Re: [APD] Re: Small Flourescent Bulbs

["S. Hieber" <shieber at yahoo_com>]

That depends on what you mean by "30 watts of light."

Do they give off more light than a 30 watt incandescent
would?  Yep.  Do they give off as much light as they would
if the tubes were straight instead of spiral and everything
else remained the same? Nope.  The inside of the sprial is
shining almost entirely on the other inner side of the
spiral and reflections never return 100%. Worse, even if
the reflection did return near 100% of the light, it would
only return it back to the other inner side of the sprial. 
Most of it eventually is absorbed by the tubes but some of
it leaks out between the coils, so the light from the
middle is not a totally lost. If you were trying to make an
ideal reflector, you wouldn't make it out of fluorescent
bulb tubes.

BTW, can a single T5 that's about 4 foot long give off more
light than a PC of comparable design except that it is a
u-tube?  Yep, because there is no other tube in the way.

So why make bulbs in a spiral shape if it "uses"up so much
of the light output?  Because they can fit in an
incedescent lamp and yield a higher energy efficiency than
the incandescent it replaces, thanks to the extraordinary
inefficiency of incandescents.

Scott H.
--- GramFran413 at aol_com wrote:
> Scott, are you saying that the two 15-watt rated "spiral"
> fluorescents I have 
> in a little 10G tank are or are not providing 30W of
> light?  (I have one 15W 
> over a 5G, too.)


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