How To Cope When Your Favorite Light Bulb Gets The Shaft: Fluorescent Light Bulbs

This is the third installment of a three-part series on replacing EISA phased-out light bulbs – what’s leaving and why. You can read the first post on household A lamps here, and the second on reflector lamps here.  

Discontinued Fluorescents

T12 fluorescent light bulbs have been around since the ’30s, and in light bulb years, that’s just too plain old. Technology’s potential for efficiency, for saving you time and money, has moved light-years since then. That’s why the T12 phase-out began in July this year. This phase-out affected nearly all T12s, with the exception of the cold temperature lamps and a few others. Most T12s now have gone the way of typewriters and VCRs, cassette tapes and rotary phones – delightful relics, but come on people, we’re better than this.

We’ve also listed one T8 lamp with the group. While T8s are much newer, and most are much more efficient than T12s, the lamps listed are the oldest and most basic of their kind. They have the least lumens and the shortest lives of all the T8s, so while they’re cheap, they’re simply not a good value.

Here’s how to update:

You can still use these lamps, but they’re no longer imported or manufactured – once current supplies are depleted, they’re gone forever.

When building owners switch to current technology like newer T5s and T8s, they can save nearly 50% of the energy they normally use every year to power a T12. These new lamps are smaller in diameter, but can still provide the same light output, just like every other piece of new technology that performs better while having a sleeker, streamlined form.