Here’s a story that suggests that they can. Like any poorly manufactured or quality controlled product, failures can occur. But with CFL bulbs, there’s additional things that can go wrong over the simple and century long proven incandescent bulb. Read on and see below for some technical details on CFL bulbs. Some “explosive” video also follows. – Anthony
Via American Thinker: A compact fluorescent light (CFL) on the ceiling burst and started a fire in a home in Hornell, N.Y. December 23, 2010. “Those are the lights everybody’s been telling us to use,” said Joe Gerych, Steuben County Fire Inspector. “It blew up like a bomb. It spattered all over.” Fire Chief Mike Robbins said the blaze destroyed the room where the fire started and everything in it, and the rest of the house suffered smoke and water damage. The Arkport Village Fire Department as well as the North Hornell Fire Department required about 15 minutes to put out the fire. Link
“Bulb explodes without warning,” reported NBCactionnews.com, May 21, 2010.
“Tom and Nancy Heim were watching TV recently, when Tom decided to turn on the floor lamp next to his recliner chair. ‘I heard this loud pop…I saw what I thought was smoke, coming out of the top of the floor lamp,’ says Tom. Nancy suddenly found glass in her lap. She says, ‘I did not see it. I just heard it, and I noticed I had glass on me.'” Link to story
On February 23, 2011, TV NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee covered “a newly-released investigators’ report that blames a February 12 fatal fire in Gallatin on one of those CFL bulbs.” Ben Rose, an attorney for the rehabilitative facility in which Douglas Johnson, 45, perished, said, “This result is consistent with our own private investigation. …We have heard reports of similar fires being initiated by CFLs across the country.” Link
…
October 5, 2010 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported: “Trisonic Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs Recalled Due to Fire Hazard” because of four incidents. It’s official notice states: “Hazard: light bulb can overheat and catch fire.” Link
Concerns about the toxic mercury in CFLs are downplayed by the bulbs’ advocates, but they shouldn’t be. According to EPA and other sources, the safe limit is 300 nanograms per cubic meter. When a broken CFL was reported in Maine, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection did the most extensive testing in the nation to evaluate the health risk. Its 160-page report is shocking:
Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the…300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3. Link
Full story at the American Thinker
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Some things you may not know about CFL bulbs.
1. They have a built in switching power supply, or “ballast” like full sized fluorescent tubes. But they are not encapsulated or “potted” like those ballasts. See below for an inside view of a CFL base.
2. Capacitors, like the black one shown above, can sometimes fail catastrophically
3. The standard fluorescent lamp ballast can fail. Leaving burned-out lamps in the fixture, using the wrong size lamps, incorrect wiring, incorrect line voltage, operation at temperatures below or above the rated limits, power surges, and even the age can all cause a ballast to fail.
However, not all ballasts fail and stop functioning. Many overheat. Because a failing ballast can get extremely hot, it can become a fire hazard. All modern magnetic ballast designs have an internal temperature sensor that shuts the ballast off it gets too hot. In most designs, when the ballast cools off, the sensor will allow the ballast to turn back on. A fixture where some or all of the lamps shut off by themselves and later come back on is probably a fixture with a failing ballast. However, as shown above, these sorts of ballasts are usually encapsulated, and if a component fails, is contained within.
4. CFL bulbs, being replacements to incandescents, can be closer to things that can catch fire, such as upholstery (a table lamp). Not being fully encased (many CFLs have vent holes for the power supply) they can throw sparks when they fail. They can also breach the plastic case they are enclosed in.
5. CFLS, like any lightbulb, are fragile. However most incandescant bulbs don’t do this when cracked:
This video seems a bit extreme, and I wondered if it was “helped along” like NBC did with the model rocket motors taped to gas tanks fiasco. Though, here’s a news story from Chicago about what happens if homeowners ignore the warning about dimmer switches:
LED lighting is the way to go, in my opinion and experience. See how I retrofitted the biggest power suckers in my own home here:
Swapping my lights: fantastic!
Of course, you can always use your old CFL ballast to make a Jacob’s ladder:
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h/t to Bob Ferguson at SPPI who has this section on mercury issues:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/mercury/
Be sure to read the fine print on the CFL packaging. Some will explicitly warn against “base up” installation (e.g. standard basement bare bulb ceiling fixture), and as others have noted, the heat buildup in enclosed fixtures can be problematic. I have several lamps where the shade is supposed to clamp on the bulb – incandescent only, here! As for outside lights, CFL’s don’t work very well in the winter, do they?
