Hmmm, I'm not familiar with "soft start" bulbs. Are they some of the new fangled energy saving (LED or fluorescent) bulbs?

Back in the day, when everything was an incandescent bulb with an honest to goodness wire filament, bulbs would tend to blow out when they were first turned on. The resistivity of tungsten (or any other metal) is less at lower temperatures. From Ohm's law (V=IR), you would get more current flowing until the filament warmed up and its resistance increased. Too much current and the filament would melt/break, and the bulb would be burned out. If you could make an incandescent bulb that would slowly decrease the resistance after the bulb was turned on, the initial current would be less, making the brightness less (P=IV). Higher initial resistance (but a dimmer initial light bulb) would have been an advantage as far making it less likely to have the bulb burn out.

But who uses incandescent lightbulbs these days?

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

Proudly raises hand

You're in trouble now.

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

Sounds like those stupid florescent cork screw bastards. I hate them.

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

Yeah they look like LEDs but when they light up you can see that they are fluorescent. Basically I didn’t read the package, I just grabbed bulbs.

No I have a mixture of bulbs in my fixtures. The light will come in immediately and it will also get brighter. I can’t bring myself to throw out the stupid bulbs.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Bravo!

Just one more thing to add...

Also back in the day, there were 3-way bulbs that had a low-resistance (high brightness) filament and a high-resistance (low brightness) filament. The switch would cycle 00, 01, 10, 11 to give off, low, medium, and high brightnesses respectively. But, this caused a lot of start up cycling for the high-resistance filament and would burn them out prematurely.

A clever solution to this problem was to have the switch operate in a Gray Binary sequence of 00, 01, 11, 10 or off, low, bright, medium. But it never caught on commercially.

[Sorry. I got my geek set on high today.]

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

Depends on the situation, but I prefer my slow starting fluorescence especially when waking up before sunrise.

One thing that bugs me is the whole process to claim warranty on more expensive/longer lasting bulbs.

They KNOW you're probably not going to keep the receipt and bother to mail the thing back, at your cost, just to net 1:1 for the cost of mailing it back.

Bastards.

They save your night vision, especially when you are sniping or defending against home invaders

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

About 50% of my lights are incandescent but that is slowly changing.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

I thought those were for waking up with, supposedly helps you wake up if your room slowly lights up.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

I find a bright light does a good enough job waking me up.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

You can still buy them. Just have to look for them on a lower shelf

We have some of these .. annoys me as well. And so, we wind up not turning the light off once it's got to full brightness.

On a somewhat related note, I don't think the newer lights seem to last as long as advertised. Definitely replaced a bunch well before some 5 year lifespan or such. Or maybe that's because we leave them on? :-)