Rethinking the Role of the Automobile

[BailOut]

Originally Posted by stuffy

a few years ago i switched every light bulb in my house to cfl's except for my office which has daylight spectrum bulbs due to the small amount of natural light available.

the cfl were supposed to last much longer than a normal incandescent, but i have replaced them all within 2 yrs, while my office bulbs (which are on all day long and sometimes in the evening i might add) are ALL still going strong.

it was kind of annoying when considering the cost of the cfl's.

I've heard similar complaints from other Canadians, stuffy. There was some troubleshooting done and what seemed to be the issue was that some Canadian power providers and/or grids have trouble maintaining 60hZ delivery. Many readings were taken as low as 58.9hZ and as high as 61hZ (sorry I don't have a link, but this stuff was burned into my memory because I was learning about electricity at the time).

The ballast inside the base of a CFL is designed to work at exactly 60 oscillations per second (my local grid is 59.9hZ, which is close enough), and counts on it for proper excitation of the photons lining the tube. Anything lower than 60hZ will make the ballast work overtime to try to keep an even excitation of the photons (which stops the flickering), and anything over 60hZ will cause the resistors and gates in the ballast to be pushed past their service limits.

You can see if this is your issue by watching a Kill-A-Watt for a few hours while you have its display set to Hz.