Put your pledge on the map. and if you want they'll send you a free zipper pull too when you take the pledge.

 

Good stuff. Our local hardware store sells all wattage types of CFL's for only 75 cents each. All of my lights are CFL's. Even got a kitchen ceiling fixture with two 16w CFL's that put out 150watts of equiv light for only $1.99!!!. Can't beat the prices....They even make the globe style CFL's for bathroom vanities, only 9watts for equiv of 40watts of lights.

 

I have more CFL's than you can shake a stick at and I've got to be honest with you, the light output ratio is at best 4:1, and for many of mine, it's more like 3:1. In other words, an 11w CFL puts out about as much as a good 40 watt bulb. My 15w CFL's are roughly comprable to my GE "Reveal" 60 watt bulbs... or not quite. Ended up using 17w CFL's in the room where I really wanted solid, bright light output that I previously had 60 watt Reveal's in. I have 14w globe style bulbs for both my bathrooms and they are MUCH brighter than the 35w and 40w bulbs they replaced.

Pretty much all the ones I have are 5000-5500K since I hate yellow light. Most all the important ones are fast-start too - light output within a tenth or two of a second of hitting the switch. The lesser important ones are the old style CFL's that take a second or so before they come on, but I can live with it. I keep saying I need to write up a review some day of all the bulbs I've tried. I think I've sampled at least 8 different varieties of CFL's by now and they really are all different! Different shapes, sizes, quality of light, time delay to light output, percentage of usable light in the first few seconds after start, and so on.

 

Almost all of mine are spiral quickstart CFLs from Commercial Electric. 14W --> 900 lumen @ 3300K. Nobody can tell the difference from normal light bulbs. Home Depot has 6-packs of them for $10.

My favorites are the R30 floods- no more heat rays of death beaming down on you! Unfortunately I cannot find PAR30 form factor for my swivel floods, even on line.

Any CFLs with globes or other treatments often have lower light output- the light is still from the spiral element, but the outer globe absorbs some. I'm not ready to swallow $5 per for most of those- I have a lot of 25W vanity-type bulbs to replace!

 

That E-star website locks up my browser solid. I tried it twice and both times my system came to a stop.

 

Where are you getting yours so cheaply?
We've replaced all of ours with these about 4 years ago, the average cost per light was around $4.00.

From the website:
In my own experience it has been just the opposite. The bases keep burning out.
I've easily replaced about my house and a half for failure.
For example our master bath has a long, 12-bulb fixture, so we replaced all the builders 60w incandescents with 7w globe-enclosed fancy style CFL's, along with the other two bathrooms, they have 5-bulb units, so that was 22 CFL's in all.

After ~3 months we had 10 out of 22 eventually fail for what ever reason but have not replaced them...these expensive units remain dead, still screwed in the sockets. It's kind of embarassing when we have guests, so we shuffle them around so the working ones are in the "public" bathrooms.
Only 2 bulbs light in that 12-bulb unit.

I replaced 4 150W floods that light the back with 25w CFL's. These fixtures get rained on so I bought the correct CFL designed for this, along with one in the front that illuminates the flag pole at night.
The first one burned out after about 3-4 months, so I replaced it with another CFL. A different one burned out a few weeks later so I replaced it. (~$8.00 ea) and when the 3rd one quit I gave up and replaced with 75W incandescent ones.
Eventually all my outdoor CFL floods failed within 5-6mo so I don't buy those expensive ones anymore.

With the exception of my ceiling fan fixtures and chandelier lights (CFL's can't be dimmed) and exterior floods everything is switched over. My other light fixtures are the dual socket-type and in almost all cases one of the two is burned out/not working. (No CFL is older than 4 years)

At this rate I'm always tempted to save some money and go back to the wasteful incandescents.
So......Where can I get the good deals on these that other people get? I've been getting all mine at Home Depot/Lowes.

Thanks in advance

 

None of the ones I purchased have been cheap, but I've yet to have CFL burn out, ever. I get all mine from http://www.topbulb.com although I'm not averse to buying the $12 and $15 bulbs. Maybe the expensive ones aren't so failure prone? Maybe I just haven't had any of mine long enough to have them fail? Perhaps under/over-volt problems in your electric company's production are burning our your CFL's quicker?

 

From my experience what burns out a CFL the fastest is if it's turned on and off frequently, such as in any automatic sensor type fixture.

 

I've had 3 fail out of 12 over 3 years- 1 14W, 1 3-way, and 1 19W, all from Commercial Electric. All seemed to have the same failure mode- the glass cracked where it joins the xformer base, with evidence of scorching at the point of failure.

Not sure if that comes from the xformer operating out of range over/under and delivering unregulated voltage to the electrode, or if its from mechanical stresses in the glass at that point- the entry into the base is certainly the weakest point, especially if the spiral part was hand-torqued at any point in the past.

Overall, I am very happy with my CFLs