[RFI] How cost effective -- and safe -- are CFL bulbs anyway?

[W2RU - Bud Hippisley]

My kitchen ceiling utilizes five 75-watt indoor "floods" and my radio room
uses two, also.

A year or two ago I bought two low-wattage replacement fluorescent floods
for the ones in my radio room, since I was looking for a brighter, whiter
light where I do a lot of reading and detail writing/drawing.  Depening on
how they worked out, it was my intention to then fill the kitchen sockets
with them, too.  I'm not sure if the bulbs I bought were what you guys are
calling CFLs or not, but I think they were around 17 watts each.  Since
they're indoor flood replacements, I have to assume they were designed for
base-high mounting.

Three problems with them caused me to revert to standard incandescent
floods:

1.  They took "forever" to get up to useable brilliance.
2.  They didn't even last a year before I had to replace one of the two.
3.  One day I realized that the rough drifting signals I was hearing on 80
meters disappeared when I turned my radio room light switch off.

I'm back to incandescent bulbs now.

Bud, W2RU