Saturday, January 10, 2009

CF ya later

Friday night as the pizza was baking in the oven, I doomed our planet to some sort of WALL-E, futuristic, detritus-laden nightmare.

It wasn't by refusing to recycle the cardboard box that the frozen pizza came in. It wasn't by keeping the car running in the garage to keep it warm in case I had to run an errand. It wasn't even by creating a rudimentary bowling alley out of empty plastic water bottles.

Nope, I simply wrote regular light bulbs on the white board grocery list hanging in our kitchen.
Why didn't I write compact fluorescent light bulbs instead? Well, to put it simply, I've grown to dislike them more and more.

Sure, they are supposed to last longer. And they are supposed to demand more energy, reducing our energy consumption and making the world a better place. But (at least in this house) they don't work with the type of reliability that I would like. 

Meaning, when I flip the switch in a room that features a ceiling fixture using a CF bulb, sometimes, the fixture doesn't turn on. At least five times in the last year I've replaced a burned out Edison bulb (as I am now choosing to call the non-CF kind) with a CF and very soon afterward, the fixture begins flickering or simply won't operate.

I don't think I'm taxing the socket with inappropriate amperes or wattage or whatnot. I admit that I'm not quite sure WHAT I'm doing wrong. I just know that the CF bulbs aren't reliable in our home.

So, if I want illumination, I've gotta go with the Edison bulbs--deadly though they may be.

Unfortunately, since I hadn't committed myself to such Luddite tendencies until today, we didn't HAVE any spare Edison bulbs when I endeavored to replace the burned out bulbs in the office space this morning. So, I had to cannibalize the hall closet and one of the torchiere lamps in the TV room to make it possible to type this post under something other than candle light.

And as a result, my grocery list is now a weapon of mass destruction.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks for destroying the planet, jerk.