Environmentally-friendly lighting that isn't hideous? A rant...

[regnaD kciN]

Forgive me from the start if this seems like flame-bait or mocking environmental sensitivity; I don't intend it to be. But I'm wondering if anyone has an answer to my problem other than "abandon hope, all ye that enter here."

For years, I have used CFLs in a few, non-critical areas of the house, but have shied away from them in main fixtures, simply because I thought they looked downright ugly every time I tried them there. But surely, I reasoned, times have changed -- technology is always advancing, and CFL lighting has become mainstream. Why, nowadays, it's nearly required, as incandescents are getting phased out and largely unavailable. Every so often, I think of the need to "go green" and am on the verge of converting to CFLs, but find myself holding back.

Well, yesterday was the point when I tried taking the plunge. One of the three "can" lights in the kitchen ceiling had died, and I was unable to find my usual R30 65w spots anywhere. The local Fred Meyer was offering a special on GE R30 "warm light" equivalent CFL floods; I wasn't thrilled about having to go from spots to floods, but that didn't seem to be an option in any format. These bulbs were GE, not a no-name generic, and I had read good things about GE CFLs before. It listed the color temperature at 2700K, which seemed more than warm enough.

So, I get home, pull out the deceased spot, screw in the CFL, and hit the switch. My immediate reaction was that this must be some sort of a joke; the light was dim and a sickly greenish-yellow, every bit as bad as the experience I'd had with CFLs in the old days. Since the other two cans still had their spots, you could easily tell the difference, with everything on the side under the new bulb appearing chartreuse compared to the pure white and accurate colors under the spots. But I figured it was unfair to judge it yet; after all, CFLs need to be warmed-up properly. So I left it on for several hours, and came back to check again. No luck; although the light had gotten much brighter (even, seemingly, brighter than the spots), the weird color-tint was still there. As a matter of fact, the increased brightness only made the sickly effect much stronger. After staring at the scene in disbelief, I found myself checking the other (as I said before, non-critical) fixtures in which we'd installed CFLs, and couldn't help but notice that they all put out the same sick yellow-green light, only seeming less noticeable because the lights were dimmer.

To put it bluntly, I found the light, when used in an important area of the house, intolerably ugly. Despite the claims of "vast improvement" over the past few years, I could detect no such thing in this new, brand-name bulb...just more of the same old ****. Is this the best we can hope for in environmentally-friendly lighting? I know that there are LED bulbs around, but haven't tried any, mainly because I don't feel like shelling out $35-$85 dollars per bulb sight-unseen. I don't want to turn into some sort of quasi-survivalist stockpiling bulbs, and muttering things about how they'll take my incandescent bulbs when they pry them from my cold dead fingers, but there's got to be some sort of better alternative other than getting used to ugly yellow-green light all the time. Seriously, there were points over the past night where I was thinking that, if what I was looking at was the future of home lighting, I was going to decide that, fire risk be damned, I was going to go back to candles!

[diane in sf]

1. Check around for deals on LEDs--they have a much nicer light. I got two at a trade show for $10 each

they were 60watt equivalents. Lowes or Home Depot may have a deal on them if your state is supporting that. I think they are in California. Company I bought bulbs from: http://www.viribright.com

[Nay]

2. I have the same problem. That light is butt-ugly, and the sickly color not only hurts my eyes

but it makes everything look indistinct and weird. And if I have to be near one very long, it makes me irritable!

For lights near me (for reading and the like) I bought a special lamp (an Ott light) that holds a natural-light fluorescent tube. It's made for people who need correct color when sewing, doing needlework, etc. in the evening. It's the only thing that has saved me.

[regnaD kciN]

4. As I have come to understand...

...the problem with CFLs is that the "color balance" is created by mixing phosphors of several different discrete colors (red, green, yellow, blue, etc.) on the inside of the tube to create a given shade of white. This means that, while the color output of an incandescent bulb forms a smooth bell curve centered on the given white balance, will all different hues on that curve being represented, the corresponding output of a CFL would be full of peaks (where the phosphor colors are) and valleys (where they aren't). Now, when you're looking directly at the bulb, that doesn't seem so apparent, which is why hardware displays can put a bare incandescent bulb next to a bare CFL, and the two will seem more or less the same. But, when you're looking at a room illuminated by light from the bulb, it's very different, because you're seeing reflected light from the objects, which have their own peaks and valleys of color in the paint used on them. If I'm looking at an off-white appliance illuminated by a CFL, I'm only seeing the places where the peaks of the CFL's color response line up with the peaks in the paint color used on the appliance. If you get a "valley" in the CFL light or the paint color, that part of the reflected spectrum will appear darker. Hence, in my example, the predominant hues of green and yellow. (If the color of an item isn't near-white, it will even be more apparent.) Worse yet, the areas that are not directly exposed to the light itself will be lit up by reflected light from other objects...which will already have been "comb-filtered" by the interaction between the CFL and the colors of those objects, which is why objects in partial shadow tend to look darker under CFLs than they do under incandescents. The only way, as far as I can tell, of avoiding this problem is for CFL manufacturers to figure out a way to mix many more shades of phosphors in their lights so that there's more of a smooth bell-curve appearance to the color response of their fixtures -- but I don't know if that's physically possible, and I'm sure it's a lot less economically-profitable than the technique they use now.

[diane in sf]

3. Here's a $10 bulb from Lowes (they donate blue)

http://www.lowes.com/ProductDisplay?partNumber=338802-75774-LA19DM%2fLED&langId=-1&storeId=10151&productId=3341246&catalogId=10051&cmRelshp=req&rel=nofollow&cId=PDIO1