10 Questions for . . . Ed Hammer, CFL Inventor

In this installment of 10 Questions for . . . , Associate Editor Kimberly Janeway speaks with Ed Hammer about his 1975 invention, the compact fluorescent lightbulb, and why it took so long for this innovation to reach the marketplace. Hammer (shown with the first CFL) has worked in the lighting industry for 50 years and holds more than 40 patents.

How do you feel about being called the father of the CFL? And does Edison inspire or haunt you?
"Father of the CFL" is a nice title—I'm fine with that. I wasn't haunted by Edison. I wanted to make the world a better place; it's still my goal.

What led to your invention?
I was a senior physicist at GE Lighting in Cleveland and was working in fluorescent lighting in 1973, when we had the energy crisis in this country. As a result, we designed a bulb commonly called the F-40 Watt-Miser, the first energy-efficient linear fluorescent lamp. That said, I thought we might as well get a replacement for the 100-watt incandescent lamp. That type of lighting is very, very inefficient.

What did you envision as a replacement for incandescent bulbs?
I thought if we could get a fluorescent replacement, we'd get more efficient lighting. I was also thinking compact and to get it to look like an incandescent I would make it spiral and bend it with certain geometry, but it wouldn't be easy. My colleagues gave me many reasons why it wouldn't work.

From conception to prototype took up to two years, and my first compact fluorescent lightbulb was good. It's on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Today's spirals look very similar to the first one.

You invented the CFL in 1975. Why did it take so long for it to reach stores?
A number of reasons. There wasn't enough money for GE to do the CFL. It got delayed. Time goes on and there were other projects. In 1985 we tried to do the CFL, but bending it was very difficult because there wasn't automated equipment. GE thought the CFL was a good bulb but too expensive to make. The bending was done manually and the other parts were automated. The only place in the world where CFLs could be made and sold at a reasonable price was China. In the end, GE wasn't the first to bring CFLs to market.

Were there any problems with the first CFLs?
One big problem was that they operated with a high-frequency electronic ballast. People complained they were having problems with their TVs and they'd take them back to the store. The output frequency of the CFLs was the same as the frequency from the televisions and was causing interference. Once we identified the frequencies being used, the remote-control people designed around it. Interference is no longer a problem, but that slowed down sales of CFLs.

LED lighting is coming of age

Even though a revival of the musical "Hair" is taking place in New York City through the end of August, this is not the dawning of the age of Aquarius but of LED lighting, as we reported in our May 2 Buzzword: Solid-State Lighting story and as The New York Times covered in the July 28 news story "Fans of L.E.D. Say This Bulb's Time Has Come."

LEDs have achieved widespread commercial use in traffic lights, street lamps, and other applications. But General Electric, Osram Sylvania, and Royal Philips Electronics are now looking into residential applications. (A Philips iW MR LED is shown.)

As with any emerging technology—pay attention, all you alpha geeks—price is a big issue in how fast consumers will adopt them. LED bulbs cost upward of $100 each. Even if as claimed they last 100 times longer than traditional incandescents and best compact fluorescent lightbulbs for longevity, that's likely a tough sell, especially given the slow economy. But their prices will inevitably drop, making LEDs something worth keeping an eye on.—Daniel DiClerico

Essential information: Read our report on undercabinet lighting, which covers LED fixtures.

Vintage Consumer Reports: Lightbulb testing

The big round object in the photo at right isn't some early satellite or a giant fitness ball. It's an integrating, or Ulbricht, sphere that we used for an August 1965 report on incandescent lightbulbs to check the quality and quantity of their light output.

Each bulb—we tested five major brands—was suspended in the center of the sphere, whose sides were coated with a specially formulated high-reflectance white paint. A precisely regulated current lit each bulb while a photoelectric cell and meter measured the light output in lumens. We ran the test on the bulbs when they were new and after they had burned for 500 hours.

Our testers chose the 500-hour milestone because most of the tested bulbs had a claimed life span of 750 hours. Some of the bulbs burned out far short of their advertised life, while others well exceeded it. But most lasted just about 750 hours.

Forty-three years later we're still testing lights, though now they're compact fluorescent lightbulbs. We covered CFLs in an October 2007 report and continued to test them for months. Read the results of that testing in this update. Our follow-up tests revealed that some low-priced CFLs aren't lasting as long as manufacturers claim.—Gian Trotta

Essential Information: Watch our video on CFLs, right, and read about Home Depot's new CFL-recycling program.

