# GE ending production of CFL bulbs



## begreen (Feb 1, 2016)

Boy, that was quick.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/business/energy-environment/ge-to-phase-out-cfl-light-bulbs.html


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## Lake Girl (Feb 1, 2016)

Potential for liability with mercury content and they are not being disposed of responsibly?  LEDs are far more efficient and Globe seems to do a large business on the CFLs (at least in Canada).  I know initially they (CFLs) had some fire risk issues but that seems to be resolved.


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## williaty (Feb 1, 2016)

Good riddance to bad rubbish! CFLs were a horrible technology that can't disappear soon enough, IMO.


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## Ashful (Feb 1, 2016)

williaty said:


> Good riddance to bad rubbish! CFLs were a horrible technology that can't disappear soon enough, IMO.


What didn't you like?  Horrid color?  Cold starts?  Failure to live up to advertised lifetime?  Hazardous chemicals?  Disposal requirements?


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## williaty (Feb 1, 2016)

Ashful said:


> What didn't you like?  Horrid color?  Cold starts?  Failure to live up to advertised lifetime?  Hazardous chemicals?  Disposal requirements?


You forgot to add "The soffit lights slowly turning from white to a dull orange as the outside temperatures drop below 0F" :lol:


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## Jags (Feb 2, 2016)

Ashful said:


> What didn't you like?  Horrid color?  Cold starts?  Failure to live up to advertised lifetime?  Hazardous chemicals?  Disposal requirements?


No - I like all that stuff.  Does that make me weird?

On a more serious note, this was pretty well written in the playbook.  CFL's played an important part in the transition to more energy efficient light, but by far was not the best available technology for the job.  It just took some time to ramp up the better tech (LED) to make them competitive in the market.


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## Highbeam (Feb 2, 2016)

Jags said:


> No - I like all that stuff.  Does that make me weird?
> 
> On a more serious note, this was pretty well written in the playbook.  CFL's played an important part in the transition to more energy efficient light, but by far was not the best available technology for the job.  It just took some time to ramp up the better tech (LED) to make them competitive in the market.



This^

The CFLs showed us that you do NOT need 60 watts to make a lamp light up. Huge bridge technology that led us to the better mousetrap of LED.

They are dumb now but I don't regret buying them when I did.


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## Ashful (Feb 2, 2016)

... and I don't regret not buying them, when I didn't.


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## peakbagger (Feb 2, 2016)

For those who will miss them I have a box of brand new CFLs that will probably go to local transfer station.


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## begreen (Feb 2, 2016)

CFLs were a decent transitional technology, but LEDs are likely less expensive to make and have additional benefits. I'm not too keen on some LED bulb's color rendering, but they are getting better. We got a box of CFLs from the power company for getting an energy audit. So far they have stood up quite well, have a warm white light and dramatically reduced power consumption. The light is also less directional than LEDs. We only have them in locations that stay on for long periods of time so warm up is not an issue. The longest life bulb is already over 5 yrs. It's on every day for 8hrs in the winter and about 4 hrs in the summer. My shop lights are tube fluorescent and I dislike them much more than the CFLs we are currently using. Considering the CFLs were free we will be using them until they burn out. By then the next generation of LEDs should be out, hopefully at half the price.


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## Where2 (Feb 2, 2016)

peakbagger said:


> For those who will miss them I have a box of brand new CFLs that will probably go to local transfer station.


Hang on to them for me, I'll pick them up on my drive north in April... I use them in numerous places around my house in FL. Most notably the 8 bulbs in the front porch light fixtures, and my dock lights.  I've got one CFL on the dock that has been running dusk to dawn for 8+ years. Since I have two identical fixtures on the dock, I ran one LED in one of the fixtures for 485 days before it died. I put the old CFL I took out back in, and both are still on tonight.


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## jb6l6gc (Feb 2, 2016)

For the savings I see I don't mind cfls.  I do have some led's as well in the new lights I installed in the basement.  In my personal opinion it doesn't matter as long as it's not an incandescent!


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## jebatty (Feb 3, 2016)

Two of the four pin-tube florescent bulbs in our recessed kitchen fixtures still provide satisfactory light after 20 years of use come March 2016. The other two were replaced in the last two years. No complaint about CFLs from me. They did the job, they saved lots of electricity, and most worked just fine.


