Ode to incandescence
Ihaven’t been to the mountaintop like Martin Luther King Jr., but I have seen the light. And for most of my life, it’s been incandescent. I’m talking about those lightbulb-shaped light bulbs that cartoonists place in thought balloons to indicate the birth of an idea. How simple it was to unscrew a dead one and replace it with a sibling.
Incandescents never played games. When they had served their time they just went black or departed with a colorful flash. Screw in a new one, and if the package said 100 watts, that’s what you got. And the cost? Peanuts.
Oh, there were fluorescents, too. Long, white tubes usually grouped in twos, threes or fours worked well on a kitchen ceiling or suspended over a workplace or workbench. I’ve seen fluorescents that were 8 feet long. Some genius even came up with a circular model.
They also were easy to control, warning of trouble by flickering. You just plugged in a new ballast (don’t ask), and there you went. Later, ballasts were built into the bulbs. How easy can it get? But I still favored the glowing filament.
Nowadays ... well, don’t get me started. It’s too late. I’m started.
In 1976, a General Electric engineer took a thin glass cylinder and twisted it into a Dairy-Queen-like spiral. Lo and behold, the CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) was born.
On the plus side, they were quite efficient, giving out much more light than you were paying for. Fourteen watts of energy, for example, provided 60 watts of illumination, according to the packaging. Oh, and they had stamina, with lifetimes estimated at nine or more years, based on usage of three hours a day. But they were expensive, most weren’t dimmable and they contained demon mercury, resulting in a disposal problem. I found that some gave off a bluish hue, and they never seemed to match the lighting power of the wattage touted on the container.
I remember getting my first one free as a promotional gimmick. Then, as the price began coming down, they were everywhere. Try to find one now. It’s possible that there are a few leftovers, but they’ve been phased out. At the moment, I have eight in use and 14 in reserve.
I thought the future had arrived with CFLs. But then a brilliant substitute reared its bulbous head. It’s called the LED (lightemitting diode), and now we’re talking about lumens, not watts. Here, again, the price is falling and, in fact, Duquesne Light is offering 10 of them to customers free if you take a brief audit online or by phone and plug in your account number.
More good news, in my experience, is that there is a 100-watt equivalent that kicks out 1600 lumens, virtually the same as the incandescents did. And it draws a mere 15 watts. But LEDs, like CFLs, can be temperamental. I tried one in an outdoor fixture with a timer and it didn’t work. Ditto in a lamp with a dual-intensity switch.
Furthermore, you have to decide whether you want “soft white,” “warm white,” “cool white,” “daylight” or “natural light.” As Charlie Brown would say, “I can’t stand it.”
By the way, did I mention halogens? No, I didn’t, and I don’t think I will. It would be like adding another lamp cord to trip over. Or something.
Ed Wintermantel is a retired newspaper writer and editor living in (on?) Mount Washington (edwintermanyel@comcast.net). He points out that it takes two journalists to change a light bulb — one to change the bulb and the other to ask questions, take notes and file the story.