![]() The federal government has fully committed. Their widespread appearance on store shelves was supposed to mark not another depressing trade-off but rather a Nobel-worthy breakthrough: They provided brilliant illumination at a fraction of the old energy costs and were nearly immortal by the old tungsten standard. ![]() My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university’s planned energy savings. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around. A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.įor most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. ![]() ![]() Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb. The lightbulb was flickering over my head. ![]()
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