Tripping the light fantastic (July 3)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
You probably have heard that good, old incandescent bulbs soon will be outlawed. When incandescent bulbs are outlawed, I guess, only outlaws will have incandescent bulbs.
They are to be replaced, we are told, by those twirly fluorescent bulbs or some of those other upstarts.
These new bulbs are supposed to be more energy-efficient than the incandescent bulbs, and I will take their word for it. But I’m not so sure they are all that efficient overall. They tend to be a little dimmer than incandescent bulbs, and so you need more of them in a room if having bright light is your objective.
We are using quite a few of those new bulbs — mainly because somebody gave a bunch of them to us free — but when we have to start paying full price for them, I think we’ll start to miss the old incandescent bulbs.
Also, the manufacturers tell us on the packages of these new bulbs that they last a lot longer than the incandescent ones do, but I’m not sure that is true. It seems to me I have been changing them out more often than I did the old variety.
I don’t charge myself for changing my own light bulbs, but if I did, you would have to figure the extra changing time into the cost of the new ones.
Mrs. Doud doesn’t trust these new bulbs much. She is convinced they are going to blow up or set off sparks, or maybe both.
Of course, the incandescent bulbs had their problems, too. They aren’t any easier to change than the new ones are, and some of them wear out faster than others. And they always get hot when you turn them on, so you can burn your fingers if you try to unscrew one without turning it off. (You may say, “Why would you ever do that?” and I would say, “I don’t know. All I remember is burning my fingers.”)
Sometimes life is like that.
