>>Mike just got me worried so I looked it up. Scare-mongering. See the below:
>>
>>http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070518-cfls-bulbs.html
>
>I know. The problem is that there is already mercury around us and every single broken bulb will add. It will never get lost. This is the same problem with any fluorescent tube.
>
>An other problem is that you get I minimal poison here and a minimal poison there. Scientists test each poison but not the combination we live in.
>
>CFLs are best as straight forward lights - they need a high energy for start up and will run with less. Commonly a single start need 45 minutes to compensate against a normal bulb. They are flickering - doe to there electronics with a higher frequency then a normal fluorescent tube but they are. And the bigest problem to me is that they only send a small spectrum of light (What they share with LEDs).
>We do not want to now the overall energy ratio, where we have to take the energy for production into account. I do not believe that we save much energy on this.
>
>Agnes

My next-door neighbour got rid of hers cos she didn't like the light output.

Would you believe that after talking about these yesterday, how they last long time, and how I use them in my hall, I got home to find that the bulb in the hall had blown.

(Twilight Zone music)