Beginning late in October 2006, while hunting at my local Home Depot store for more dimmable compact fluorescent light bulbs, I was delighted to discover a new-technology dimmable light bulb with candelabra base. (The only compact fluorescent bulbs I had seen previously in candelabra base were non-dimmable ones from Ikea).
I soon discovered that these new bulbs were in fact quite different from compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), using a technology called "cold cathode". This is the same technology you probably already have as the backlight in your flat-panel computer display or flat-panel TV set. What's less familiar is that most people don't realize you can now get that same technology in a range of screw-base light bulbs you can use in your normal lamps, ceiling fixtures, and other places around your home.
Like CFLs, Cold Cathode light bulbs use a mercury vapor through which a current is passed, producing energy which causes a phosphor coating on the inside of the tube to fluoresce. Like CFLs, CCFLs produce something like five times the light per watt than incandescent light bulbs do. And like CFLs, CCFLs typically look like a glowing tube, either straight or (for screw-in lamps) in a spiral shape. But the similarities pretty much end there.
Well, and let me emphasize this, cold cathode lamps are (to a surprising degree!) different than either incandescent or compact fluorescent light bulbs. You will find that you will probably use them differently, and they do take some getting used to.
But after having lived with them for a while, I've totally fallen in love with them, and I am basically changing over my whole house to them.
This leads directly to one of the most interesting and intriguing properties of cold cathode lamps, and the way they behave in a home set up with the X-10 remote control system.
The (negligible) amount of power passing through the X-10 wall switches when they are turned "off" (not enough to visibly even make an incandescent filament glow) is enough to (barely) light up a CCFL light bulb. (I've come to call this "nightlight mode".)
In my house, I have had two of my three bathrooms set up with X-10 infrared-based motion detectors so the lights in the bathrooms would turn on when you walked in, and turn off automatically a few minutes after you left. One of my housemates hated the fact that when he would get up in the middle of the night to go use the bathroom, the lights would blink on right in front of him. By the time he would head back to bed, he'd be stumbling around in the dark bedroom now that his eyes had adjusted for the brightness of the bathroom. Now, with the cold cathode bulbs in that bathroom, he can use the bathroom in the middle of the night without turning the cold cathode lights in that bathroom "on" at all, because they produce more than enough light for that purpose in their "trickle power" mode. (If I ever do want those lights to be completely off, I can turn off the "disconnect" slider under the X-10 switch paddle or pushbutton switch).
In my downstairs "guest" bathroom, I still wanted to retain the auto-on, auto-off mode activated by the X-10 motion sensor. So there, I replaced the center bulb in the seven-bulb light fixture with one 15-watt decorative globe incandescent lamp (leaving the other six 3-watt decorative globe cold cathode lamps in place). The filament of the one incandescent lamp in the fixture both allows the X-10 wall switch to "see" the remote control signals on the power line, and at the same time "shunts" the power across the cold cathode lamps so they turn completely "off" when the wall switch is "off". So this allows that fixture to operate in basically the same way it used to when it had only incandescent lamps in it.
Those candelabra-base decorative globe incandescent bulbs are generally only widely available in 25 and 40 watt sizes. (A 15-watt size is available, but hard enough to find that I had reverted to using the 25 watt ones). Seven 25-watt bulbs used to use 175 watts in those fixtures (and I have one of those seven-bulb fixtures in each of my three bathrooms). Now, seven 3-watt CCFL bulbs use just 21 watts total, when they are fully illuminated... and produce very adequate light levels. In the case of my downstairs bathroom, my fixture there now uses 33 watts (18 for the three CCFLs plus 15 for the one residual incandescent) which is still a huge improvement over the 175 watts the fixture used before.
It's also intriguing that in that fixture, when the one (much-shorter-lived) incandescent light bulb burns out, the remaining CCFL bulbs in the fixture will instantly and automatically revert to the dimly lit "nightlight mode" (which of course does not interfere with me turning the light "on", or dimming it, using the local light switch on the wall as usual) until I get around to replacing the incandescent bulb.
So you have a choice (in multi-bulb fixtures connected to X-10 wall switches). You can either use the circuit in "nightlight mode" (no remote control, but you do have on/nightlight under local control, with local dimming if you have the rocker-type X-10 wall switch that supports local dimming); or you can have full X-10 remote control, including local and remote dimming and "full off", by adding one incandescent bulb to the fixture (or at least to one lamp connected to the circuit controlled by that wall switch).
I don't expect to be able to get rid of the last incandescent bulbs around my entire house. For example, the light bulb in my (self-cleaning!) oven needs to survive a temperature of probably over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit... and I don't think any cold cathode light bulb (or their electronic drive circuitry) can support that. I'll probably always have a few other special-purpose bulbs, in my sewing machine, appliances, or a few other places. As of the end of December 2007, I am down to just thirteen significant incandescent bulbs in my home... and seven of those are in my stove and ovens (three), refrigerator and freezer (three), and microwave oven...! Two more are outdoor patio and balcony lights which I virtually never use (I even hung an artwork over the light switch for one of them), two others are R-20 reflector-type bulbs (and I just haven't bought bulbs to use in those yet, and might actually opt to just replace the fixtures instead), one particularly difficult-to-get-to closet bulb, and the single odd incandescent bulb in my downstairs bathroom fixture (as already mentioned).
