The bargain of the moment seems to be the discount store long-life bulb. I mean the compact fluorescent type (CFL).
China may have cheap labour but I would imagine that the materials cost of a CFL would not be vastly different than elsewhere. The electronics is not elaborate but it is not entirely trivial. The folder cylindrical bulbs and their coating have a real cost.
So how is it that these bulbs are so cheap? To look at their packagaing and steady supply of bulbs, it does not seem they have come from a quick sale of surplus stock.
So have they been slipped out the back door. A missing lorry or two in China and arrived here in their tens of thousands?
Or is the explanation much more rational and less dramatic?
Many dollar stores in the US (with the "Dollar Tree" chain appearing to me to be a notable exception) have compact fluorescents. They usually come in packages that say "energy saving bulb".
These are usually quadtubes but some are now spirals or tripletwintubes. The quadtubes usually cost $1. The spirals and tripletwintubes mostly in my experience cost $1.50 to $2.
These come in claimed wattages anywhere from 9 to 36 watts, and claimed light output anywhere from that of a 40 watt incandescent to that of a 150 watt incandescent. A few have light output claims in lumens, anywhere from 505 to 1800 lumens. In my experience, none significantly outshone 40 watt A19 "standard" lamps of "Big three" brands. Actual power consumption of these is mostly under 13 watts, at least for quadtubes of any nominal wattage.
Most have "daylight" bluish color ranging from 6600 to 8,000 Kelvin (eyeball estimate), including many that claim "soft warm white light". Most have halophosphate phosphor.
In my experience, perhaps about 7-8% were DOA or failed early or significantly malfunctioned. Failures are sometimes not all that passive. I had one produce smoke and an orange glow in its base after conking out 3 minutes into its operating life. A friend of mine reports one that produced three "pop" sounds when failing, with two of the pops being loud. And in my experience perhaps another 5% malfunctioned less significantly (arc snakes after long periods of non-use or lamp needs to be touched to start when cold). And I have tested perhaps 60-65 units so far, 17 "brands", 43 "models", with none seeing enough use to get a good idea of their life expectancy.
I doubt these are stolen. I see a few variations including the three bulb styles and 5 distinct phosphor formulations so far among these cheapies. And I see a lack of higher price ones like these anywhere - especially in places other than dollar stores. I believe that these junkers are in at least somewhat routine production.
Lower quality and lower marging. Lower marketing cost. And so on. A Philips Genie is 6 euro as a brand product, but you see them for 3 as well without the name (but clearly the same product).
The no-name lamps are, as Don wrote, of much lower quality. Electronics can be saved on (not using tube-saving startup methods, no interference suppression, lower reliability margins, missing fuse, and just cost optimization because the price has to be so low). Phosphor can be saved on.
All in all it is still amazing what 70 cents can buy...
I don't. I see them as low as 0.71 euro, in my local supermarket. For 11/22W philips genie. The packaging is spot on, and they are being sold from display boxes of maybe 3000 on the supermarket floor. I'd guess that the store (one of several hundred in the UK, a smallish branch of Morrisons) is selling 6000/wk.
As to their reliability, I have a string of ~15 wired in series. They have so far been on for maybe 60 hours, and 40 starts. One has stopped working. I haven't investigated if it's a mechanical failure of the holder, or supply, or the bulb itself has failed.
A complete boxtop:
Philips 6 years* Genie
230-240v~ 50-60Hz B22 BC 6000h
600 lumen 80mA
11 watt / 60 watt order code 797254xx
(and on teh side light output measured according to iex 969 standards, compared to a 1000hr soft tone bulb of similar light output. Lifetime based on an average of 3 hr/day burning)
Ian, I too am in the UK but I haven't tried the Morrison CFLs. (0.71 Euros = 50 UK pence = 90 US cents. Is this right?)
I have tried the "pound shop" CFL bulbs and at approx one pound (= USD
1.80) they are great. The colour temperature is actually very nice and not at all like the sickly green-yellow I have seen before and what's more they seem distinctly brighter than the claimed equivalent-wattage tungsten lamps.
I guess there may be a large percentage of failures as Don suspects or a shorter total life although I don't have enough samples to know this and I too have not had any outright failures.
So they seem to give a bright and comfortable light which is better than the light from a tungsten GLS lamp. Of course, GLS lamps don't set a very high standard but earlier CFLs were not even as good as a GLS.
The infant mortalities are often workmanship issues. I opened up one that failed after about an hour, with an obvious smell of escaped smoke. The wire leads from the lamp itself were pushed through the circuit board holes and soldered, then the excess tag end was bent over against the adjacent lead, causing a short circuit. I have seen this same problem in large fluorescent fixtures. The workmanship in many of the imported electrical devices is terrible.
Do you go down every isle at the hardware store and marvel "how is this so cheap"? It's a fact of modern life, mass production of goods does this. Why significantly cheaper than a premium brand? How did you think those large corporations got so large? Profit margins. For all we know, these generics might sold by the gazillions in China, or even by major brands tryign to compete in the generic market without devaluing their retail branded alternative as much while still making some profit at that price-point.
Others implied lower quality. Perhaps, but there are two (at least) important factors here:
1) Would-be engineers will often poo-poo anything not esthetically perfect. In the end "does it work, long term and safe enough" is what matters most.
2) Any cheap generic product is likely to not undergo the same standards of QC, product testing. Early generations may have more bugs so everyone sees some product with a bad failure rate and remembers this, but ignores that it was a beta product essentially, that a couple years later these issues were worked out, but those who had the problem may never know as they have sworn to now buy only the brand costing significantly more instead. Unfortunately they will sometimes even vehemently argue for the brand they chose later, citing lots of marketing fluff instead of ever getting to the meat-n-potatoes, what the actual fault condition was in the first generic and whether subsequent revisions corrected it.
So the answer in short isn't "why so cheap", it's "where have you been to not notice modern economy?" In the end it's the same story, different day, you make a small gamble buying product, qualifying it for your needs or disqualifying it.
You are dead right that many things have got a lot cheaper. But the value which a CFL bulb gives is oustanding. At the discount shop price they undercut the mainstream product approximately by a factor of 4 or 5 or maybe more.
Despite the tales of poor assembly, the components seem to be of reasonable quality. This is a far better bargain than those packs of subminature screwdrivers which seem to be made from rubber which sell for the same sort of price or even a large bottle of liquid detergent.
Some products in the, er, new economy are much better value than others. Some people may not see this and have no idea of product complexity or design and think that everything's cheaper so something extra-cheaper in the same as something else which is slightly-cheaper.
Nope, the cheapo-cheapo CFL is a real lollapalooza.
I have heard good things about the roughly $2 CFLs from Ikea, and I know someone who has dozens of them in use, used for them for years, and swears by them. But these surely appear to me as being much different from the $1 to $2 ones at dollar stores. The latter I would not swear by at all - I would rather swear *at* those and at whoever gets them there and the FTC for not noticing any of those and how far short of claimed light output most of their actual light outputs are.
I did word that hastily - no, I was not thinking about cursing out dollar store customers for buying the clunkers - probably largely unsuspecting what these are like and how much worse they are than other CFLs. I meant to say "brings them there" - as in the supply chain.
This is the best answer in my opinion, except for the one main ommission. The reason why they can be made so much EXTRA cheaply in China is because they have far fewer environmental restrictions on handling phosphor and mercury than most other countries do. To them, prison labor handling hazardous materials is a way to eliminate 2 problems: labor cost and excess undesireable population. The Nazi's did similar things years ago, but we stopped them eventually. We don't care about their doing that to their own people in China, they aren't as "real" to the rest of the world.
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