The New York Times has an article on Wal-mart beginning to push the sales of compact fluorescent bulbs, and it offers many criticisms of the product, which is surprising given how popular they are among the green do-gooders out there.  One of the main criticisms given, which is reiterated by Asymmetrical Information, is that it somehow gives off a harsher light.  While this may be true, they miss one more even more crucial error... labeling.

Most people who currently use incandescent light bulbs buy them based on their wattage.  Unfortunately for light bulb manufacturers, most people don't have training in electrical engineering, and don't understand what wattage is a measure of.  And so most people mistakenly believe that wattage is a measure of brightness.  It's not.  Wattage is actually a measure of power usage (current x voltage).  The common measures for brightness are lumens or candelas, but those are not prominently displayed on light bulbs.  The problem comes from the fact that compact fluorescents use considerably less power (wattage) to produce the similar brightness (lumens) as an incandescent bulb.

True story.  Some folks from the Sierra Club were going door to door in my mom's neighborhood giving away free compact fluorescents for people to try.  My mom took two, but after looking at the package later, set the aside thinking they were useless to her.  She typically uses 60W to 100W bulbs around the house, and so when she saw that these were 25W bulbs, she immediately thought that they would be far too dim.  However, in reality a 25W compact fluorescent bulb is roughly equivalent to a 100W incandescent.  After she talked to me about this, I explained the difference to her, and she put them in a couple of her basement fixtures to give them a try.  The first thing she complained about was how dim they were, even though they weren't as dim as she originally thought they'd be.

A couple of months later, she saw some compact fluorescents on sale at a hardware store, and decided to try these out instead.  This manufacture was very smart (I think they were GE), and had put a label on them saying that 20W compact fluorescents were equivalent to a 75W incandescent.  She showed them to me, and I told her that she would likely find them to be dimmer than the ones she already tried, because these were 20W, where the others had been 25W.  But because they put the "equivalent to 75W" labeling on them, she had bought them thinking they'd be brighter.  Sure enough, she put one of the 25W bulbs next to a 20W bulb, and she realized that the freebies were brighter than the ones she bought.  Even worse, she complained that both were dimmer than the incandescent she normally used.

Dimmer of course is really a relative term.  It has to do with the "quality" or "harshness" of light in many circumstances.  But in her case, even I would say that the incandescents fill the area with more quality light than the equivalently powered compact fluorescents.  The other main problem with them is that you can't use them in "3-way" lamps, which many people use in their living areas.

The moral of the story is that people are only willing to help the environment, and save money, when it doesn't inconvenience their lives.  Until CLF bulbs progress to the point where they give off an equivalent amount of light at a reasonable price, people simply won't switch.  The manufactures also have to do a better job at marketing these bulbs to people who are used to wattage as a measure of brightness.