Home Depot launches CFL-recycling program nationwide

Home Depot has done something other major retailers and government at many levels throughout the country have not been able to implement. The home-improvement retailing behemoth today started a free collecting/recycling program for compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or CFLs, at its 1,973 U.S. stores; a similar program at Canadian stores started last fall.

“Recycling is expensive, but if you’re waiting for recycling [of CFLs] to be economically feasible, you’ll never do it,” says Ron Jarvis, Home Depot’s senior vice president for environmental innovation. The retailer’s effort is not a pilot program—it’s here to stay, according to Jarvis, who adds, “We won’t increase the cost of CFLs.”

The move by Home Depot comes at a time when more Americans are installing these bulbs that use about 75 percent less energy to produce the same amount of light as standard incandescent lightbulbs. In 2007, Home Depot stores in this country sold 75 million CFLs; Wal-Mart, 137 million.

Those energy savings don’t come without a cost: CFLs contain mercury, a neurotoxin. (All of the manufacturers of the Energy Star-qualified CFLs we tested claim to use less than 5 milligrams of mercury per bulb.) The presence of mercury raises several issues, including the recycling and the handling of broken bulbs.

To recycle CFLs at a Home Depot, you bring spent, unbroken bulbs to the store’s returns desk. (Starting in September the stores will have special receptacles on-site for the bulbs.) There’s no fee, and the stores will accept any CFLs, even those you didn’t buy from a Home Depot. The CFLs will be shipped to a recycling company, which will break down and recycle the bulbs and properly deal with the mercury, according to Home Depot.

Here’s hoping that Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, and other retailers nationwide follow Home Depot’s lead.—Kimberly Janeway

Essential information: Read our comparison of the major brands of CFLs (available to subscribers).

Buzzword: Solid-State Lighting

What it means. Solid-state lighting, or SSL, could be the next big thing in residential lighting. SSL refers to a type of bulb—or lamp, in industry parlance—that uses the movement of electrons through a semiconductor material to generate light. The semiconductor is in a solid block form, hence “solid state.”

Because there’s no filament that heats up (and eventually burns out), SSL is up to 50 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, claim manufacturers. SSL is also said to last as much as 10 times longer than compact fluorescent lighting and contains none of the potentially harmful mercury that has brought CFLs image down to earth and made recycling them a hassle.

Why the buzz? SSL has existed for decades under the name LED, short for light-emitting diode (the semiconductor material involved is a diode). But LEDs are not the only kinds of SSL. For example, laser technology is a form of SSL, and organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, are on the horizon. As a result, the lighting industry is transitioning toward the more all-inclusive solid-state lighting moniker. “Within the broad category of TVs, you have several options, including LCD, plasma, and OLED. Similarly, solid-state lighting refers to anything that is not a conventional gas-based lighting technology,” says Govi Rao, chief executive officer of Lighting Science Group (LSG), a manufacturer of lighting equipment.

The switch to SSL might also have to do with the marketing of LEDs, which are still leading the way in this technology. For years, LEDs were limited to commercial use, for example in traffic signals and airport signage. The fact that they couldn’t generate pure white light kept them out of the residential market, except as the red indicator lights on electronic devices. But manufacturers are getting closer to a perfect white LED; LSG, for one, just launched a line of replacement LEDs (shown). Unfortunately, no matter how good the technology gets, some consumers will always associate LEDs with Lite-Brite. By giving the lights a different name, manufacturers can in a way reintroduce them to consumers.

Whatever its name, SSL is still years away from wide residential use. But it’s making steady inroads, including for undercabinet lighting. We’re currently testing these task-lighting fixtures for our August 2008 special kitchen section. Five years ago, we wouldn’t have covered SSL, but this year, it’s a theme in the story. Without giving too much away, we’ll just say that the purported efficiency of SSL is pretty solid.—Daniel DiClerico

Selections from Consumer Reports' Selling It

In each issue of Consumer Reports, the Selling It page covers the goofs, glitches, gotchas, and howlers that appear on product packaging, in advertising, and elsewhere. Below you’ll find a few recent Selling It entries that relate to the home. We’ll present these pieces on this blog from time to time. (Click on each image to enlarge it.)

