Alho
> We know no one really likes them but my local Tesco's has been selling
> CFL's (18w 20w and even some 23W) at 5 for£1. Not always in stock, but
> got to be worth buying some.
>
50p for 5x20w ones at Sainsbury in Winnersh this week if anyone is near..
Mike P
> We know no one really likes them ...
OK, maybe I'm no-one, but I prefer them to crappy hot yellow
19th-century-tech tungsten. The only place I use incandescents are a
couple of 20W 12V halogens in the cupboard-sized downstairs loo and a
mains GLS-style halogen in the PIR-activated outside light, where a fluoro
would be rubbish due to the frequent ons and offs and low temperatures.
Oh, and CFLs aren't much cop in lava lamps ;-)
> but my local Tesco's has been selling
> CFL's (18w 20w and even some 23W) at 5 for£1. Not always in stock, but
> got to be worth buying some.
Thanks, I'll take a look next time I'm near a Tesco.
Normally, of course, I don't go in.[1]
[1] g'wan, hands up who gets that reference? ;-)
--
John Stumbles
Who's *really* behind all these conspiracy theories?
The Philips ones come with a little leaflet to post to tell them how
wonderful they are. I'm reduced to filling them in and telling it like
it is. Mustn't waste the freepost.
In 2 bedrooms we have some bluey-green light, but we will have to
replace the single fittings with multiples to achieve sensible levels of
lighting.
In the 'music room' my daughter complains that she can't see her piano
music properly. All I get is moans.
Elsewhere the CFL candle bulbs are too big for the fittings, so the fake
candle bits have had to be discarded. They came from CPC. They seem to
have faded, as an air of gloom has descended on that room and we have
had 2 failed bulbs in the year in the '3 bulb 'candelabra'..
I'm not against FL's. The strip light in the kitchen is fine, but the
rating is realistic. Maybe if 30-watt CFL's were common and of
consistent quality, I'd become more enthusiastic.
--
Bill
Tesco's CFLs seem to be a mixed bag. There is one 11w stick lamp that is
the best CFL I have found so far - it actually has some output at the
red end of the spectrum, produces some useful light at switch on, and
warms up in a minute or two. They seem to last about as well as two or
three traditional bulbs. However anything candle shaped they do, seems
to truly awful. Short life, very slow warm up, and quite a variation of
different shades of green from identical new bulbs.
--
Cheers,
John.
/=================================================================\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\=================================================================/
> In message <7n342iF...@mid.individual.net>, John Stumbles
> <john.s...@ntlworld.com> writes
>>OK, maybe I'm no-one, but I prefer them to crappy hot yellow
>>19th-century-tech tungsten.
> Well, I've posted before and I'll repeat. We have installed these
> everywhere and they are terrible. One room has 2 x 3-bulb lights. By
> mixing and not matching, we can get the lights to come on and slowly
> assume reading brightness, but we have what it says on the boxes is the
> equivalent of 360 watts in the lounge. We used to run on 40 watt bulbs.
> Add to this one of the lamps glows green. The other green one in another
> room expired after about 2 months. They were badged "Ever Ready". One of
> the Philips ones lasted about the same time and was the source of a
> sizzling sound for the last 2 weeks of its life.
Not had any such problems: only the odd ones that go flickery or quite dim
just before they expire.
> In 2 bedrooms we have some bluey-green light, but we will have to
> replace the single fittings with multiples to achieve sensible levels of
> lighting.
> In the 'music room' my daughter complains that she can't see her piano
> music properly. All I get is moans.
> Elsewhere the CFL candle bulbs are too big for the fittings, so the fake
> candle bits have had to be discarded. They came from CPC. They seem to
> have faded, as an air of gloom has descended on that room and we have
> had 2 failed bulbs in the year in the '3 bulb 'candelabra'..
I don't have candle bulbs anywhere: they're just too naff in any
technology :-)
The least satisfactory CFLs I have, from the pov of warm-up time and
lifetime (though the current batch seem to be getting better) are GU10
equivalents.
You do have to take the incandescent-equivalent ratings with a pinch of
salt: I go for 20W CFLs in place of 100W tungstens.
> I'm not against FL's. The strip light in the kitchen is fine, but the
> rating is realistic.
