It's dead. The housing you speak of is the ballast, not a fuse.

If you can get this shipped to your location, they probably are a better deal at $10 each (I recently bought some good 45-watt 5500K CFLs and they work well - cgi.ebay.com/4-x-45-Watts-Perfect-Daylights-STUDIO-VIDEO-PHOTOGRAPH_W0QQitemZ360151510898QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item53dab3ef72)

No user repairable parts inside the ballast of a CFL unless you really know what you're doing and even then I've never found it economically viable.
One trap with CFLs. Although they create around one third the heat of a tungsten lamp for the same amount of light they still do get hot and they need to be kept cool, more so than a tungsten or HID lamp. In some small fittings with no ventilation it is possible to overheat them and they will not last as long as they should.
Some of them are also not very well made, we've had batches where the glass parted company with the plasic too easily or there wasn't enough ventilation holes in the ballast housing.
From your description of what happened it sounds like an infantile failure, just bad luck really. If you bought it from a reputable retailer they should replace it for you. If you bought it online they probably still will but you'll cop the freight at least one way, probably better just to cut your losses on something that cost $18.

Bob.

Thanks Bob. I'm going back today. BTW, for anyone interested... the ballast housing CONTAINS a fuse or fuses, or components that perform the same task. They CAN be repaired. The only issue is determining how the specific PCB in the bulb is configured. I could not find a schematic for this bulb, and it would have been too much work to de-solder the thing and figure it out...for $18.

Ken

It is amazing to me that governments around the world (including both state and Federal agencies here in the USA) are going to mandate CF usage. They certainly have their place any comprehensive energy policy, but to completely outlaw tungsten is just plain stupid.

Addressing the issue of this post, I have had a huge percentage of my CF bulbs die a very early death. There are some really good, technically savvy pages, such as this one:

Should There be a Ban on Incandescent Lamps?

that provide some great technical information about some of the significant and serious pitfalls of this technology, along with some of its advantages.

To avoid the problems you are having, you need to:

1. Purchase "good" CF bulbs. This is difficult, but some of the stuff out there is basically landfill before it is ever used -- which is horrible because these things are NOT environmentally friendly in any way.

2. NEVER use them in any can or enclosed fixture. I tried using a "spotlight" CF (turns out it is a regular CF with a spotlight enclosure fitted on the exterior. I've gone through almost a dozen, with none of them lasting more than a year. Regular 75W incandescents last a decade in the same application.

3. NEVER use them in any application where the bulb is turned on & off frequently. This is true of regular florescents as well. I have most bulbs in my house on a motion-controlled whole house computer. This turns lights on & off as people enter and leave rooms. Saves a ton of energy, but it does turn the lights on and off a lot. The CF bulbs all died in less than a year. By contrast, most of the incandescent bulbs in the system are the original bulbs from when I put this system into operation in 1994.

In my view, CF bulbs are extremely nasty beasts. If you break one near your two-year old kid, good luck. They are toxic.

I have great hope for LED technology and hope that it can be developed fast enough that it can be used instead of CF bulbs so that we don't let our governments create an ecological disaster of major proportions by forcing us to use these hazardous bulbs.

I have many bulbs and so far have only lost one. I get mine at Lowes and try to buy name brands, but since they are all made in China, I don't think it matters too much. Lowes usually sells them in two or three packs. The one I lost died within an hour. When I took it back the next day, they wanted the whole 3 pack back. I did finally convince them to exchange it.
The light output is marked on the package, but you really have to dig around to find it. Some are marked on the bulb itself, so you have to open the package to look.

Lynn

I recently bought LED lights, and they are OK for general lighting but NOT for video - severe flicker. However, LEDs draw so little power that it is easy and cheap to build a DC power supply (for those that have no internal transformers), and perhaps soon we'll see commercial LEDs with built-in filtering.

I did build up two sets of 8 ebay "bike" lights each, with each bike light having 76 LEDs. I run them off a 36v LiFePO4 scooter battery and they are BRIGHT, with no flicker (pure DC from a battery does not flicker). They seem to have a cool color temperature, and they are thermally cool, too - running at less than 10 watts or so for each set of 8. I haven't actually used them for video, but the idea is tempting.

I have, in fact, used one of the "UFO"-style LED lights that many on this forum were talking about some months ago. I glued it to a UV filter for my camera lense and I use it from time to time for video of small objects, especially when I want to chroma key them. Pretty good color rendition, and the LEDs seem identical to those in the 76-LED bike lights that I bought.

