, then you may have found at least part of the problem.
All of the above was a vast oversimplification.
