I'm bemused by all these people who consider tungsten light to be warm and friendly, I think its vile, sickly grossly un-natural light.
It’s warmer than daylight, but traditional and natural sources of night-time light are much warmer still: fires, candles, and oil lamps.
Colour temperature does not matter much except for the initial impression, because your eye quickly adjusts to any colour temperature from candlelight to overcast sky.
The problem with CFLs (and, I strongly suspect, LEDs) is that – in addition to the annoying artefacts (flickering, buzzing, etc.) mentioned in this thread, which are depressingly common – the spectral power distribution has dark chunks, bright chunks, and other unnatural features in its curve. The lamps do not remotely emulate black-body radiation. Your eye cannot properly compensate for this and therefore the colours and brightness of known objects appear strange.
The efficiency claims are exaggerated by these spectral flaws too, because you need more light energy for a given impression of brightness and good visibility. Try sewing under CFLs. To avoid eye-strain you need many more ‘equivalent watts’ than the actual wattage of a tungsten bulb.
Photographers notice these problems more obviously because colour photographs taken under CFLs are hard or impossible to post-process to a natural appearance.
On efficiency, the claims are exaggerated by another effect: often a room with the lights on is a heated room. This is certainly true for most of the winter for most of Europe. And even if ceilings are not an ideal location to put heaters, they heat the room above. Therefore in blocks of flats, the net loss of energy from tungsten bulbs must be low in cool weather.
Of course there are more-efficient energy sources to heat a home than electricity (though many Parisian flats nonetheless have electric heating), but the heating effects of tungsten bulbs still reduce waste. Some of their heat output is put to good use.
Another consideration is that of scale. Tungsten bulbs account for very little of your total energy footprint. Anyone who drives a car bigger than a Clio – in fact, anyone with a car at all – would save a lifetime of tungsten bulb energy in a few months by making a smarter choice there. British houses, like French ones, are with rare exception appallingly insulated. Americans blow staggering amounts of energy on air conditioning that is only required by bad architecture and bad culture. Desktop computers are pointless energy hogs in 99% of homes in 2017. Airline travel even once a year makes a mockery of your attempts to save a few joules with a CFL in the bathroom.
Speaking of which, few things are dumber than a slow-warming CFL in the bathroom or toilet, which I see in most British houses these days. The energy saved is trivial, the CFL soon dies because it’s not designed for two-minute cycles, and you can neither see to shave properly nor go for a quick pee.
I have used CFLs in the living room, kitchen, and one bedroom, where they make sense in my case. And I’d like to use LEDs in my new flat, assuming they’re any good. But tungsten is not as bad as made out and has its place anyway.