I learned about CFLs on dimmer switches the exciting way. I replaced four incandescents in a pair of ceiling fixtures with four new CFLs that I had just purchased in a large multi-pack. As I flipped the sliding dimmer switch from off to full on there were loud pops and bright flashes as two of the bulbs self-destructed. I am familiar with infant mortality of electronic devices, but this seemed like more than just a coincidence. I suspected that it might have been the dimmer that did them in. It took me several minutes of scanning the verbose packaging before I finally found the place down in one corner where the fine print said that they could not be used with a dimmer.
“Leaving burned-out lamps in the fixture…can…cause a ballast to fail.”
In a fixture that’s seldom used, it’s hard to know whether the switch is off or the CFLimp has burned out. Such fixtures save no money when the cost of the spirochete bulb is figured in. Only incandescents should be employed in seldom used fixtures.
Seems that CFL’s would pollute a lot more just in the manufacturing of them……..
…not to mention the problem with mercury after the fact
I found a sooty deposit arround the fitting of a CFL that had worn out and did not know what to make of it?
Davey says:
April 20, 2011 at 3:30 pm
… As for outside lights, CFL’s don’t work very well in the winter, do they?
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The CFLs in my chicken coops work just fine all winter long.
It depends upon the type and if you are impatient or not as to how well they work for you.
We bought this house in 2007, it was new, and we replaced every light except for two with CFLs. We have had 6 basically DOA units, which I attribute to the handling given to them at the big box we bought them at. There are 67 CFLs used at the house, six of these are outdoors.
You do need to consider color rendering.
YMMV
Had one in a base-down table lamp. About a year after I installed it, turned it on, poof, crack, zap. Glass busted off, and the thing started emitting hot sparks as I tried to turn it it back off by reaching back in under the shade.
CFL’s are not safe yet. There’s no way I can be the luckiest guy in the world. They are a fire hazard. If you must use CFLs, get the kind that are doubly enclosed in a separate outer bulb. Incandescents are the safest. Halogens can also shatter, but they will only send hot glass shards flying. All new halogen fixtures today are sold with glass enclosures to filter the UV and contain the hot shards. And LED’s are not yet cost-effective (the payback time is too long, and the reliability is too low).
Mercury is bad stuff, and when combined in a twisty fragile contraption, there’s going to be a long-term health issue.
Symptoms of mercury poisoning in humans
1. Psychological disturbances
Angry fits, short term memory loss, low self esteem, inability to sleep, loss of self-control, sleepiness. Loss of an ability to learn new things, doing things by rote.
2. Oral Cavity problems
Inflammation of the mouth, loss of bone around teeth, ulcerated gums and other areas in the mouth, loose teeth, darkening of gums, taste of metal, bleeding of gums.
3. Digestive tract problems
Cramps, inflamed colon, GI problems, Diarrhea and other digestive problems.
4. Cardiovascular problems
Weak pulse, blood pressure changes, chest pain, or feeling of pressure in the chest area.
5. Respiratory problems
Weakness and problems with breathing, Emphysema, Coughing persistently.
6 Neurological Problems
Headaches, vertigo, tinnitus, shaking in various areas of the body (eye lids, feet etc)
Symptoms in children
Mercury poisoning in Children is a cause of many symptoms of developmental disorders including Autism, Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, ADD.
In Australia we can get 240V halogens. They are way better than CFLs, none of that flickering that I sometimes notice for example. I don’t know what halogen options are like in other countries though.
Doug Stanley says:
April 20, 2011 at 12:50 pm
“Did anybody else get the optical illusion of the picture of the bulb seeming to grow while reading the top of the article. Pretty cool.”
No, but can I buy a nickel bag of that stuff? ;o)
Sorry about dup, I must have hit Return or something.
I started to read that Maine DEQ report, then realized the data in the report wasn’t nearly as interesting as the pictures. In all the pictures, the experimenters are wearing full Hazmat suits.
Tells you all you need to know about the danger. They weren’t going to take chances on their own health.
Same thing happened to me Alexander.Just the base left,and another one in a lamp,that left a hole in the globe.They are awful lights.They go dim after a few weeks of use,sometimes they need to warm up when you turn the light on.I had a power failure one night.All lights were off,except the one in the kitchen,it was still glowing,not enough to see by though.
They are a waste of money,and do not last as long as claimed,or shine as bright as claimed.
hehe Margaret.