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## iamlucky13 (Feb 4, 2016)

The cheapest LED's I've seen were $2.50. The cheapest CFL's are around $1 (not the GE ones). But the cheapest LED's supposedly use 4-5 W less power than the CFL's, a nice improvement from 5 years ago when the cheapest LED's were $20 and used about the same amount of power as CFL's. They're close enough now that the LED's can frequently make up for their higher purchase price.

I'll mostly keep using my CFL's until they die. There's little reason to throw them out. I can't imagine ever buying another CFL, however, and there's a few fixtures I'm putting LED's in for the slightly better overall color quality. So far, I've had no failures of either type in the last 5 years.

CFL's did their job fine until something better came along (and the mercury concerns were overblown), but GE knows sales are plummeting, and they understandably see no point in trying to hold on to part of a dwindling market when they can't beat the generic brands on price.


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## begreen (Feb 4, 2016)

Agreed. Though at $1.99 for 60w LEDs  at our local Ace this week I did pick up one just to try it.


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## jebatty (Feb 5, 2016)

My take on using CFLs until they die is quite different. For quality of light and convenience, LEDs are very good on all of color, instant on, great cold weather performance. LEDs are better lights. Next, the length of time the CFLs may last before dying will end up costing more in electricity use than the cost of making the switch to LEDs now. Then I found a great outlet for the CFLs: give them away to people who are in financial need. I recently visited a disabled friend barely making it on public assistance and noticed the number of lights (all incandescent) that were out in her apartment. I offered the CFLs, free of course, to bring light into her home. She jumped at the opportunity. Now I also have given away most of my CFLs to people in a similar situation, and will give away the others as the opportunity presents itself.


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## semipro (Feb 5, 2016)

jebatty said:


> My take on using CFLs until they die is quite different. For quality of light and convenience, LEDs are very good on all of color, instant on, great cold weather performance. LEDs are better lights. Next, the length of time the CFLs may last before dying will end up costing more in electricity use than the cost of making the switch to LEDs now. Then I found a great outlet for the CFLs: give them away to people who are in financial need. I recently visited a disabled friend barely making it on public assistance and noticed the number of lights (all incandescent) that were out in her apartment. I offered the CFLs, free of course, to bring light into her home. She jumped at the opportunity. Now I also have given away most of my CFLs to people in a similar situation, and will give away the others as the opportunity presents itself.


I've been looking to do the same thing.  Seems like its "all good" if we can squeeze a little more life cycle out of those CFLs and save some power -- and shed some light!


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## woodgeek (Feb 5, 2016)

Yeah.  Shopping for LED carefully is important.  Now it is pretty easy to find warm/soft white 2700/3000K temps and CRI>=80, which seem to be pretty standard stock.  Now I look at lumens/W.  Some are still as low as 65 lum/W, like a CFL, while others are in the 85-105 lum/W range, and you actually need to do math to figure out the latter.

I like the 100 lum/W guys just because they run cooler and I figure they will last longer for that reason, esp in a poorly ventilated fixture.  Some of my first 'cheap' CREE leds have started to fail.


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## semipro (Feb 5, 2016)

woodgeek said:


> I like the 100 lum/W guys just because they run cooler and I figure they will last longer for that reason


Good insight -- the power is probably making heat if its not making light.


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## Ashful (Feb 5, 2016)

woodgeek said:


> Some of my first 'cheap' CREE leds have started to fail.


Interesting.  One thing I've noticed is that many here in the Green Room like to compare real-world CFL lifetimes, which are noticeably shorter than advertised lifetime, to advertised LED lifetimes.  In other words, "we know CFL's don't live up to projected lifetime, but we'll just assume that LED's do."  This has the potential (very high likelihood) to invalidate all long-term cost calculations and comparisons.

Do you think these Cree LEDs that have failed are meeting their advertised lifetimes, or are they falling short?


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## iamlucky13 (Feb 5, 2016)

Ashful said:


> One thing I've noticed is that many here in the Green Room like to compare real-world CFL lifetimes, which are noticeably shorter than advertised lifetime,



CFL lifetimes can be all over the place, depending upon the build quality of the bulb, where it's installed (near doors often means vibration, small enclosed fixtures cause high operating temps, etc) and how the power quality is in the home (some homes have lots of interference on the lines that play havoc with the tiny little circuit trying to push steady current to the electrodes, or big transients from appliances starting and stopping). From talking to various people who use them or tried them and gave up, it appears to me a small, but non-trivial minority have consistent problems with them, but most people do not.