If only one could get regular strip fluoros in presentable
non-style-challenged fittings :-(
--
John Stumbles
militant pacifist
The thing with cfls is, like linear fls, they range in quality from
excellent to dire. Picking philips wasn't a good start, and it sounds
like you've gone for too low power lamps too.
Try something decent like Osram, using 23w for 100w, 15w for 60w, and
11w for 40w.
NT
> Picking philips wasn't a good start [...]
IME the Philips 'professional' ones (PLET range[1]) are excellent. The
local John Lewis used to sell them but alas they only seem to carry the
subsidised stuff now. The better lamps do cost a bit more, but lamp
cost is down in the noise once you factor in the lifetime electricity cost.
> Try something decent like Osram, using 23w for 100w, 15w for 60w, and
> 11w for 40w.
Agreed - Osram 'Dulux' types are also very good and 4:1 ratio is about
right.
[1] Available from electrical wholesalers or see
http://www.lightbulbs-direct.com/category/275/professional-triple-turn-15-000hr-energy-saver/
--
Andy
Give it a few years and CFL's will be a thing of the past. LED's will
have become the norm. The latest from Cree ( http://www.cree.com/ ), the
XP-G with an R5 bin can produce about 139 lumens per watt. CFL's produce
about 60 to 72 lm/W and incandescents produce 8 to 17 lm/W
LED technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. OLED's offer up the
possibility of moving away from point source emmission of light. Quantum
dot LED's can produce any colour that you like.
I can speak highly of Prolite Spirals - very good light (I have the daylight
and that's good enough for me to spot the 3 different brands of pipe and
fittings on my white waste pipes from the kitchen(!). They do a warm white
too. Had 7 in service for a year and one died (unless it's the plug fuse -
haven;t checked yet - TBF it's in a hand lamp and does get knocked about)
but the rest are still burning strong and bright.
Haven't found Megaman and Varilight bad either.
Don't touch unbranded/wierd branded cheap crap IMO. I had some Tesco cheap
ones a few years back. All useless - very dim. Another brand I bought a
load of were "Your" (some chinese home grown crap) and they did run OK at
first, but dimmed out in about 6-9 months. Doubt their carbon footprint
even beat a filament lamp.
You generally get what you pay for (exceptionally lucky bargains excepted)
--
Tim Watts
This space intentionally left blank...
I am about to do something very similar. A transformer has gone in
the roof above the bathroom, so I'm going to replace transformer+MR16
halogen with GU10 fitting + CFL.
What brand of CFL did you fit?
I wish I could find some decent circular T5 fittings.
Poundland is still selling 100W Pearl Incandesent bulbs, 3 for a pound.
--
Adrian C
Clearly there is a variation in operation between manufacturer and light
design. The manufacturers should quote start up times on the packaging
as well as colour temperature.
>Poundland is still selling 100W Pearl Incandesent bulbs, 3 for a pound.
TJ Hughes* is doing 4 clear 60 or 100W for 99pee.
* A chain mainly based in the North selling pile-it-high, flog-it-cheap
goods purchased from emporia unable to sell them, m'lud.
--
(\__/)
(='.'=) Bunny says Windows 7 is Vi$ta reloaded.
(")_(") http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/windows_7.png
they were 6 or 8 for £1 last time I looked, but mixed wattages
NT
John,
Um..*thinks*...*faint bells ringing*...
Death Cab for Cutie? Shirt? Definitely Viv anyway.
Siteco do some quite nice linear and circular fittings, but aimed at
the office market so thoroughly modernist looking (and pricey no
doubt).
Thank you for pointing this out, I have bought a supply.
It really is very strange pricing �1 each or 5 for �1. I have paid nearly
�7 each for these in the past.
If you buy Megaman's very expensive GU10 CFLs make sure you buy them
from somewhere that will replace them when they fail at one tenth of
the advertised life. I fitted a dozen a year ago and 2 have already
failed after 900 hours use (compared to the 15,000 hours they
advertise). Unfortunately they were supplied by a subcontractor to a
builder who was doing some work for me so I have no receipts. Megaman
do not reply to emails or letters regarding their warranty policy, so
I'm about to involve trading standards.
