A few minutes ago, one of our smoke detectors activated. A nearby compact fluorescent light bulb was flickering and pouring out white smoke. Wow those things smell bad and get really hot when they die.
Is this a normal failure? It seems kind of dangerous.
1. If the bulb was base up, this can happen on cheaper styles as they don't use high temp components. This can also happen if the lamp is in a high-vibration area.
2. If it was a non-dimmable CFL on a motion detector or dimmer circuit, this can happen - and it can overheat your dimmer or motion detector as well.
3. CFL's - like ALL fluorescent lamps - including the tube ones in your shop or kitchen - have tiny amounts of mercury. As far as phosphorus, any CRT (tube) monitor for a television or computer has MUCH more phosphorus (as well as lead, cadmium and a bunch of other nasties).
4. 80% of the lamps in my home are CFL's - I hate them, my wife hates them, but we have seen the effects on the electric bill and we use them in almost every room of the house.
5. I now use LED lights in my office, I like these much better than CFL's, but I need 5x more lamps to get to the same lighting levels I had with CFL's, so I have a fairly heavy investment there. They are cool to the touch, they dim (in a slightly odd way) they burn at any angle with no problems and they use so much less electric that it's incredible. My office went from 3 60w incandescents (180 watts) to 3 12 Watt CFL's (36 watts) to 15 3W LED's (45W). I am gradually replacing outdoor lighting with LED's, and my son just likes the cool blue version of LED and that's all he uses in his room.