I throw mine in the rubbish.Too bad if it pollutes the ground,I didn’t ask for them,and if governments think disposal is a problem,why don’t they put disposal bins in every street?
Every story I’ve seen re the mercury issue in CFLs only discussed the problems associated with a single bulb failure.
Has anyone bothered the calculate the environmental impact of an area hit by a Katrina-like hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or tsunami? I was on the Gulf Coast just days after Katrina . There were entire neighborhoods gone – much of them washed into the Gulf. People live where they work, so many homes of workers in the seafood industry ended up in prime fishing areas of the Gulf. How much mercury does it take before the government bans fishing in contaminated waters?
Has there been any research on this issue wrt Japan’s earthquake/tsunami? I think they converted to CFLs to a great extent. Probably not; I doubt if the government really wants to know the answer.
As an engineer that has designed many optical systems using different light sources including among other things; LED’s (Visible and IR), Gas Lasers (HeNe, CO2, etc.), Xenon Arc Lamps, Solid State Lasers (Visible and IR), Tungsten Halogen and Incandescent Lamps, I DO NOT ALLOW CFL’s in my residence. The TRIVIAL energy savings are not worth the performance limitations including; safety (i.e. presence of easily released TOXIC materials), quality (i.e. useful lifetime), start-up time, color rendering, etc.
LED technology is actually quite mature; the problem is that the LED companies have not had “crony capitalism” steered their way to reduce the cost of building the factories to reduce the production cost. This seems to be since the CFL solution is the only STATE SANCTIONED solution, no doubt due to heavy lobbying from the CFL manufacturers.
I have installed a few LED’s where the conditions (ease of replacement or frequency of use i.e. always on) justified the extra expense. I will continue to evaluate other locations in my residence where LED’s might make sense. Otherwise I am a totally incandescent man.
Cheers, Kevin.
A Longstar 105W CFL 5000K used in a photographic lighting fixture was being used for the first time and had been on for less than about 20 minutes when something in the base exploded with an ear splitting BANG, smoke erupted from the fixture, and open flame licked out of the base by several inches before I was able to pull the powerr plug and smother the fire with a towel. The seller apologized and shipped a replacement.
A GE spiral 26W CFL in a table lamp went off with a bang while I was in the next room. By the time I reached the table lamp, the fabric shade had a small burning hole where something hot had started it to burn slightly before I smothered it. A lot of very acrid smoke was coming out of the CFL, and the hot gooey brown stuff was spewed on some areas of the base along with the blake smoke residue.
Another GE spiral 26W CFL drew immediate attention when it made a loud poppping and fzzzzzt noise in a table lamp. I turned around just in time to see yellow flame shoot out of the base, before the glass popped and shattered all over the table. The falme immediately extinguished itself, but the acrid smoke and smoke deposits, molten goo, and shattered glass were troublesome.
Then there was the GE 12-23-29W 3-Way spiral CFL in a floor lamp which went off with a very loud bang and gifted us with some acrid smoke for awhile, but no flame that we noticed.
I won’t continue with the 25W and lesser CFL lights which failed in somewhat less spectacular fashion, yet remained ominous with broken glass, burning hot resin shrapnel, and the unpleasant smoke and noxious burning fumes.
It should also be noted how the incandescent light bulbs have changed so dramatically in the latest years. I’ve occasionally kept records on the 100W, 75W, 60W, 40W, and other incandescent bulbs to see if they were not meeting the claimed service life. What I found was that many did not, but they sometimes came close on average. What was disturbing, however, was the claimed service life was a small fraction of the service life we enjoyed in past decades of usage. GE and the other companies are making these standard incadescent light bulbs with a drastically reduced service life when they are compared to what was in use in a period such as 1950 through perhaps around 1990.
When questioned about this reduced service life, the customer service representatives readily acknowledged it while reminding us that a tradeoff was being made between a much shorter service life versus a reduced usage of electricity and lower electrical bills. The Chicago area electrical utility used to supply free light bulbs to its customers about the 1950s, so the utility kept its costs ofr the incandescent bulbs lower by delivering and installing incandescent bulbs which lasted for 5, 10, and more years before they burned out. In the 1960s we often did not change a light bulb for one or more years, even when they were usedd most hours of each day. It seems, however, as the years went by, the service life dropped from years to only tens of days. Whatever savings there may have been in electricity and electrical bills, we still had to wonder whether the energy costs needed to manufacture, transport, and sell so many additional light bulbs and generate so much additional sales revenue doing so perhaps greatly outweighed the claimed energy savings?
