&#% compact fluorescents again!

[mitaux8030]

Hi all,
Thanks to some greenie prat, we now all have to have those nasty compact fluroescent globes in our homes.

I hate their reliability... as I've lamented before, it seems that around 10-20% of them fail within the first few hours of use, no matter weather they're the high quality 'name' brands or the low quality 'cheapies'. I figured out that due to the high failure rate this makes the CF globes actually more expensive to run over their overall lifetime, averaged through a house with 15 globes.

And as someone else has also pointed out previously (onya TRASH), at the end of their useful life, they're more toxic to the environment than the good old incandescent globes.

But now I have a new problem with them. I like to listen to shortwave radio of an evening... but one of the major contributors to radio noise within the house is - yep you guessed it - those &@#* compact fluorescent lamps. Again I've found that, against logic, some of the high end 'name' brand, expensive types are the worst offenders. One, a GE brand costing $12 is actually the worst offender, spreading hash and buzz through the shortwave bands that is audible a good 50 metres away from the house!

Energy saving perhaps, but they're decidedly ungreen, unsafe, unreliable, radio-unfriendly and uneconomic. And thanks to a gullible vote-grabbing government that didn't thoroughly research the subject, we're now forced to use them.

There must be an alternative!!! But if there is, I've not seen them commonly available in the supermarket shelves yet.

My question here is: what alternative technologies are there that are energy saving, reliable, non-toxic and radio / EMC freindly?
What about LEDs... are there LED lamps that fit the standard bayonet or ES fittings, how good is their illumination dispersion, and how are they for RF noise?
I did find a variant of the incandescent globe that seems as if its a halogen hybrid (if the packaging is to be believed) type that seems quite RF friendly and reliable but it was the only one I've been able to find so far.