Notes: |
The first
electronically ballasted compact fluorescent lamps were rather
expensive things, very well engineered too. In fact, it was
discovered that for the general market, they were indeed, somewhat
over-engineered. Making use of premium quality components and
very good manufacturing techniques. This led to lamps being
produced with lifetimes shooting up into the 15'000 hour mark, but
rather high price tags. I recall in the mid 90s, seeing
compact fluorescents on the supermarket shelves with prices starting at
around £6, and reaching into double figures for the higher
wattages. A 23W Philips PL-ET Pro set me back £7.99 in 2000 I
believe (may have been 1999 - can't remember precisely!).
While this was something hugely favoured by the commercial market,
where these lamps were finding an increasingly common place for areas
where round the clock lighting was required, it turned out that the
general public were in most cases more interested in the energy savings
gained by the use of compact fluorescent lamps than the overall
lifetime.
Of course, a number of manufacturers were quick to catch onto this
idea. The natural result being lamps based around precisely
the same technology, but with cheaper components being used, and often
the production being outsourced to countries such as Taiwan and China
to reduce production costs still further. It is for this
reason that in many places now, it is easy to pick up compact
fluorescent lamps in common wattages for less than £2 - in some cases
even less than £1. Of course, the lifetime of these lamps is
somewhat less than their more expensive counterparts - in face quite
considerably less. The average lifetime of your "cheap"
compact fluorescent being in the 5000 to 6000 hour mark. This
is of course still well, well longer than anything that can be achieved
by any common incandescent lamp (some higher end halogens can just
about reach the 5000 hour mark under ideal conditions) - and of course,
this still comes with the same energy savings as the higher end
electronic compact fluorescents too (though they're generally slightly
less efficient - not drastically though).
This is a pretty typical example of one of the cheaper imported compact
fluorescent lamps out there. A rated 6000 hour lifetime,
efficacy of roughly 50Lm/W, and packaging which features text so badly
translated into English that it's almost comical. There is
one thing about this particular lamp which makes it a little unusual
(in the UK at least), and that's the colour temperature. This
lamp features a colour 864 phosphor. This means that it's a
very cool white, in fact the 6400K colour temperature of this lamp is
meant to be equal to that of noon-time daylight. That
assumption would appear to be correct - my camera's colour balance even
agrees with it. For general lighting, I tend to prefer warmer
colour temperatures, but ideally, I'd prefer to have something like
this for illuminating a workbench or drawing board, as it's a more
natural light to work under. High colour temperature lamps
are quite hard to find here, as warmer (2700 and 3000K temperatures
being the norm) are preferred by the majority in the UK for general
lighting. Hence daylight temperature lamps are more of a
specialty item here than in many other countries.
One interesting quirk of this particular lamp is that it is totally and
completely - blatantly miss-labelled. It CLAIMS to be a 20W
lamp...when in fact consumes just a touch under 10W (it's about 9.5 I
think - the readout fluctuates from 9 to 10W - my wattmeter only has a
1W resolution I'm afraid). If you'd bought this expecting the
output to be that of a normal 20W CFL, you'd have been sorely
disappointed. Unsurprisingly for a lamp which can be obtained
so cheaply (less than £0.50 apiece when bought in bulk), the
reliability of these seems to be somewhat variable to say the
least. The person who donated me this lamp has installed
several of these in a commercial premises previously, and found that
while some of them failed after only a couple of days of operation,
some of them are still working to this day, after around 12'000 hours. |