You don’t suppose there has been a long-term effort to slowly indoctrinate the younger generations of people to accept reduced service life for the lighting, and getting people accustomed to paying for television programming rather than receiving it for free as in the past?
We are using twisted CFL bulbs since about 4 years here in our hot tropical climate in two varieties: 220V AC and 12V DC (with build in inverter to 220V AC). Out of 35 bulbs non exploded: we did not buy the cheapest Chinese quality. I like them: good light with a lower electricity bill.
I will keep them, I am not easily scared 😉
Isn’t it so interesting to see how the Precautionary Principle does not apply to CFL lights or anything else near and dear to the hearts of the who believe….
This is true, Ive seen it firsthand,not so much with the low watt ones but with the 100 watt and down to 60 watt…watched them catch fire and burn in their sockets usually shattering too, half a dozen times at least if I hadnt been there Id have lost the buildings…I use the small wattage ones mainly outside on poles where if they burn no real harm can happen but I will never use them indoors regardless of what the govt or envirokooks say! I got me lots of incandesents!!
I still go for halogen rather then LED. The light can be dimmed using a standard triac, the lumen per size is way higher, the cost is way lower. With a dimmer one can variate the color too. The lower the warmer. Installing 50 w halogens with dimmers gives the best bang for the buck.
To get the same lumen (around 800) from a LED you need to use 8 (EIGHT) power LEDS,which sell over here from 30$ to 60$ a piece. A halogen sells for 1.50$.
Living in France with the low energy price due to the nukes LEDS can’t even come close since you can’t recoup the investment in energycosts. The thing will be long time burned out before you get your 300$ plus back.
No brainer.
I’ve used CFLs for many years, generally because of the saving in the cost of power.
The quality has gone done, though, as the cost has dropped and they became The Law here in Australia. This was brought home when one exploded – no fire, but the glass glowing thingy was ejected from the base/ballast, and shattered all over the floor.
I’ve only had a single experience of this after using dozens, however, it does not give me any comfort that there has been only a single occurrence – one is one too many.
(But then again I also had an incandescent lamp fly apart many years ago, where the glass bulb was ejected and landed on a carpeted floor. The only damage was a scorch mark.)
Ok. Second try…
I shared this posting with a friend, and we have a question:
How many CFLs do you have to use and for how long to offset the carbon footprint of burning a house down?
Oddly enough here in Australia where the incandescent bulb is banned an Australian brand of light globes called fused safety globes are available. They are real deal bypassing the BS. However the fuse is real are so are the globes.
To heck with our Potemkin President (with any luck he’ll be gone by January, 2013). Write your Congressman. Congress passed the initial ban on Edison incandescents, and Congress can—and must!—repeal it.
/Mr Lynn
Carl Bussjaeger says:
April 20, 2011 at 1:11 pm
“Dave, I have what’s left of a box of “Sylvania Super Saver Energy Efficient CFL” 23 W (“100 Watt replacement”) bulbs, labeled with the UL Listed logo. I say “what’s left” because two of these bulbs did catch fire.”
If they carried a legitimate UL approval they did not catch fire. The plastic base in UL approved bulbs is flame resistant. To set it on fire you need to use a blowtorch and it still won’t continue burning once the torch is removed. Depending on failure mode they may produce some smoke but no flames. Anecdotally I’ve been using about 20 of them for 4 years. Out of those 20 one of several that are on in excess of twelve hours per day failed after two years. There was no visible discoloration on the bulb or base. It was working one day and not working the next day. Caveat: I have none of these in enclosed recessed fixtures per manufacturer warning and the ones that are on dimmer circuits are ones that are explicitely designed for dimmer circuits. Most of them reach what appears to be full intensity instantly and the exceptions are outdoor floodlights which take up to 30 seconds to reach full intensity. The only real complaint I have with them is the “dimmer” bulbs don’t dim like an incandescent. When the dimmer switch is at about the halfway mark and the bulb is about half as bright as normal if you try to dim it further it cuts out altogether which makes it practically useless as a dimmer for me because I want it to go from being a nightlight to a work light which an incandescent bulb will do easily. Other than that I can detect no flicker and the color is acceptable provided I pay attention to the bulb type – “warm” for living areas and “cool” for work areas which is something I’d been doing with conventional flourescents for decades. I’m not sure if CFLs have longer or shorter life than conventional flourescents as I’ve only been using CFLs for four years and I get probably twice that many from from conventional flourescents. At this point they appear to be equivalent.