Seth asks: How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?. There are several answers. First, his "only 6% of homes have CFLs" is simply wrong. That figure is from a 1999 report. Sales of CFLs have increased steadily and somewhat dramatically since then. Getting accurate market share figures is hard. There was a conference session on that difficulty at the 2005 Energy star conference. But unit sales have increased from the roughly 0.4% unit percentage in 1999 to somewhere between 1.6 and 2.5% in 2004 of unit screwins being CFLs. Translating that into homes with CFLs is hard, but the home percentage has probably increased proportionally. That would mean from 25-40% of US homes having at least one CFL.
The figures for MA in 2004 were: 67% of homes had at least one CFL, and there were an average of 6.7 CFLs in homes that had at least one. MA had 12% of home lighting from CFLs, or 20% if you include fixtures like under-shelf lighting. Of the all the lighting sockets it was estimated that about 60% remain candidates for CFLs. The rest are either already CFLs, or have a functional reason why CFLs will not work. Some of this background and related reports are available as PDFs reference in the 2005 ENERGY STAR Lighting Partner Meeting Agenda : ENERGY STAR.
There is also a lot more analysis of why people do and don't like CFLs, together with historical analysis that explains some of the CFLs baggage at EERE News: EERE Progress Alerts, which links to another PDF. It is actually good news that the list of problems is now down to things like "It's too hard to open the package." That is quite an improvement.
By all means sell the CFL concept. New CFL designs are increasing the candidate sockets and there are a lot of candidate sockets to sell.
But it helps to tell a story that is closer to the truth. Obvious errors like "only 6% of homes have a CFL" really hurt credibility. The better story is that CFLs save a lot of money, they save energy, the current models are suitable for 60-80% of the sockets, and only about 20% of those are presently CFLs.
The two biggest functional barriers remaining are: 1) failure to work properly with dimmers. The CFL makers are working on this, but have not solved the problem for most dimmer systems. and 2) Color temperature of the white is much better, but still not a replacement for many spot lighting systems. A lesser problem, but one that forces people to shop around, is that CFLs are not the same shape as incandescents. There is usually a CFL that fits, but finding it may require extra shopping that is not needed for incandescents. Describe these failing also. It is much better to not sell an unacceptable product, than to sell one and give CFLs a bad name.
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