Compact fluorescent lamps are one of the areas which have made very significant progress in the last twenty or so years. Fluorescent lighting has been around for many, many years - having made their first appearance at the World's Fair in New York in 1938 - but they've always been too big and often ugly for use around the general home. Aside from in garages, some larger kitchens, and occasionally for applications like lighting under shelves and things where the fixtures could be concealed. Philips however attacked this problem head on, culminating with the launch of the SL*18 lamp in 1984. This was a phenomenal breakthrough, being the worlds first commercially available fluorescent lamp which you could buy and fit into any normal lamp holder. It was not without its drawbacks however; it was heavy (Over 500 grams), far larger than conventional bulbs, and had an unacceptably long five minute run up time. Things however have come a long, long way since that first lamp. Though it still deserves a very, very big salute from all lighting enthusiasts, as it was the first lamp of its kind.
Despite their somewhat odd and rather futuristic appearance, the technology behind a compact fluorescent lamp isn't anything particularly new - albeit somewhat shrunken compared to what it's based on. Essentially it's just a fluorescent tube of a relatively narrow diameter, twisted into such a shape that the largest amount of tube can be fitted into the smallest area. Usually the tube is attached to a ballast module at the base, and equipped with a normal BC or ES cap, so that it can be fitted straight into a normal lamp socket.
In some cases, the tube and ballast unit may be designed to be separated, usually so that the tube can be replaced independently of the ballast. This design appears to have started to become more rare, mainly due to the fact that cheap electronic ballasts have become the norm, and that tube life has been stretched so much further - the Philips SL*18 had a rated life of 5000 hours for example, whereas the Osram Dulux EL lamps I've been using a lot lately state 15'000 hours on the box - often with the tube these days outlasting the ballast. The separate ballast/tube assemblies do still exist though, but they're less common as a retrofit now mainly intended for new installations. Philips PL*S and Sylvania's Lynx series are probably the best known of these modern "non retrofit" compact fluorescent lamps.
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20th June 2023: Minor changes to background page code to improve search engine performance.
