In which I kvetch about fluorescents

[zdashamber]

Homer: Come on, Flanders, there's gotta be something you hate. What about mosquito bites?
Ned: Mmm mmm! Sure are fun to scratch! Mmm! Satisfying!
Homer: What about, uhhhhh, fluorescent lights?
Ned: Oooh, they hum like angels! You're never lonely if you've got a fluorescent light!

I want to like fluorescent lights. Really, I mean, there's the living-lightly thing, and there's the not-burning-out-suddenly thing, and there's the freeging-politicians-jamming-'em-in-our-face thing. But they just suck. They create crappy light.

I've mentioned this to my friends some, and they're like "Oh, but those are bulbs you got from Ikea years ago! Things are advancing really fast!" But I've been doing a lot of research about light sources lately for an idea I have on backlit mouldings, and I can tell you that the trouble is: every single way to make light today that doesn't involve "heating something up" (ie, incandescents or fire) involves quantized light. We excite this thing electrically, and then it drops back down an energy level, releasing a packet of photons at a certain wavelength. Fluorescents have a vapor in them that glows at high UV energy, and coatings on the glass that are excited by that energy and then put out visible light droppings. EL, neon, LEDs, directly drop photon packets.

Here's a typical "cool white" modern fluorescent bulb's spectrum, from wikipedia. Then, a typical "soft white" incandescent bulb's spectrum from this page of many spectra. Then, sunlight. (I tried to find a directly comparable chart of sunlight with "counts" on the y-axis, but no love. However, the sunlight spectum image I have comes from a really neat page about researching (at Berkeley!) roofing tiles that reflect more light to reduce heat and energy use.)




It's just obvious that the incandescent has the fluorescent beat all to hell. At every wavelength the incandescent has more light. Fluorescents put on several coatings of different stuff to try to get a wider variety of light spikes, but after about three the coatings get too thick to be efficient anymore.

Light doesn't just matter to how an organism sees. Just a week ago at the work retreat someone mentioned that 70% of the light that a human brain concerns itself with doesn't go to the visual centers. There have been studies that found mutations in clock genes in people who get up at ridiculously early hours: normally, the first bright light you see in the morning re-sets your brain and that ticks down over the course of the day, counting out when you should sleep and wake again.

To me, it makes a lot of sense that the brain expects to get light on all the sun's wavelengths, and gets all screwed up if it's only getting 10 of them. Studies have found that people are more depressed and prone to act out under fluorescent lights. LCD screens are filters over fluorescent lights, and screw a lot of people up. Mice die faster. In looking through spectrum/lighting webpages, you'll find tons that talk about bird breeding, or snake thriving. Few seem to discuss that lighting bad for a mouse or a bird or a snake is bad for a human, too. Fluorescents are cheap.

So, going back a couple months, I thought I'd give compact fluorescents another try, just to see if they really had gotten better like my friends claimed. I stopped by Home Depot and got some brand-spanking-new compact fluorescents, in three different light flavors (based on "warmth", the degree-Kelvin measure of how blue the light is). I started with the lowest, "warm." Took those out after a day of use... Don't think you can slip sodium by me, assholes. If I wanted that "living under a bridge" look I could graffiti all the walls and pee in the corners, and it'd still be comfier. Orange! Grah!

Tried "cool white" next, and I've been there for a couple months. I can run 180 watt-equivalents of light instead of the pitiful 120 watts I could run before, and it's diffuse so that I have a better chance of reading stuff without shadows everywhere blocking, and it only costs 45 watts of energy so I can run the electric kettle at the same time without worrying about overloading circuits. And truly, the fluorescents have gotten better at not humming and not flickering. And yet...

The light is ashy.

I can feel my brain arguing with itself. "It's dark," say 95% of my light receptors. "No, seriously, there's light," says my visual cortex. "WTF pitch fucking black" say everything set up for light colors I'm just not getting... It's hard to tell whether my mood and pattern of living are affected, but I suspect they are.

I dunno. 120 watts really is pathetic.

Maybe if I try all three types of compact fluorescents at once, one in each bracket of the central fixture... Maybe I can finally get around to hanging the white Christmas lights all along the wall by my bed, and that would make up the difference in spectrum...

Upshot: politicians trying to ban incandescent bulbs are fucking smoking crack and oughtta be booted the fuck out of office. This is a health choice people need to be free to make for themselves.