Alternative to a CFL flood

Flood alternative

Last weekend I did a survey of my light fixtures at home and bought enough compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) to change nearly all of them over from incandescent. I’ve had a few CFLs in the house for a while and learned early on that paying for the good name brands results in lamps that last much longer and is worth the extra cost. I bought the GE brand because of the wide range of shapes, wattage, and colors available. I learned a few things this time around. You can get a lot more light out of that bedroom ceiling fixture with CFLs than you can with incandescent while not exceeding the power rating of the fixture and still use less energy. Some of the squatty globe style ceiling fixtures may require a smaller CFL form factor than you would like to use. The good news is that when you break a 23W CFL trying to make it fit, all of the glass and mercury is caught by the globe. I have a lot of X-10 switching in the house. It seems that the 3-wire X-10 equipment has no problem with the RF interference from CFLs. The two-wire switches can be a problem though. I have only one circuit, in the garage, that is problematic and I’ll follow up when I have a found a solution. The so called full spectrum (5700K) lamps are pretty blue and the warm white (2700K) lamps are very yellow at the lower wattage. The high wattage warm whites are much less yellow. Finally, I have yet to find a CFL spot or flood lamp that comes on bright when first turned on. They start out very dim and take a minute or more to approach full brightness. This can be good or bad depending upon what you need. In the master bath, I turn one of those on first in order to let my eyes adapt slowly. I like that a lot and I don’t need a lot of light when I am er… umm… sitting down for a while, however, in the kitchen I want those spots to be bright immediately. I found one lamp that is made of a conical spiral tube that works better as a flood.