

I have a big house in Silicon Valley. That means I’m a millionaire.

I wish my bank account reflected that status. If I told Jim Louderback I was a millionaire, he’d probably cut my salary.

In fact, I’m a millionaire in name only, and then only if I could sell my house for close to a million dollars. We were lucky when we found this house, about a mile from Apple Computer’s Infinite Loop and close to one of the bigger Hewlett-Packard campuses.

It’s a weird house, too. Imagine a two story house, sliced vertically down the middle, and reassembled in a cockeyed manner. We call it a “dual split level” layout. It’s ideal for me, because the daylight basement—a California rarity—is at the opposite end from the upstairs bedrooms. I get to make as much noise as I want. It’s all about testing systems, of course. You know, running those speakers at full volume and checking out the latest HD-DVD or Blu-ray movies at 0dB.

But I digress. Because the lab here is in the basement—as is my wife’s home office. She works for a Fortune 500 company, but almost none of her co-workers are in the Bay Area, so her company brought in a couple of phone lines and pays for broadband service.

Until recently, I’ve been running a single 300W halogen torchiere near my office door. Occasionally, I’ll fire up one of those articulated desk lamps and pull it down into a PC case I’m working in for additional visibility. My wife is much more attuned to light than I am, and the only way she can work in the basement is to have a 300W torchiere and a pair of 75W desk lamps going.

That’s a lot of power consumed through the day, just to generate light.

In the evening, it gets worse. Upstairs are more halogen torchieres and a number of standard incandescent bulb lamps or ceiling fixtures. At night, our home is ablaze with light. I might as well just set dollar bills on fire.

So I began experimenting with compact fluorescent bulbs. A couple of years ago, I added a second torchiere in my office, that’s only used occasionally. That one has two of those circlet fluorescent lights, one smaller than the other. It works fine, but the light output seemed a little anemic. Every once in awhile, I’d check out compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL)—really spiral tubes—but my wife never warmed up to them. “The light’s too harsh,” she’d say.

I’d point out that the 5000 degrees Kelvin color temperature of the CFL bulb was closer to daylight than her 2700K incandescent or 3000K halogen lights, but that got me nowhere. So I pretty much gave up.

Until recently.

In the garage, I have a photography setup that had consisted of a pair of 500W incandescent floods on tripods standing next to a table with a white dropcloth. After nearly setting the light fixture on fire by leaving the 500W bulb on for too long, I realized I needed something cooler. So I discovered the EZcube Light Tent.

In fact, the light tent part of the EZCube setup isn’t that different from many similar tents. What’s more interesting were the 32W and 55W CFL bulbs that the company sells. That got me interested in CFL bulbs as a lighting source. Now, the CFL bulbs that EZCube are also 5000K lights, so that wouldn’t solve my wife’s dislike of the light temperature. But as I was impressed by the light output, I began hunting around. I discovered that there now exist a host of 2700K CFL bulbs that screw into light sockets and come in a vast array of sizes and light output.

Lots of CFL Bulbs

The bulbs above range from 20W to 42W, and offer light output ranging from 1300 lumens to 2700 lumens. At the upper range, that’s a lot light. The bulb at the top, middle is actually a 32W, 3-way bulb, so you can even have that capability—though I noticed that the lowest setting of the three does flicker slightly.

In general, though, flicker is not an issue with modern CFL bulbs. And those preferring incandescent light coloring can now get that, too. One thing you do have to get used to is that CFL spirals have a warm up time—they take a couple of minutes to reach full brightness.

CFL spirals are also bulkier than standard light bulbs. For example, we have a pair of electric lamps in our bedroom that were built from antique gas lights and have those lamp covers that used to grace gas lamps. Those covers would fit easily over a standard light bulb, but anything larger than a 23W CFL bulb wouldn’t work. Recently, I discovered a more compact 27W bulb (shown in the lower right corner of the picture above) that fits just fine.

Cost can be an issue. I’ve recently bought a few CFL bulbs from BuyLighting, and prices for the 27W compact bulb I like best is $9.95. But a 26W spiral goes for $5.95, and 23W units are only $4.95. Note that these bulbs typically last 4-6 times longer than an incandescent bulb. Factor in your electricity bill, and cost isn’t that big an issue.

What about mercury? Recently, a news article floated to top of the Digg home page about someone in Maine who had to spend $2,000 for a toxic waste cleanup when she broke a CFL bulb. In fact, that’s something of an urban myth. The amount of mercury in a CFL bulb is about 1% of the amount in a standard mercury thermometer. A bigger nuisance if a CFL bulb breaks are the bazillion tiny shards of glass that result from breaking the spiral tubes. Still, if you’re worried, you can check out the guidelines on CFL breakage and disposal from the US Government. When a CFL bulb fades out, you should properly recycle it.

Technology does move on, and we’ll likely see CFL bulbs and other technologies that reduce the power consumption of lighting. But for now, CFL bulbs seem a practical alternative to incandescent bulbs. Now I just have to figure out how to replace several wall-mounted halogen lights…

This Week on ExtremeTech
We’ve got a busy week coming up. Today, we’ve got a helpful guide on buying memory, plus an article on Intel’s new P35 chipset. Jason Cross has been busy checking out the first substantial DirectX 10 content, which happens to be Lost Planet from Konami, based on the Xbox 360 game of the same title.

Meanwhile Jeremy Atkinson’s been playing with a few gaming keypads, and will report his findings. By week’s end, we’ll have reviews of some P35 motherboards.

As usual, our weekly podcast will be up on Monday. Also, Patrick Norton and Robert Heron and the rest of the DL.TV gang will be giving you their skinny on the tech world on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Be sure to check it out.

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