I've not had a single CFL fail in the last 5 years, and I don't recall any failing in my previous home, either. Some of those in the common areas of my home easily exceed 3 hours per day, putting them easily over the 5,000 hours normally expected for a CFL. A couple of my LED's are probably right around 5,000 hours, too, because I put them in the fixtures that are on the most.

I expect a similar trend for LED's as CFL's. Some of them will fail early due to defects. Most should get in the ballpark of the expectation. The most likely failures would be in the power supplies or the solder joints hooking everything together, which is primarily a matter of quality control by the manufacturers. The industry has done quite a bit of testing of the actual emitters, and the failure rates on those are extremely low. They usually very slowly and predictably lose brightness as the phosphor coating breaks down over time.

When Philips won the L-Prize for one of their high-performing LED's a few years ago, they first had to pass 7,000 hours of testing at 110 degrees F, and the trends for brightness, color drift, and power consumption were extrapolated to 25,000 hours, with a requirement that less than 10% fail. Since the DOE had already set up the test, they kept it running. They finally ended the test at 40,000 hours. The lights were still producing 95% of their original rating, with zero bulbs failing in any manner. Dimming failure was considered dropping below 70%, so they had a huge margin beyond expectations.

Phillips probably cherry-picked components for their test bulbs, but that kind of margin leaves a lot of room for worse performance before bulbs are actually consistently failing.


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## begreen (Feb 5, 2016)

We have been getting 2+ yrs out of CFLs in our kitchen where they see the most hours. That's better than the 1.5 yr average for the halogen bulbs that used to be in the same location. I now have two LED bulbs in there with this cluster of 7 ceiling can lights to see how long they last by comparison.

FWIW, I have a CFL in our garage door opener now for a couple years and it's doing fine. Previously I had a GE halogen in it that only lasted a month.


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## woodgeek (Feb 5, 2016)

Ashful said:


> Interesting.  One thing I've noticed is that many here in the Green Room like to compare real-world CFL lifetimes, which are noticeably shorter than advertised lifetime, to advertised LED lifetimes.  In other words, "we know CFL's don't live up to projected lifetime, but we'll just assume that LED's do."  This has the potential (very high likelihood) to invalidate all long-term cost calculations and comparisons.
> 
> Do you think these Cree LEDs that have failed are meeting their advertised lifetimes, or are they falling short?



One had the glass bulb separate from the base....glue failure...the bulb fell off in the fixture after a few hundred hours.  The other just dropped its lumen output >90% after maybe 2000 hours.  Out of maybe 10 bulbs in this $4/bulb class.

I figure the other 8 will make up the average.


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## TradEddie (Feb 6, 2016)

woodgeek said:


> One had the glass bulb separate from the base....glue failure...



Same here, although I just put it in my garage where nobody can accidentally touch it! Still works great. 

TE


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## Lake Girl (Feb 7, 2016)

jebatty said:


> offered the CFLs, free of course, to bring light into her home.


That's a good concept and falls well into green philosophy.


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## BoilerMan (May 8, 2016)

I have been keeping track of CFL and LED lifetimes since building in 2009.  To date (out of a total of 22 lamps) 9 CFLs have died, most Lowes generic brand, and 2 out of 5 LED's have died with less than a year on them, both Osram 7.5W, got them to warranty and closest replacement available was Sylvania 8.5w 800lum.  All have been 2700k.  I am a control electrician, and we also install many outdoor lighting in commercial applications (wallpacks and pole/street).  LED failures before the life expectancy is not as uncommon as you may think, and those fixtures are all $500+ dollars, so calculating payback over traditional HPS/MH is not _always clear cut.  _

TS


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## Ashful (May 10, 2016)

BoilerMan said:


> I have been keeping track of CFL and LED lifetimes since building in 2009.  To date (out of a total of 22 lamps) 9 CFLs have died, most Lowes generic brand, and 2 out of 5 LED's have died with less than a year on them, both Osram 7.5W, got them to warranty and closest replacement available was Sylvania 8.5w 800lum.  All have been 2700k.  I am a control electrician, and we also install many outdoor lighting in commercial applications (wallpacks and pole/street).  LED failures before the life expectancy is not as uncommon as you may think, and those fixtures are all $500+ dollars, so calculating payback over traditional HPS/MH is not _always clear cut.  _
> 
> TS


Exactly what I was implying.  Thank you for some real-world experience, on this.


