About two years ago I moved to a new house. I thought I'd do the right thing and also try to save on my power bills by replacing every light with CFLs from the start.

The experiment lasted about a year. By that time I'd had enough of straining my eyes to read a book, of holding letters over my head to get enough light to read by, even trying to use the phone was a chore.

The CFLs are now mostly sitting in a cupboard gathering dust.

The only place I've found a genuine use for them is in a bedside lamp, where a regular bulb generates too much heat and is brighter than required.

I'll be stockpiling incandescent bulbs before the ban. Of course if cheap LEDs come in that'd be even better.

I've found the wattage equivalents a bit overestimated. I had the same eyestrain problems when I replaced my 75 watt bulbs with "75 Watt equivalent" cfls. They just weren't bright enough. I moved those to my garage and replaced them with the "100 watt" cfl and they are great. They use 22W so they are still using less than 1/3 the power.

I had the same problem in my house. I do arts and crafts sometimes, and I couldn't find a bulb even close to the right quality. None of them were as bright as a 150 watt+ incandescent and I had a hard time seeing details and color differences. I'm all for saving money, but these just didn't work.

We are using primarily incandescent now, but I stuck with CFLs in some places: lamps we rarely use (like a night-light type so we don't stumble into things late at night), some lights on timers (even though the box says not to), and in a few rooms we rarely use. The best place I've found for CFLs is in our porch lights. We have fixtures that are tough to get into, and really, who remembers to change the bulb out there? We stuck in CFLs a while back and haven't had any problems. Plus, no one cares if it takes a while to get fully bright.

CFLs are great in work lights. They don't get to hot and can be moved around easily. Got them in the basement and laundry too.

I assume that I can use a 22W CFL (100W equivalent) in a fixture with a 75W limit. Is this correct?