Apparenly they are a big theft item at hotels. Makes sense, they're not tied down, are small and expensive.
Thinking back on what to do if you crack one, what do you do if you break one at hotel? You can't open the window to air the place out. You can use the useless postcard to pick up the glass, but imagine calling the front desk saying "I broke a CFL, I wasn't trying to steal it and now there's a poison hazard in my room".
4 comments:
I have difficulty understanding why someone would steal one of these things... I'd be more likely to leave one there I didn't want.
I use a CF for my front-porch light. It's on most of the evening, and I don't care about the long strike time or color temperature so it's a good application. I put one in the hall when I wasn't living here yet, so I could leave a light on inside the house between visits without wasting too much electricity. That's about the extent of my interest in the things, I'm waiting for LED lighting to become consumer-ready, hopefully before the idiot feds' anti-incandescent regulations kick in.
The right way to do that would have been to establish a minimum # of lumens/watt and be done with it, but they'd rather go the prescriptive route they took with the MTBE debacle.
I switched a year or two ago. You can buy single CFLs for like 8 or Home Depot has a box of 4 for the same price. They come in 3 different temperatures. I quickly got over the warm up time and now don't really notice a difference. Except that I haven't changed a bulb in about a year.
I agree that if you get the right temp ones the light is good. In my kitchen I replaced 4 90 watt bulbs with 4 120 watt bulbs that use around 28 watts. Its brighter and the light quality is fine. I replaced one bulb at a time as they burned out and you could not see a difference in the quality of light.
The biggest problem with LEDs is they need a low voltage DC supply, so to plug into the wall current you need a converter. This is why they are popular in portable and auto application, but not as normal light bulbs. The led's themselves (even the white ones) are not that expensive, but trying to make a screw-in replacement is.
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