Unfortunately, most LEDs for 120vac are not nearly as efficient. As of 2008, available 120-volt lights typically provided only 20 lumens of light per watt (LPW) of electrical power – barely superior to the 15 LPW of incandescent bulbs, and far inferior to Energy-Star fluorescent lights (about 60 LPW). However, LPW ratings of about 100 have been achieved in the lab – and very efficient LEDs are now available for some applications, so the future of LED lighting seems to be bright.

Regarding CFLs, older ones contained about 4 grams of mercury (it would fit on the tip of a ball-point pen), but new CFLs may contain no more than 1.4 grams. If one breaks, one should don protective gear and pick it up with tape (see www.jlconline.com/maine, www.jlconline.com/mercury, and www.epa.gov/CFLcleanup). Fortunately, the EPA estimates that only about .2% of the mercury in a bulb is elemental mercury vapor; the rest is in the glass, the coating, etc.

One analysis I read compared the mercury load on the environment imposed by CFLs compared to the mercury that results from the extra power generation required by incandescents. Even though the CFLs do contribute a small amount of mercury to landfills, they save so much power that the reduction in mercury spewing from power stations' chimneys far more than offsets the CFLs' own contamination.

Power factor (pf) problems are easy to correct. Electronic ballasts that use a voltage tripler or quadrupler circuit rely upon capacitors rather than transformers to get their high voltage. Capacitors produce a pf less than one because the current leads the voltage, whereas older magnetic ballasts produce power pf because voltage leads the current. The former is not so easy to remedy cheaply, for inductance must be added to the circuit to correct the pf, and coils are not so cheap - and they add weight and bulk. However, a poor pf due to too much capacitance offsets the pf problems created by magnetic-ballast CFLs and other inductance-heavy devices, such as refrigerator motors, so the overall effect on transmission line load would be beneficial.

CFLs that depend upon transformers, and this may include "electronic" ballasts, can provide a pf of 1 by the addition of capacitors - no longer expensive nor bulky nor with the limited life expectancy of old electrolytics.

Bottom line, I don't see evidence that CFLs pose a significant environmental or personal safety hazard. Moreover, they save a lot of energy.

Incidentally, if you are interested in more ways to save energy in your home, an article on that topic from one of my books is a free download from http://homexam.com/homeowner.htm (click article 9E).

Poisons are a concern with quite a few materials that go into electrical and electronic equipment. I'm fairly prepared for the type of CFL failure described above and how to best be adopt precautionary behavior if the demise of a bulb breaks the glass.

Where I am less prepared is with regard to failures on unattended bulbs. Having not had an incandescent bulb fail where it has almost started a fire I've can attest to have seen some pretty worrying burning on some early generation CFLs at the base when they've 'gone'. One might presume this has been due to the lack of care in the design of the miniaturization of the ballast and starter circuits. I'd worry more if I tried to use CFLs on the back of silicon controlled switches rather than manual switches. So for me, home automation or dimming (even with dimmable fluorescents) would be out of the question. Appreciating that the modern day CFL has been safety checked and that it is misinformation to suggest that there is a increased risk of fire. Yet it is nice to have a personal choice for some of your lighting. e.g. Where you leave a light on unattended such as a nightlight for children etc (I do encourage my children to sleep in the dark but we do have visitors sleep over who are scared by it). Not the root intention of the saying, but "where there is smoke...."

I'm also not overly enamored at the prospect of using compact LED arrays on AC power. Really, those knowing the difference might find it hard to trust the switch mode PSUs and semiconductor ('chopper') rectification. These lightweight low cost circuits are fabulous when they are working but they can have rather nasty catastrophic failure modes. Again, I have nothing to say they are of risk but I'm not entirely comfortable until more years have passed and real conclusions are drawn.


Recessed lighting didn't have smoke hoods from the outset. That came through time, statistics and general misadventure.

Downsides:
Incandescent=cheap (domestically), hot, inefficient
CFL=concentration of poison, rapid demise with smoke + occaional melting
LED=focused, tiny switch mode PSUs with failure modes offsetting some of the otherwise benign characteristics, bright is only just starting to mean bright enough to provide a punch of light!

Indeed, I'm sure other technology has its misgivings too (e.g. high pressure sodium, magnesium, halogen, xenon etc). I'm just not sure how well informed the decision makers are when grand social reforms are being pushed.

The CFL is still young compared to the coiled-coil incandescent. We have to expect units will die young and unexpectedly.

All in all, I agree that tungsten ought to be lawful for the responsible purchaser. CFL should be encouraged but not entertained with open arms. In the OP's case, it turned out to be a small but not insignificant waste of money, in the example quoted.