EU CFL Ruling Raises Vision Concerns

Some UK charities and vision experts are calling into question the European Union decision to phase out traditional incandescent light bulbs in favour of Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs). The EU requires traditional filament bulbs to be phased out by 2016, and 100W bulbs will become unavailable later in the year – from September they will no longer be sold in the UK. Already 100W traditional bulbs are becoming hard to buy and there are rumours of people hoarding them.

Concerns now being expressed do not relate to the issue of the tiny quantities of mercury in the bulbs that was raised a year or two ago (largely misguidedly – while in environmental terms far more mercury is released into the environment by the manufacture of traditional bulbs). Instead they focus on potential difficulties for partially-sighted people.

In a BBC report, David Adams from The Royal National College for the Blind, noted that “They do come on slowly and if there are steps or objects in the way, people can fall over, have accidents and that’s the biggest danger.” There have also been concerns about the actual brightness of the bulbs. In the same report, Larry Benjamin, of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, is quoted as saying, “Incandescent bulbs give a general bright lighting source and the worry is that if they disappear, patients won’t be able to have the same level of lighting in their homes. There’s quite good evidence that low lighting can lead to a greater number of falls in people with low vision.”

The technology employed in CFLs has improved rapidly over just a few years. When I originally converted my house to CFLs in the late 1990s, the only options were inductively-driven lamps, and – like traditional fluorescent tubes – they operated at mains frequency, which in the UK is 50Hz and can result in a visible flicker for some people. Today, CFLs have high-frequency electronic driver circuitry and this is no longer an issue. Similarly, in the old days, all the CFLs you could get had a high colour temperature phosphor, giving a more bluish, harsher light. But very quickly other phosphors with a “warm white” colour came on to the market and now the colour temperature is not unlike the familiar tungsten-filament bulb and there is a wide range of options.

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Once again, in the old days, the lamps took a while to come up to full brightness, especially in cold ambient temperatures. Modern technology has ameliorated that too – they take only a few seconds nowadays – and though there is still work to be done here, and this is a valid concern, it is not likely to be so for much longer. Combined with the fact that running CFLs for less than 15 minutes at a time can somewhat shorten their life, the simple answer is to switch them on a little earlier where possible. They will still save tons of energy (and tonnes of CO2 emissions).

A different issue is the question of the light levels being too low. This can be blamed at least partially on the CFL manufacturers, who can be accused of having been a little optimistic in giving comparisons between the light output of regular bulbs and that from a replacement CFL. Instead of comparing like with like, they tended to suggest that, say, a 60W bulb (850 lumens light output) could be replaced by an 11W CFL (about 600 lumens – the light output of an incandescent bulb consuming around 45W). The US Government’s Energy Star program suggests that a CFL equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb should run about 13-15W. The fact is that CFLs save so much energy that there is really little reason not to go for a higher-output bulb. Buy an 18-25W CFL, for example, and you will have the light equivalent of a 75W bulb (1100 lumens) and still save a lot of energy. So that knocks that problem on the head.

Concern has also been expressed that CFLs do not offer the same contrast as traditional bulbs, which might be a problem for the partially-sighted. The answer here is that if this really is an issue, there will not be an availability problem with plug-in replacement halogen lamps, which produce a prodigious amount of light and still save some 30-45% of energy use. The downside is that they have traditionally been more expensive, but prices have fallen dramatically in recent years and are likely to continue to do so.

Another, related, consideration is whether the lighting setup is actually right for the job. For reading, for example, you really need local task lighting: relying on overall room lighting is arguably not a good idea whatever the light source. Tabletop low-voltage halogen lamps are ideal for this: they are now very cheap, as are replacement bulbs. The whole question of getting the right lighting for the job, at home and at work, is a topic that really needs to be addressed more thoroughly – homes and gardens magazine journalists, sharpen your pencils!

Image: Wikimedia Commons