Let There Be Light Fixtures

I hope this doesn't sound too whiny. Perhaps just whiny enough.

The story actually starts two summers ago. It was during one of our two or three one-week periods each year when the temperature gets up there.

I remember this particular afternoon it got so warm that the self-adhesive sticker hooks I had all over the house started dropping off the walls one by one. It was actually pretty funny.

I had all the fans running, especially up in the bedroom, in which all the warm air would collect and would get really hot and stuffy. Downstairs, I was using one of those standalone air conditioners, and I was watching TV, and my computer was on.

After a bit, I decided to make something to eat, so I turned on my George Foreman grill, and put some vegetables in the microwave. About a minute later, the refrigerator's compressor kicked in, and that was the last straw. My power had failed; I'd blown a fuse. (Yes, I had fuses; I'll get to that shortly.)

So I went out to the museum-quality fuse box I had, determined which of the two 30-amp fuses had failed, got a replacement from , and installed it, being more careful about which appliances I had on at one time.

Forward to last September. Again, one of the warm weeks. Having forgotten the lesson I thought I'd learned the previous year, I put myself in almost exactly the same situation — it was after dark, this time — and when the refrigerator kicked in, the power went out.

After chiding myself bemusedly, I grabbed the spare 30-amp fuse I had left over from the last time and headed for the fuse box with a flashlight. I couldn't quite tell which fuse had blown, so I replaced the left one with the fresh one, but the lights stayed off. I put that one back in and replaced the other existing one with the fresh one; the power remained off. I was baffled. I tried different combinations, and under the poor light, even lost track of which was the fresh fuse and which were the old ones; couldn't tell them apart.

At that point, it was time for a panic break, so I freaked out a bit. OK, quite a bit. After I calmed down, I dug out the ol' phone book and looked for an electrician who did emergency service.

The nice fellow that came by examined my situation and reported that the reason I couldn't tell which fuse had blown was because none had — some wiring underneath my house had melted, rather than a fuse.

It turned out that previous residents/owners of my house had made what was a common mistake. After repeatedly blowing 15 Amp fuses, someone decided to just put in a bigger fuse, and then someone later put in a yet bigger fuse, etc., until when I moved in, I naively thought the 30A fuses that I found there were proper. In fact, my house's wiring was only 15A rated.

I was kinda lucky, really. If the wires that had melted had been in just the wrong place, something could've caught fire. (Indeed, one of the inspectors I spoke with averred that a good chunk of Alameda's house fires are due to old wiring.) It was time to get real, and I arranged to have the whole place rewired.

(The rewiring job is quite the story unto itself — I'll not mention names — so I'll just offer in passing that should you work with a local contractor or service provider who's a franchisee, and some problem with said local provider develops, contact the franchise's corporate people. I almost got whiplash from the speed of the response.)

But it was after the job was complete, and all the lighting fixtures installed, that things got ugly.

I really like CFLs. Understanding that incandescents, while not very efficient at producing visible light, produce prodigious amounts of heat, I was delighted when they became available, and installed them wherever I could.

The only places I couldn't was where I had a dimmer; last time I'd looked into it, dimmable CFLs were few and far between, and expensive. But my new wiring inspired me to see what may have found its way onto the sales floors. There are many more dimmable CFLs than there were a few years ago, but I found that not all dimmables are alike. Some are more dimmable than others, and some work better with some dimmers than others, and vice versa. It appears that CFLs include some electronics in the base; this is what makes them "self-ballasting" (whatever that means), but it also appears that these electronics are not standardized, leading to the inconsistent behavior. So getting everything the way I'd like has been an ongoing challenge. But it got worse.

I discovered, only after talking with the inspectors, the Title 24 standards (that my contractor neglected to educate me about them is one reason I'm declining to name him), in particular, the residential lighting standards.

In a nutshell, you know the kind of fixture where you screw the bulb in? They're going away. Under Title 24, new fixtures in kitchens, bathrooms, etc., must be "high-efficiency", and in an all-too-classic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" move, it prohibits, in most new installations, the screw-base that we've been used to for over a century.

The argument seems to be that if they can, people will substitute low-efficiency lamps because they're cheaper. That sounds a bit harsh, but then I was the one that found 30A fuses in my 15A house. The standard allows for GU-24 bases, sometimes referred to as "twist-and-lock." The problem is that the market for GU-24 bulbs hasn't kept up with the standard.

If you want a CFL with a screw base, nowadays there's quite a selection. All different wattage, including 150W and 300W equivalents, different color temperatures, dimmables, 3-ways, party colors, black-lights; they've even come down in price to "almost reasonable." GU-24s, not so much.

What's frustrating is that the standard isn't new; it's been in effect for over three years, and published longer than that. But look for GU-24 CFLs; the selection is really limited. It's very hard to find one over 27W (120W), or other than "warm white" (2700K). GU-24 dimmables are few and far between, and yellow ones, like a porch buglite, do not yet apparently exist. Home Depot has exactly three varieties of GU-24 CFLs; 13W, 18W and 23W, 2700K, not dimmable. Hello, so-called free market? Bulb manufacturers? Who dropped the ball here? There are plenty of GU-24 fixtures on the market, it's not like they just started appearing. I'm somewhat confounded. And annoyed.

The final insult — at least, I hope it's final — is about my porch. It has a GU-24 fixture, with a diffuser globe. A GU-24 CFL fits in it, but white is all that's available. I did track down an adapter to use my yellow, screw-base CFL buglite in a GU-24 socket, but it adds just enough length that I can no longer fit the globe over it. I've encountered a couple of other screw-base fixtures — new fixtures — that are just not big enough for most CFLs. I mean, really.

If you're doing completely new construction, it's not that big a deal. There's lots of non-traditional lighting, track, recessed, LED clusters, under-cabinet LEDs… Besides being more energy-efficient, the design options are endless, stylish and very "moderne". Ironically, the GU-24 standard was intended to ease the transition in retrofits on older structures. Y'know, like mine.

So now, I not only have a bucketful of incandescent bulbs I have no need for, I have a bucketful of screw-base CFLs I can't use. Not sure what I'll do with them