Well, this is great. I just received an unknown CFL PCB and was planning on using it for an EL project… this will be wonderful! Thanks HaD!

Hm… Looks like this is the stuff I’ll need for a project…

fyi HAD

Jay=Badwolf

Just didn’t want to see my name up here lol.
thanks for sharing this info tho ^^

schematics are wholly for 230 volts though, so this is the antithesis of U.S,-centric information.

I’ve got a number of CF bulbs (and LED night lights) that never lived up to the label claims of brightness or longevity.

The LEDs go first in those ones, the CF usually blow a capacitor.

I’m sure they could, with only a modest increase in pricing, give the CF bulbs the lifetime of commercial neon lamps.

Well, though not interested in making something out of the CFL lights, I have taken many of these apart(just the electronics found in the white part) and was VERY disappointed to find that the usual reason for premature failure of the CFLs was solder joints which broke down!! Cheap, crappy manufacturing!

I put 4 CFL’s in my den – my wife immediately noticed and hated them.

One pair was ‘ecosmart’ from Home Depot – one failed in just a couple months. The other pair are GEs from Target, and one just failed at about 5 months.

I snuck a Cree CR6 into the kitchen over my wife’s workspace and she never knew it. Put 15 more in the house and they are fantastic. My bride still doesn’t know, and I don’t get so crabby about lights left on.

I’ve had better luck with “recent” CFLs than older models. I like the IKEA bulbs, but it’s hard to beat the (subsidized by local electric utilities) prices of the sort of generic CFL bulbs available at costco and similar (usually “Feit” brand?)
I wonder if 220V CFLs are fundamentally more reliable than 110V versions? The warranties are pretty useless since they require that you still have the original receipts/etc (after several months? Right.)

The real annoyances are the circline fixtures and torchiers I’ve put in that seem to be prone to blowing their electronic ballasts nearly as often as they blow bulbs. It’s a major inconvenience to replace the fixtures, in addition to the expense. Grr.

I used to work commercial lighting. Plilips and Osram/Sylvania were the only ones that really lasted and then it was only the ones from Europe. We used some made by TCP and they were not bad. But anything else and forget it. Probably costs more in electricity and energy to make a POS CFL than it will save in energy during its short life span.

I have it on good authority that CFLs can and do catch fire after a few months or years if they are particularly badly made.
This can happen with no warning as the typical failure mode is for a capacitor to dry out which affects the oscillator and drives tens of amps into the tube resulting in massive overheating and eventual combustion.

The cheap nonames are worst for this, unfortunately due to economies of scale the vast majority of bulbs out there are of this type.

Do the maths people, £6 for a properly made bulb isn’t a lot to ask.

Interestingly this is a direct result of cost cutting, the early CFLs used an iron ballast which didn’t fail in this way whereas the newer ones omit even a series thermal fuse on the input.
The PCB used even has a space for one.

These schematics are next to useless without knowing the inductance values of transformer windings and inductors; something that is so simple to measure. What a shame.

i’ll never understand why we throw away the entire CFL. they should be made of 2 parts allowing you to toss the fluorescent lamp and replace it while keeping the rest.