Do you think you will still be able to buy them for 'specialist use' ?
I'm okay with having energy saving bulbs in my house, my room and so on as long as they are good quality and give out good light. But I've tried them in the lamps in my workshop and they just don't compare.
There are some situations where an incandescent light bulb simply cannot be replaced. I hope they don’t stop their use out-right. It would make a little money spinner for some companies though, selling the old bulbs for specialist use (if there is a suitable loop-hole)
I agree with what some people here have said too, a lot of people think that energy savers are so bad because they have either been given the really poor ones for free by British gas, supermarkets and so on. Giving away free energy savers seems to have done more harm than good.
IIRC the legislation allows for specialist lights, as it's recognised that for various applications (such as cooker lights, and photographic/film work etc) the current crop of low energy lights don't do the job.
However it might be worth stocking up on your current favourite lights as i've no idea exactly what ones will be exempt.
I agree fully with your conclusion about the free low energy bulbs the likes of BG have given away.
We've got dozens of them spare at the moment (both parents are retired, and we've been getting them through the post for years), some of them are pretty dire, the newer ones seem much better though, although I've yet to find one my mum likes in her bedroom.
Same with the lighting i've got in my room at the moment, I swapped out the R50's (which never lasted more than a few weeks before dying, usually tripping the lighting fuse*) with Ikea low energy ones.
The Ikea ones were cheap but they are pretty awful in terms of reaching full brightness (although as they've aged they seem to have got better at warming up quickly), I tried a couple of different ones in other fittings and found a newer one that works much better - but costs about £7 a bulb (which I'm not going to spend at the moment
as I'd need about 9 of them).
The main advantage for me with the low energy bulbs tends to be that they last a long time
Delvis, most offices and factories have been using tube lighting for decades as it's cheaper to run, longer lasting and easier to maintain than incandescents (I think modern ones tend to be B rated compared to the small flourecent energy saving ones that tend to be A/B, or incandescents which are normally something like G).
We've been using them in our garage and kitchen for 20 odd years for much the same reasons (and because in the kitchen a single 5 foot tube gives much better overall light than any single/pair of normal fittings we've tried/seen).
I just picked up a couple of daylight tubes for our garage to put up in one corner for model work.
*And if they were Homebase branded ones about a 25% chance of shattering when they died (not fun trying to get out of the room, barefoot in the dark, whilst avoiding sharp bits of glass).
