Home Depot CF lamp warning

[J Tiers]

WE have a number of the HD CF lamps, "Commercial Electric" brand.

The other day, one of them in kitchen lamp started smoking and flickering while my wife was at the kitchen table.

I don't know what would have happened if she had not been there watching it, but she turned it off in a few seconds after she noticed it. In teh picture you can see where it started to burnn and char the enclosure.

Picture:


I have been tempted to put it outside and turn on again to see if it would actually start to burn, or drip burning stuff..... but I have not yet.

If not watched at that moment, who knows what might have happened?

[Evan]

Not good. I once had an ordinary incandescent bulb explode for no obvious reason and throw glowing bits of filament on the floor. So far I have had no problems whatever with CF bulbs and have been using them for years.

Perhaps you should report it to the appropriate authorities, maybe UL and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

[Swarf&Sparks]

Good luck with it Evan. Do you really think a politician/bureaucrat will understand HF/HV?
In my experience, all they understand is M$.

[motomoron]

I was in my local Harbot Fright store right after it opened. An agent of the Montgomery County Maryland fire marshall's office was there with a few assistants. I picked some sort of smallish power tool, maybe an angle grinder to look at it, and he told me I wouldn't be able to buy it, as they were confiscating everything that didn't have the correct regulatory compliance labeling.

To this day, many of the larger stationary tools have signs on them stating that they are not for sale.

Do these compact flourescent bulbs bear a UL mark?

[lazlo]

I've been buying General Electric fan bulbs at Home Depot and Lowes -- those oval 40W bulbs that are supposed to be designed to withstand the vibration of a ceiling fan. They're made in China, and I haven't had a set that's lasted longer than 2 months.

[Evan]

Try buying a better ceiling fan that doesn't vibrate.

[Swarf&Sparks]

Try balancing the inductive load with a CF, the meter won't turn at all!

[Frank Ford]

In two of our showrooms we replaced a bunch of incandescent lights in gallery style track systems with Home Depot CFs. Within a year 25% of them burned up just like J Tiers showed. Haven't had the problem with others, but until this situation we weren't choosy about brand.

Cheers,

Frank Ford
FRETS.COM
Gryphon Stringed Instruments
My Home Shop Pages

[J Tiers]

I've had big globe type GE and Sylvania CFs for at least 12 years, and not ONE of them has ever done this.......

Of course none of them was made in china, with possibly fraudulent UL recognition........ Mind, I am NOT saying THESE are fraudulently labled, but when something burns and shows no sign of the burning stopping, you gotta wonder.

The whole point of the testing is to assure that the unit will fail safely. If it does not, then one must question the testing or the standard it was tested to.

Naturally, there may be some individual units that DO have bad failure modes, even among listed or recognized products.

Frank: did yours eventually stop burning? or did they fry all the way?

[seatlanta]

I've been using CF bulbs for a long, long time, and have rarely had a problem. But I've noticed that some have almost hidden damage--usually a separation of the base from the globe. Maybe they were dropped or otherwise abused. I don't use those bulbs, of course, and I take them back for a replacement.

How long do they last?
As for the working life of the bulbs, very few seem to come close to the specs, and some don't last long at all. On average, I think their advertised life spans are optimistic.

The ones I just bought have a life expectancy of 10,000 hours. That's a lot of hours. If I burn them every single day for 8 hours-per-day, they should last almost three and one-half years.

I save the short-lived bulbs, and when I have a few, I return them to Home Depot (or wherever). I take the packaging, show them the numbers, and they've never balked at replacing them.

James (seatlanta)