We bought our first LED light bulbs today (update)

[thesquanderer]

8. CFLs fail quickly because they don't like to be turned on and off.

The claims of long life are based on leaving them on continuously. Of course, most of us are in the habit of turning lights off when we don't need them, to save electricity. But cycling the CFLs on and off shorten their life, making them especially bad to use in those rooms where you tend to stay in for only a few minutes at a time as opposed to leave on all evening. For me, they last pretty well in the bedroom, but are terrible (certainly worse than old incandescents) for use in bathrooms, kitchen, basement, garage. And when you first turn them on, they are dim. By the time they are at full brightness, you often don't even need to be in the room anymore. And of course, disposal is ecologically unfriendly. And nobody told us these things ahead of time, we were just told they would save us money and be better for the environment, neither of which turned out to be true. Really, a terrible technology except for particular uses. I wonder who made lots of money by persuading the government to practically force us to use them.