Now with Cheezo-Scan Spectroscopy!
So, the big question is, does the Sylvania CF13EL/SUPER/YELLOW bug light actually do better at not attracting bugs than a regular incandescent bug light, such as the Phillips BUG-A-AWAY?
Beats me; it’s a bit chill tonight, and the bugs aren’t really out.
BUT!
We got cool piccies!
Ah? Ah? Cool, right?
I held my very scientific pair of diffraction grating goggles in front of my camera lens, took a few snaps of each bulb in action, cut and pasted in The GIMP, and voila!
I made this image by selecting one rainbow image from photos of each lamp, editing them to be the same size & resolution, and then pasting them together, centering the yellow image from the CFL as closely as I could on the same color band in the continuous spectrum of the incandescent.
The CFL, which looks very yellow to your eyes, is actually radiating very strongly in red and green, and only faintly in yellow/orange. The incandescent, on the other hand, is radiating all the way across the visible spectrum.
(If I were being very, very scientific, I would have arranged a thin slit to photograph the bulbs through; then I would have had single thin lines at each wavelength instead of three wide copies of the CFL itself. By measuring the locations of those lines, I would be able to tell you the wavelengths of the emitted light. Ah, well. Another time, perhaps.)
It’s easy to think that the CFL will be most effective.
In fact, it’s hard to tell from this: bugs are attracted to ultraviolet, which my camera does not pick up. Fluorescent lamps use UV to stimulate phosphors coating the inside of the tube. Most FLs have a mixture of phosphors to generate a mix of wavelengths to simulate white light, so the lamp may actually be radiating in the UV, and I just can’t see it or detect it with my equipment.
However, the lamp has a heavy yellow coating, and yellow is the most efficient color for filtering out UV; since the lamp generates almost no yellow light, the coating is either there as a UV filter, or is pure marketing.
Here’s the lamp itself; note the see-through base; see-through is always a plus for this curious monkey. There’s a number on it which may well be the model number or a lot number: 0835200.
[Update: Further model identification info: the blister pack insert has the number "X15283" over the UL logo, and the bar code bears the legend "CF13EL/MINI/BUG/BL".]
I’m curious that Sylvania didn’t use an actual yellow phosphor. It may be that no strong, attractive yellow phosphor was available, or that it is prohibitively expensive.
I’d also like to see an LED bug light; LEDs actually do radiate only yellow or orange light, with, as far as I know, almost no UV. Unfortunately, they’re very expensive: about $40 for the linked model, and that lamp would not fit in my fixture.
Let me also note that this lamp turns on almost instantly with a good fraction of its full power.
In researching this article, I found exactly one other post reviewing bug-performance of CFLs. Taft found that his was reasonably effective; I look forward to seeing how mine does compared to the incandescent. Warm nights should be coming soon.
Tags: bug light, CF13EL/MINI/BUG/BL, cfl, compact fluorescent, Sylvania Super Saver Bug Light
If you’d like, I can measure your bulbs in my spectrometer. It happens to be all set up and would be really easy to do. OR I can just go get my own bulb and do my own measurements and then I’ll report the results to you.
Hmmm sounds like a plan. I might even take some bug data. Maybe a fly strip under each to get some objective quantitative data.
You have diffraction grating goggles? VERY COOL.
Just wanted to mention that pure yellow light is made up entirely of a combination of pure green and pure red light. Yellow is the result of these two primary colors blending together (note that these are primary additive colors, which is what we measure from light that is emitted). Even our brain is believed to ‘see’ color from the primary additive colors of red, green and blue, green being the most dominant. The eyes have neurons or ‘cones’ in the retina which react to one of each of the three colors. It is this combination of stimuli to the receptors that lets us ‘see’ the color we are looking at. Postive transparency film also uses these three colors of dye and digital cameras also have sensors that detect each of the three colors.
So in a sense there is no such thing as “pure yellow” light without having the existence of red and green. I’m sure you will get pretty much the same result from testing a yellow LED.
Mixing red and green paint would of course give an entirely different result because paint (or ink) absorbs color and only emits (or reflects) what hasn’t been absorbed.
This is the only CLF bug light I have found that does not flicker when connected to a circuit controlled by an X-10 type controller. That alone makes it worth it to me, even if it’s anti-bug performance is only average.