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Re:[APD] Help With My New Tank!! -- or - Like, Totally tubular language, man



I said: 

> > Those fluoresecents that are designed to fit a standard
> > light socket and have their electronic ballast built
> > right
> > into the base of the bulb generally go by the term
> > "Compact
> > Flourescent" (or CF) as opposed to "Power Compact" (or
> > PC),
> > which tends to be reserved for the longer "twin tube"
> > fluorescents that require a separate ballast.
> 
and Bob Zink asked:

> When you talk about bulbs "generally going by" the terms
> above, is that a
> "general" general, an APD general, a lamp industry
> general, or some other
> ranking entirely?

To which I reply that the terms as I described are used
that way by most folks that talk about them so far as I've
heard or read. It's common nomenclature in the light bulb
biz and often how advertisements refer to the bulbs.
Sometimes in vendor and manufacturer literature, you will
find CFs call CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamp).

 Exceptions? You bet. And folks, even on APD, sometimes
refer to the CFs as Power Compacts. The CFs are generally
high output bulbs with electronic ballast and the
technology is not imortantly diff from PCs except for the
shape of the bulb. Until recently it was hard to find CFs
in wattages as high as PCs; they tended to be in the 15 to
28 watt range. But you can find CFs rated higher than that
now. I think the highest I've seen is 70 watts. Some of the
marketing literature describes the "wattage" of these bulbs
by the wattage of an incandescent bulb that emits an
equivalent amount of light. So a CF (or CFL) that is really
a 30 watt bulb will be described as "150 watt" or as a "150
replacement".

I think the terms most confusedly used in the industry are
"lamp" and "bulb". Often manufacturer literature refers to
fluorescent bulbs as lamps, while in the vernacular, "lamp"
is most often reseserved for those appliances into which a
bulb is placed, e.g., "table lamp", "floor lamp").

AS CF start getting up there in physical size and wattage,
any distinction between them and PCs starts to blur. 

Btw, isn't it amazing that a $10 CF can have an electronic
ballast built right into it, included in the price and
intended to be disposed of with the the bulb? Eventually, I
think virtually all fluorescent bulb ballasts will be
electronic and dirt cheap.

Quick and dirty rule of thumb: if it's small enough to
replace a common household incandescent, it's a CF and not
otherwise. but like most of the English language, rules are
accomodations to and reflections of current use, not
principles bound by law. ;-)  Heck, some words in English
even mean the opposite of themselves. For example,
"sanction". Other such autoantomymical instances can be
found on sites like this:

http://www.psc.edu/~burkardt/wordplay/autoanto.html

But now I've gotten *way* off topic and my fish seem to
think they haven't been fed in weeks . . .

Scott H. 

PS: I'm sure how Generals talk about light bulbs.

=====
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