Look for more Selling It items on our Web site—new ones are added monthly—and submit ideas to this section.

Military mix-up
This offer for a door knocker (right) says, “Show your pride for our Armed Services.” Just don’t be picky about which service you support. As a Maryland reader pointed out, the knocker identified as “Army design” has the Navy design; “Navy” is Air Force, and “Air Force” is Army. The Marines design is correct. (From the December 2007 issue of Consumer Reports.)

Maybe you use scissors?   
Cuisinart’s Mini-Prep food processor (right) came with directions to heed before use: To get an even chop, “always cut large pieces of food into smaller pieces of even size—about 1/2 inch.” (From the January 2008 issue of Consumer Reports.)

A kinda sorta guarantee
The language on the package at right is common in lightbulb packaging (longevity depends on how bulbs are used), but those two tiny words—"up to"—still shed very little light. As a Georgia reader reasoned, “If it lasts one minute, one hour, or one day it fulfills the guarantee.” (From the February 2008 issue of Consumer Reports.)

Gee, no GE
This package for a replacement part (left) had a Massachusetts reader scratching her head. (From the March 2008 issue of Consumer Reports.)

Essential information: Learn more about entry doors and door locks. Find the best food processor. Consider replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Choose a new coffeemaker.

Seeing the light on CFLs

As New Year’s resolutions go, replacing a household’s worth of incandescent bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescent lights seemed, so to speak, an especially bright idea.

With electricity costs in my Westchester County, New York, area much higher than the national average, it seemed a no-brainer to cut energy consumption at my home by installing CFLs. (Learn how to do an energy audit on your home here.) I’d already put in a handful of CFLs, but most bulbs were still of the energy-inefficient incandescent variety.

On New Year’s eve, I headed to the store with a list detailing the various incandescent bulbs I wanted to replace and their CFL equivalents. For example, according to the U.S Department of Energy:
a 9- to 13-watt CFL replaces a 40-watt incandescent;
a 13- to 15-watt CFL, a 60-watt incandescent;
an 18- to 25-watt CFL, a 75-watt incandescent;
and a 23- to 30-watt CFL, a 100-watt incandescent.

I also brought along a printout detailing lighting color temperatures. “Warm,” also called “soft,” lights are designed for interior spaces like the bedroom or spaces where you entertain. “Cool,” also known as “white,” “daylight,” or cool white,” lights are best for the kitchen and other areas where you want the very brightest light, including exterior applications.

Over the course of the next couple of days we replaced dozens of bulbs with CFLs. The biggest part of the job was using a new bulb whose brightness matched what we were used to, but it was otherwise a quick job.

Eventually, we’ll have to figure out what to do with the incandescents I removed. For now, they’re piled up on my workbench in the basement. Send us a note telling us what you’ve done with incandescents you’ve replaced.

Some other observations:

• Prices of CFLs remain too high. To make replacing incandescents an open-and-shut case even for the thriftiest among us, CFLs need to be cheaper than the roughly $2 to $5 I spent per bulb. Note that dimmable CFLs and those in unusual shapes and styles tend to be the priciest. You’ll find the best deals for 60- and 100-watt-equivalent versions.

• Some CFL types are limited. I couldn’t, for example, find CFLs to replace “flame-tip” bulbs in brightnesses that are close to what some of our fixtures require.

• You need to choose the right-color CFL depending on the application. I’ve had to install different CFLs in some fixtures to get the right type of light. In the master bedroom, I had to replace a dazzlingly white 30-watt CFL with a homier 23-watt. And we initially found one new CFL in the room where we watch TV distracting because it protruded from the shade. (We hardly notice it now.)
    If you find that a particular CFL doesn’t give off enough light, use a higher-wattage one. And if the CFL is too bright, install a lower-wattage model instead.

• Manufacturers should improve CFL technology so that turning lights on and off frequently won’t shorten the life of the bulb. Currently the DOE recommends leaving a CFL on for at least 15 minutes.

• Recycling a dead CFL needs to be made easier, as a colleague recounted several months ago in this blog entry. The good news, though, is that I haven’t had to dispose of a dead CFL; even ones I installed years ago are going strong.—Ed Perratore

Essential information: Read our advice on how to handle a broken CFL. And watch our CFL video on the new Consumer Reports video hub.

Photo courtesy of GE