Stumbles, you utter bastard ...
If it is a BDDB, I have it almost going round and round in my head, but
I have a problem with my record deck ATM
I can't get a grip on something meaningful
Spill the beans
--
geoff
> Stumbles, you utter bastard ...
>
> If it is a BDDB, I have it almost going round and round in my head, but
> I have a problem with my record deck ATM
Life's like that, isn't it? Only the other day was strolling through the
West End when, suddenly, I was set upon by hordes of fans and admirers who
wanted to ... touch my clothes: so I took refuge in a nearby cinema.
Normally, of course, I don't go in but that day I saw something that
really moved me. It was ... The Sound Of Music ...
--
John Stumbles
If we'd known how much fun grandchildren are
we'd have had them first
Obvious
--
geoff
Having just dug that out of Spotify
http://open.spotify.com/track/6rW7BEuiPPBuzx0uAkeh5a
That track is such a cacophony of hoots, cackles, and wails. Perfect
silliness, but can't quite hear an Angle Grinder being played...
--
Adrian C
>> Having just dug that out of Spotify
>> http://open.spotify.com/track/6rW7BEuiPPBuzx0uAkeh5a
>
> Sadly that doesn't do a whole lot on my Linux box.
>
Spotify works fine on Wine.
http://www.spotify.com/en/help/faq/wine/
I've got it in the workshop running quite nicely on a PII-400MHz PC on
the previous to recent release of Xubuntu.
--
Adrian C
>> Try something decent like Osram, using 23w for 100w, 15w for 60w, and
>> 11w for 40w.
I wonder what the design criteria is for 23w and 11w.
Why 11 and not 10? Maybe someone should make 98w tungsten.
I wonder how accurate the 11w rating actually is. Probably 15w in
practice.
--
Les Desser
(The Reply-to address IS valid)
> Yes, I know. I don't want WINE on my Linux machine
Who'd have thought - uk.d-i-y is full of Linux fans. (I count myself
amongst them.)
:-)
--
John Stumbles
Things don't like being anthropomorphised.
> Who'd have thought - uk.d-i-y is full of Linux fans.
Hmm Linux too popular - have to move to FreeBSD in order to remain elitist
and snobby...
But then what?...
;->>>
Oh, I've got an SGI IRIX box here (unfortunately as a monitor stand, at
the moment)
Cost �35K in 1993 or somefink.
--
Adrian C
Irix doesn't count - that just means you're a masochist!
;-O
> John Stumbles <john.s...@ntlworld.com>
> wibbled on Friday 27 November 2009 19:22
>
>> Who'd have thought - uk.d-i-y is full of Linux fans.
>
> Hmm Linux too popular - have to move to FreeBSD in order to remain
> elitist and snobby...
Been using BSD since about 1978...never wanted Linux (had a look, but...)
> But then what?...
Could fire up ANU News on VAX/VMS, I guess...!
--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
--
geoff
Not me, I have it all on vinyl ...
--
geoff
--
Rod
Solaris here. I did have to do software development on Linux for
a year, but it was a relief to get back to a professional Solaris
development environment, stable documented interfaces, rock solid,
debugable, etc.
A few jobs back, some colleagues were very much into FreeBSD, and
ported our products to it. It worked fine on small systems, but
didn't scale well to multi-core systems back then (gave the
appearance of a kernel that wasn't well threaded, although I
never looked into it to see if that was the reason). I don't
know if that's changed, but of course multi-core systems are now
everywhere because single core performance ran into the buffers,
so it's much more important than it was back then.
In the commercial space where I work, there was a very brief
period 15 years ao when it might have been considered as the OS
for some opensource apps, but Linux has killed it in that area,
and it's never had any serious commercial applications on it,
so it's completely vanished now. Main commercial use is probably
as an appliance OS, where the BSD licensing model works better
than GPL (as used by Linux).
--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
> A few jobs back, some colleagues were very much into FreeBSD, and ported
> our products to it. It worked fine on small systems, but didn't scale
> well to multi-core systems back then (gave the appearance of a kernel
> that wasn't well threaded, although I never looked into it to see if
> that was the reason). I don't know if that's changed, but of course
> multi-core systems are now everywhere because single core performance
> ran into the buffers, so it's much more important than it was back then.
