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, 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. This in
itself is not an entirely new idea. In the late 1950s, Mazda
offered a clever device under the "Netaline" name, which was
essentially a normal linear
fluorescent fixture, which had a normal lamp cap, so it just plugged
straight into your normal light fitting. As far as I can
tell, it never really took off, I guess a factor in that would be that
a fluorescent fixture of that vintage with a metal case, magnetic
ballast and a five foot tube is going to be a rather weighty
combination - weighty enough that it could cause conventional
lamp holders problems. Especially bearing in mind that a BC
fitting only has two little lugs holding the lamp in. The
idea obviously has not died entirely however, as I spotted a modern
version of this very thing in a DIY store in April 2005. I
would have bought it for this site, but finances did not allow for that
unfortunately. I don't think my parents who were there with
me could quite understand why I was looking so excited when I found it
though...While it was a good 30 years ahead of its time - this was
essentially what was reborn in the 1980s in greatly shrunken form as
the compact fluorescent lamp.
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.
Page last updated:
28th April 2023: Revised Statcounter code to allow for HTTPS operation.
