"What Happened to those curly-Q light bulbs?" Topic

Remember 3 or so years ago when the government decided we should no longer use the regular old 50 cent light bulbs and started making us switch to those curly-Q things. Mercury filled little rascals that required a hazmat suite to change if they broke.

They even went so far as to raise the prices on those old 50 cent things so we would have no choice but switch. Yup, those old 50 centers now cost a whopping 2 bucks plus each. I bought the curly-Q's… it got to the point that they were cheaper!

So now look. The cury-Q bulbs are gone. None at Walmart, none at ACE. The ACE guy said they were no longer available. What?

BUT, those old 50 cent bulbs are still priced at over 2 bucks each. What the heck is going on? Have we been had? Scammed once more? Why isn't someone screaming about this? Besides me I mean…

Get LEDs, more efficient, longer lasting, and relatively inexpensive at this point

Preach it, Brother!
Preach it!

I'm still using old bulbs I bought before the forced changeover. The LED are more efficient so when I run out I'll use those. Anything more I'd say would have me join Tango in the DH.

There are no lights in the DH, btw.

LEDs are very spif. I've started switching to LEDs. I still have some of both the fluorescent and incandescent bulbs left.

IMHO…

TL;DR – CFLs were/are evil, LEDs are awesome.

Long version, they passed laws against 100W and so we started buying bulbs labelled "95W" and for all I know they were the same bulb. CFLs saved a lot of electricity, so I used them, but I also had them break and yeah, toxin everywhere. I had to handle broken bulbs for my friends, too. They made ugly late, sometimes ugly noise, didn't work with dimmers and timers, didn't fit in some fixtures, they were just awful. I, too, bought up a bunch of old-timey incandescents before they were outlawed, and used them when necessary.

But since I learned about LEDs in the '70s I've wished we could use them for useful light, so when they got decent coloring and decent prices I pulled all the CFLs and most of the incandescents out of the house and now love the LEDs. I gave the last of my illicit incandescents to Goodwill. I'm hoping to convert the bathroom and kitchen fluorescents to LEDs next year.

If you buy good quality LEDs you will use trivial amounts of electricity and won't replace them for a decade. Make sure you get the color you like. If you look on Amazon you can get them to fit all your cutesy light fixtures with the strange bases and bulb shapes. The future is here, and it's mercury free.

Landlord tried to use one of those curly bulbs in a kitchen light fixture at my apartment. Too large to fit the glass cover over the bulb. Luckily,I had some of the older incandescent bulbs in my closet space,so he used those.40-60 watt variety. Got those at Family Dollar.

Drawback to LEDs is that most will not work in an enclosed fixture, or will burn out faster. So those recessed and/or "dome" ceiling lights that are ubiquitous in homes built from, oh 1960-2000 (just a few, like, nearly ALL of them), don't work with LEDs.

Hurray for progress!

But otherwise, I like LEDs, and am glad to see those ity ‌‌ CFLs go away.

As a related rant, this reminds me of the golden age of the LP/CD wars.

C. 1985-90 remember then? CDs came in, most everybody thought they were great (esp. the record labels, who couldn't sell as much new music anymore but gladly sold you your old music all over again on CDs costing twice as much as your old LPs). The usual excuse given for why CDs cost twice as much as LPs? "They cost more to produce and don't sell as many copies." Then the labels stopped releasing records in vinyl, giving consumers no further choice in the matter.

Flash forward to c. 2000, and vinyl has gone the way of the dodo and CDs rule the roost, now cost pennies to produce -- yet the standard price remains roughly twice what a new LP used to cost. (Yes, there are bargain-priced CDs, but there were bargain-priced LPs, too.)

Flash forward again, year c. 2015, and vinyl begins to be ultra-cool again for some strange reason -- given that it was dowdy and uncool as recently as 1990 -- and hipsters wanna buy turntables again and spin platters like they were back in Riverdale with Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica. Suddenly labels start cranking out vinyl reissues and new LPs again-- and quelle surprise, they now cost twice as much as CDs!

Le plus ca change….

Yeah,well, Archie and the gang are back too:

youtu.be/oM7aCpsYDfE

I'll ask the wife -she puts everything away