I'm running FreeBSD on a couple of dual core machines (one in very heavy
use) with no problems. Also on a hyperthreaded CPU, for what it's worth.
All the others are single core (Pentium 4, lots of VIA C3s).
Not to mention Horace Batchelor...
(for younger viewers who didn't listen to Radio Luxembourg on a tinny
transistor radio tucked under the pillow at night)
Has to be Roy Rogers on trigger ...
--
geoff
In the commercial world, smallest PC-type systems I see used now
are 8 core (2 sockets x 4 cores each). I see more 16 core systems
in the work I do, but rapidly increasing use of 32 core systems for
virtualisation. It's well over a year ago now that we had to bump
up the #define in the Solaris x86 kernel for max number of cores to
256 (sorry, don't know which system(s) that's for).
Solaris sparc has been running on very many cores for some 15 years
now (and because Solaris x86 is mostly the same source, we don't
have much to do to optimise the kernel and libraries for large
numbers of cores - that painstaking work was done many years ago).
> Solaris sparc has been running on very many cores for some 15 years
> now (and because Solaris x86 is mostly the same source, we don't
> have much to do to optimise the kernel and libraries for large
> numbers of cores - that painstaking work was done many years ago).
Back in the last millenium when I worked at the local Uni's IT centre one
of my colleagues was waiting eagerly for the retirement of the big and
once-awesome Sparc so he could boot Linux on it and get 4 penguins on the
boot-up screen :-)
OT: did the Evil Empire ever get Hotmail running on it's own OS instead
of Solaris, as I understood it was when they bought it?
--
John Stumbles
It's bad luck to be superstitious.
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:44:12 +0000, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
>
>> Solaris sparc has been running on very many cores for some 15 years
>> now (and because Solaris x86 is mostly the same source, we don't
>> have much to do to optimise the kernel and libraries for large
>> numbers of cores - that painstaking work was done many years ago).
>
> Back in the last millenium when I worked at the local Uni's IT centre one
> of my colleagues was waiting eagerly for the retirement of the big and
> once-awesome Sparc so he could boot Linux on it and get 4 penguins on the
> boot-up screen :-)
I remmeber when someone I knew did that on a Sun and linux blew up
complaining about "too many PCI slots".
I came across a Philips application note that may explain something I
have wondered about, the lack of integrated ballast CFLs rated at 25W
and above.
Application note AN00048, "Self Oscillating 25W CFL Lamp Circuit" from
www.nxp.com/documents/application_note/AN00048.pdf states:
"The reason for the lamp power reduction to about 22 W is that there
are no THD-requirements for mains powers lower than 25 W so that a
preconditioner function will be obsolete."
This means that power factor correction would be needed over 25W,
which would make the lamp uncompetitive. The application note is
interesting, as it describes a circuit similar to many current CFLs.
MJA.
> On 2009-11-28, John Stumbles <john.s...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:44:12 +0000, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
>>
>>> Solaris sparc has been running on very many cores for some 15 years
>>> now (and because Solaris x86 is mostly the same source, we don't
>>> have much to do to optimise the kernel and libraries for large
>>> numbers of cores - that painstaking work was done many years ago).
>>
>> Back in the last millenium when I worked at the local Uni's IT centre one
>> of my colleagues was waiting eagerly for the retirement of the big and
>> once-awesome Sparc so he could boot Linux on it and get 4 penguins on the
>> boot-up screen :-)
>
> My one-and-only exposure to Linux on SPARC (which admittedly was some
> time ago) made me vow never to try it again. It was very broken.
>
Debian on Sparc was fine for me. Once the thing has booted, and bar the
device names, you wouldn't really notice the difference.
I happened to be going through the M9000 specs on Friday,
so it's still fresh in my mind. I guess Linux doesn't
often run a system which can handle 288 PCI slots!
I think on last millenium's systems, it was still over
100 PCI slots.
Just to show that things really are marching on, Cree announced on Dec
1, 186 Lumens per Watt from a High-Power LED
Lab efficiencies long ago passed the point where, if that
had been the limiting factor, LEDs would now be the norm.
The failure of the industry to bring any viable products
to the mass market has not been down to this.