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## jatoxico (May 10, 2016)

In case this might help anyone, in Feb of 2015 I picked up some Feit 2700 Lum, 13 W (65W replacement), BR30 LED's from Costco. 2 pack was $10. Used in my kitchen floods (6) I figured my payback time was 3mo, 6 on the outside.

They have performed well, are still kicking and I am solidly in the black on those.

CFL's have been all over the map. Like the LED's I waited until the prices dropped before I started buying. Some have held up beautifully while others didn't last at all. Surprised that GE brand was a bad batch for me. Contrary to what others have observed I've had pretty good luck using them in hand held shop lights where they have lasted longer than old incandescents.


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## Ashful (May 10, 2016)

What's most entertaining to me is that the oft-cited "short lifetime" of incandescent bulbs.  I believe some of the incandescent bulbs in my house are over 20 years old, and still going fine.  I know that, with the exception of a few that have been damaged by vibration (eg. wall sconce next to back door), all are at least 5 years old.  This, next to CFL's that may die in only a year or two?


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## begreen (May 10, 2016)

All bulb life varies depending on construction, usage, vibration, etc.. We have a CFL that I keep waiting to fail and it is now at 6 yrs in spite of being on a timer and running an average of 6 hrs. per day. Got a new GE halogen that lasted 2 week of occasional usage.


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## iamlucky13 (May 10, 2016)

I've still got maybe a dozen total incandescents in the bathroom where good color rendering is more important, and in closets and similar locations where they aren't used often enough for LED's to really be worthwhile. There's also a couple fixtures in the kitchen that take PAR-20 bulbs, and I couldn't talk myself into paying $20/bulb for the LED version.

The bulbs are usually rated for 1000 hour lifetime, but I'd estimate I've been getting closer to 2,000 hours on them, especially the PAR-20 halogens. 1-2 seem to die per year.

I've got 15-20 CFL's. None of them will die. They're 5+ years old and some have at least 5,000 hours on them. Two are in a garage door opener that killed an incandescent in a few months. One is by a door that shook to death multiple incandescents in a year. I dislike the subtle green/pink undertones and they way they make certain colors look washed out, but I dislike throwing working items in the trash even more. I'm starting to wish actually wish for them to die, especially now that I've seen Feit is selling 90+ CRI LED's at Costco for $5/bulb (good candidate for my bathroom lights. I wish they had a 3000K halogen equivalent for the kitchen).

I've got half a dozen or so LED's, including a couple of the Feit's I installed in a small, fully enclosed fixture where they're not supposed to survive. Age ranges from a few months to 4 years, and one of them is probably averaging 2000+ hours per year. None of them have died.

So my experience puts both the CFL's and the LED's clearly outlasting the incandescents. However, reviews of premature failures in CFL's and LED's abound (especially the cheaper ones), so clearly failures are not uncommon. Based on my experience in engineering, this is what I expected. Incandescents are dead simple and extremely unlikely to have a defect that causes them to die early. The power supplies in CFL's and LED's are more complicated and minor defects can allow the bulbs to pass a functional check in the factory, but die quickly in use due to high temperatures or noisy powerlines pushing them over the edge.

The manufacturers could improve the quality control to avoid these early failures, but the costs would go up. They're always seeking a balance point between the costs improving the product and losing customers due to price, versus the costs of warranty claims and losing customers due to dissatisfaction. In many product lines, targets of 5% or 10% maximum premature failure rates are common. At that rate, most households should expect to see a handful of bulbs fail early. Statistical variation or even bad batches can mean that some households see none, while others see far higher numbers.


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## sportbikerider78 (May 10, 2016)

Aren't you glad the government took hundreds of millions from you and subsidized the bulb, only to then find out they are hazardous waste and pretty much suck?  

The CFL did not lead to the LED.  LED production has become cheaper through technology breakthroughs on how to make the LED, how to drive it, and how to heatsink it. 

People would have lept more quickly to the LED if they didn't have closets of crappy CFL's.  The transition from incandescent to LED is a no-brainer.


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## Highbeam (May 11, 2016)

It was a relatively short lived technology wasn't it.


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## iamlucky13 (May 11, 2016)

Highbeam said:


> It was a relatively short lived technology wasn't it.



They've been around as a practical product about 20 years. That makes them longer lived than plasma TV's.

It's true that CFL's didn't lead to LED's. But white LED's simply didn't exist even as a development project until CFL's were already established in the market, and white LED's sucked worse than CFL's until about 10 years ago. They were still too expensive to really be worthwhile and only matched or barely beat CFL performance until about 5 years ago.

