CFLs: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Goodbye CFLs?

Remember when the CFL was presented as the Future of Lightbulbs? We'd all be thrilled to replace our archaic incandescents with high-tech CFLs. Just to hasten us along in the proper direction, the old bulbs were banned, lest people go all squirrelly and anti-social and prefer them to CFLs. Then came LED bulbs, which were A) better, and B) didn't require opening every window in the house and wearing gas masks if you dropped one.

Well:

GE just announced that it no longer make or sell compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) lightbulbs in the US. The company will wind down the manufacturing of CFL bulbs by the end of 2016, and it will begin to shift its focus on making the newest and most energy-efficient lightbulbs, LEDs.

We've started to convert to LEDs here and we're pretty happy with them. One of the big box hardware stores nearby had a really good sale on them a while ago, and we picked up a few at prices not too much above the prices you'd expect incandescent bulbs, back when you could get them. The come in a variety of "shades", and we found that the warm white was quite adequate; a "cool white" gave the same clinical light as a CFL. Great for an operating room, maybe, but not for a home.