Otherwise, I now have 53 cold cathode bulbs installed, maybe another ten awaiting use, and am down to just about thirty fluorescent and compact fluorescent bulbs still installed. Those are normally still being used because they are in existing linear-fluorescent fixtures, or because (in a few places) I really need the higher lumens or other special characteristics (3-way light levels for example) that those special CFLs are still able to provide. Hopefully, CCFLs will eventually replace most of those here, too.
Meanwhile, I'm (greatly!) enjoying the experience of learning about and getting used to this fascinating and very appealing new lighting technology. (When I found and bought my first one less than six months ago, I had no idea what sort of revolutionary technological adventure I was getting myself into...!) It is HUGELY different than what I have been used to before, and I'm already starting to reconfigure my home accordingly... starting to use more light fixtures, and turning them on more often, adding more X-10 decorative rocker-type wall switches to take advantage of the (local) dimming capability, and so forth.
By the way, the X-10 plug-in lamp modules used with freestanding lamps still provide remote dimming and on/off control with cold cathode bulbs, pretty much the same way they did with incandescent or dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs. Occasionally (with some lamp modules and some bulbs) I will see a certain degree of "jitteriness" in the light output, which if it really bothers you can be eliminated (at the cost of losing the dimming capability) by replacing the X-10 lamp module with an appliance-type module.
There are a few places where I simply don't expect to light the area up as brightly as I maybe used to. To some degree, this is something I will just get used to. It's a small price to pay for my personal contribution to help stop energy waste, and global warming.
I know of three companies (I hesitate to call them "manufacturers" since I think all of these are actually produced in China) offering these CCFLs in the USA:
You can go to their Web sites to download their product catalogs so you can see what wattages, sizes, styles, colors and other forms they currently offer. But here are pictures of two of the various ones I use here at my house... the first one is the Litetronics 8w, the second is the TCP 5w decorative globe.
That's a good question. Expect to not find the models you want in local stores... but the companies can tell you who the local distributors are, and the distributors can special-order them for you. Home Depot Supply, the distribution arm of the Home Depot chain, does carry them... but their prices tend to be surprisingly high. I strongly recommend that you call numerous different distributors, local and perhaps not-local, for price quotes... you're likely to be very surprised at how different the prices will be from one source to another (and even from one model and style to another). You can also try looking on the Internet (Froogle is a good place to try) to compare prices from online sources. And try just doing a Google search, once you know a specific model that you are interested in, to find other Web sites which might have more information or otherwise list that model.
As of this writing, in early 2007, the only ones I know of on a retail shelf here in Dallas are the little 3-watt frosted torpedo-shaped bulbs, which Home Depot is selling for the very low price (comparatively speaking) of about $6.50 each. These ones have a candelabra base but do come with an adapter which allows them to be used in a normal light bulb socket too. They also come with a nine-year guarantee!
One article I read claimed that the amount of energy we WASTE in the USA because of incandescent light bulbs is equivalent to SEVENTY percent (!!!) of all the energy we use in EVERY car and light truck in America...! A staggering statistic. This means that even the much-talked-about raising of the CAFE ("Corporate Average Fuel Economy") standards from 25mpg to 35mpg, while useful, is a far less genuinely useful measure than it would seem... (even if!) we could TRIPLE the CAFE standards from 25 to 75mpg, and then replace the entire nationwide fleet of cars and light trucks, we would not save as much energy as we would by simply getting rid of incandescent light bulbs.
Also note that if you live in a part of the country where you air condition much of the year, the savings most people talk about (the energy savings in the bulbs themselves) are actually understated... since the energy savings are not just in what goes into your light bulbs, but you must also include the energy you otherwise use in your air conditioning to now pump all that unnecessary and unwanted heat outdoors.
One promising sign is that, during 2007, governments worldwide have started to act. In March 2007, Australia was the first country to announce a ban on incandescent light bulbs (although both Venezuela and Cuba have had light bulb exchange programs in effect a year or more before that). With breathtaking speed, Canada and the 27 countries of the European Union announced their ban shortly thereafter, and the US finally came around towards the end of the year. Most of these bans take effect from 2009-2012, although the USA is apparently going to be a straggler with some of the measures not taking full effect until 2020. And most Americans still don't really understand what our Federal government actually passed in that bill, mostly just hearing about the fuel economy improvements for cars.
What is still more screwy is that the technology that people and governments are mostly all talking about as the presumptive successor to incandescent bulbs is regular compact fluorescent, even though the (IMHO very superior) cold cathode bulbs are typically not even mentioned...! Even most conservation/"green" organizations (who ought to be more up on this kind of thing) are still babbling about CFLs and Compact Fluorescent, as if that were still the way to go.
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This page and all linked contents originating with me are Copyright (C) 2005-2007 by Gordon E. Peterson II, all rights reserved worldwide. Last revised December 30, 2007.