CFL's were a useful interim technology - far more efficient than incandescents, and while not as efficient as sodium vapor or metal halide lights, had far better light quality than the former, and were far more practical in household applications than the latter. It's hard to say they pretty much suck when for every lighting technology that existed until LED's reached maturity, there was at least one performance category that CFL's could claim a significant advantage in.

And they're not hazardous waste. The mercury content is genuinely trivial. Yes, hazardous waste laws apply to them in some areas, but that's because of politicians who ignore science in order to pretend they're earning their keep, not because of actual hazards.


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## Sprinter (May 11, 2016)

Highbeam said:


> It was a relatively short lived technology wasn't it.


Compared to Edison bulbs that are still the most used, yes.  


iamlucky13 said:


> until LED's reached maturity,


At what point do you think that will happen?  I can see a lot of problems ahead before maturity sets in. Heat sink issues, light diffusion, compatibility with existing fixtures, color,  etc.  I like the way lumens/watt efficiency issues are going, though.


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## iamlucky13 (May 11, 2016)

Actually, I'd say they're mature now, by which I mean they've reached a point where they are practical for a common use. That's not to argue the issues you raise don't exist or that LED's are the right choice for every application, but that they've been addressed to a sufficient degree that LED's have meaningful advantages over competing technologies in certain aspects.

Put another way, room for continuing improvement is not the same as immature.

In most of the places I've tried LED's, I find no reason to remove them and go back to either CFL's or incandescents. The main exceptions are the bathroom, for good rendering of skin tones in front of the mirror by incandescents, and the range hood in the kitchen, which has some sort of built in dimmer that interacts very badly with LED's. I'd call that a generally competitive experience.

I know of occasional cases where others have had bulbs not quite fit in a small fixture or are too heavy, have a poor light distribution, buzz audibly, or have overheated, but those appear to be a reasonably small minority. I also know of a few folks who have very high expectations for color quality that even the high CRI LED's can't meet, but they are a very small minority. Those cases are also why I don't think the bulb ban should have been passed (in addition to it being unnecessary)


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## sportbikerider78 (May 12, 2016)

LED's are looking very promising.  Just 10 years ago, a headlight made of entirely LED's was something only exotic manufacturers were thinking about because of cost.  Now an economy car like the Toyota Corolla has them.  Since there is very little burn in time (like HID's) they can be switched on and off almost instantly, allowing use for high beams with dedicated lenses.  Check out the Mazda adaptive LED headlight.

http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/m...mming-adaptive-led-headlights-at-ceatec-2014/


Very cool stuff.


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## begreen (May 12, 2016)

Very cool. Wonder if they have a fog driving mode too.


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## Highbeam (May 12, 2016)

You can buy retrofit LED capsules for the common headlights as well. Like H4s. Not cheap though.


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## BoilerMan (May 12, 2016)

Back in the early 1990s my parents bought a "small fluorescent replacement" on QVC (remember the Quality Value Channel?) it was quite heavy, fully enclosed and made in Japan, something like $40.  That was put in the hallway fixture that was left on 24/7 whenever they left the house and at least 6 hours a day any other time.  It just failed a couple of years ago.  Wish I had kept it for a bit of research, may have been a rebranded Phillips or Sanyo.  But it had a pile of hours on it, took at least a min to warm up and seemed to be about the equivalent to a 60W incandescent. 

TS


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## begreen (May 14, 2016)

Ha! The long lived 15w CFL bulb in our living room just died last night after about 5.5 yrs of daily service. (~5hrs / day in summer, 7hrs winter) Not bad at all. It's been replaced with a dated 9w LED bulb now. Let's see how long this one lasts.


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## Seasoned Oak (May 14, 2016)

Gets rid of the mercury problem


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## begreen (May 14, 2016)

Trivial. If concerned better get rid of the tunafish too. There's possibly more mercury in it.
http://earthtechling.com/2011/10/the-mercury-myth-how-much-mercury-do-cfls-actually-contain/

_*How much mercury is contained in a CFL?*
Each bulb contains an average of 5 milligrams of mercury, "which is just enough to cover a ballpoint pen tip," says Leslie, associate director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer. "Though it's nothing to laugh at, unless you wipe up mercury [without gloves] and then lick your hand, you're probably going to be okay._
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/a1733/4217864/


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