GE Fluorescent Lights

First of all, if you spell “fluorescent” as “flurorescent” or “flourescent” then you’re not an idiot. At least, not unless I am too.

Moving on, this is a product review of one of the most basic products known to American mankind–the light bulb. I say “American” mankind because there are still countries today where most people don’t have electricity and their only light comes from fires made of burning wood and candles, kind of like Americans 200 years ago. These are the same countries where most people die young, kind of like America 200 years ago. These are also the same countries that people like Al Gore are trying to prevent from getting electricity, because the production of electricity leads to global warming. That is, Al Gore hopes you believe that, along with everything else he says, because if you do and we get cap and trade legislation passed then Al Gore is going to be a billionaire. But that’s another story.

Several months ago I went to Target to buy some light bulbs. The fluorescent lights (I copied and pasted “fluorescent” that time so I wouldn’t mess up the spelling) were on sale, I noticed. That meant they were only five times as expensive as the normal light bulbs. Now, if you’re like me, you think global warming is a total scam and so buying fluorescent lights to save the environment is also a scam, and a very lucrative one for GE at that. But even so, if you’re like me, you’ve bought into the idea that fluorescent lights last longer and use less electricity. And once again, if you’re like me you like to save money, and you don’t like changing light bulbs that burn out all the time. So I thought hey, they’re on sale, I won’t have to risk getting on a wobbly chair as often, and I’m going to save money in the long run. Great! So I bought a bunch of them.

Within two weeks one of the lights I bought burned out. Ok, that was annoying. It wasn’t the first annoying thing. The first annoying thing was that the lights take a full minute or two to fully turn on, so you can’t just flip the switch and find what you’re looking for, you flip the switch and then leave the room while the lights warm up, and then come back a few minutes later once they’re fully on, and then you try to remember why you were going into that room in the first place. But as annoying as all that was and is, it wasn’t enough to motivate me to write about it.

Last week I was over at my brother in law’s house. There was a tall lamp with no lamp shade in the middle of their front room. It wasn’t placed there because they’re weirdos, but because they were in the middle of moving into that house. As the children ran about, as children are prone to do, one of them knocked over the lamp, and one of the lightbulbs shattered. And yep, you guessed it, it was a fluorescent bulb.

As soon as I saw the broken bulb I thought “Didn’t I hear that fluorescent bulbs have mercury in them or something? And isn’t Rush Limbaugh always talking about how if one of these breaks in your house you have to call a haz-mat crew to come clean it up?” But Rush Limbaugh exaggerates things, right? Right? Well, I thought it was safe to at least read the box. Sure enough, the lights have mercury in them. But the box didn’t say what to do if a light breaks, although it did say to make sure you dispose of the lights correctly, which probably means you aren’t supposed to just chuck them in the trash like I do my old computers, cell phones, used car oil, and old car batteries.

It was night, and being a new house it didn’t have Internet yet, so we called someone who had Internet. They did a search for what to do when a fluorescent bulb breaks, and lo and behold, the more stuff they read, the more it sounded like Rush was right about calling a haz-mat crew in. There was part of me thinking “C’mon, there can’t be that much mercury in that bulb, let’s just vacuum it up and go on our merry way” but another part of me was thinking this might be one of those times I should follow instructions and play it safe.

To make a long story short, several Internet searches and phone calls later, we finally found someone who knew what we were supposed to do. First, we were supposed to vacate the area for 20 minutes, because it’s the gas inside the bulb that is most dangerous. Well, it was great to know that after we had all been sitting in the vicinity of the broken bulb for a half hour. Second, we weren’t supposed to use a vacuum to clean it up, we were supposed to use a wet rag. Trouble is, it broke on the shag carpet. How do you get all the broken glass up without using a vacuum?

So we put all the kids in a different room, my wife picked up as much of the glass as she could with a freezer bag over her hand (I was standing around just watching…just kidding, I was watching the kids and making sure they stayed out of the room), and then we left because we needed to get our own little one to bed. My brother in law arrived later with a vacuum and vacuumed it up and then threw away the vacuum bag…err, disposed of it according to local laws and regulations.

But even with all that, it wouldn’t have been enough to get me to write this post. What topped it all off was that as we were reading the fluorescent bulb box, it read that fluorescent bulbs last a long time, but that if you turn them on and off a lot their life is dimished greatly, to the point where they may not last as long as a normal incandescent bulb. Wait…so they might actually burn out faster? So I’m paying five times as much for a bulb that may burn out faster (in at least one case a LOT faster), doesn’t turn on immediately, and is quite a bit more dangerous than mere broken glass when it breaks? And I’m supposed to feel good about helping the environment, when in reality 99% of the people buying these bulbs are probably chucking them in the trash which means our landfills are becoming contaminated with large quantities of mercury? The only positive things I’m left with are that they may save me on my electrical bill…if they last long enough, and they look kind of cool, in a way, sort of.

So let’s just say that’s the last time I’m buying one of those bulbs. Man, do I feel like a sucker. GE did a great job with their marketing on this one.