EMI: CFLs vs Incandescent Lights in Your Lab?

The only time I have experienced the type of trouble you mention was in a room where we did measurements with radiated EMI up to some 100 MHz. Electronic ("green") ballasts were installed for the fluorescent lamps in there, and we could clearly see them (and not our DUT) on the spectrum analyzer. We went back to simple mains frequency chokes and things were a lot better again. I guess the same reasoning goes for compact fluorescent lamps.

Other than EMI measurements with test receivers or spectrum analyzers, I wouldn't expect trouble. Hacking radios with dimmed incandescent bulbs on in the same room usually is worse than interference from CFLs.

CFLs are not very green at all, there's enough components inside them to make a ham radio transmitter!

They use so many different third party components - the cost in resources and transportation of CFLs and their constituent parts far outweigh the environmental impact of using a regular incandescent bulb.

It's a fallacy that CFLs are greener, and I've not seen any evidence to suggest they are.

However - What they are good at is reducing power consumption and running cost, so from the users point of view they're great for reducing the energy bill, just not so great at reducing the impact of electrical lighting on the planet and it's resources.

More efficient != More environmentally friendly

With regard to EMI - I work with audio, it's quite common to get interference on audio or signal lines that run close to a large lighting ballast or power transformer. My advice is to keep power and signal lines separate when possible, but they'd have to be pretty close in order to have an effect. The only time where I'd get anal about it is when fitting lighting in a sound recording studio, I've used so many badly wired studios over the years that I'd insist on having the lighting ballasts in a separate room.

REVISION:

I should be corrected - my reason for believing CFLs are bad looks like misinformation - a commonly held misconception - doh!

I retract my earlier comment that:

the cost in resources and transportation of CFLs and their constituent parts far outweigh the environmental impact of using a regular incandescent bulb.

I'd like to replace it with:

the environmental impact of using a CFL far outweighs the environmental impact of using a regular incandescent bulb.....probably :)

I do still have an issue with CFL mercury content, it's really bad for the environment, but... as things are currently - I admit CFLs are the lesser of two evils when you consider how the majority of electricity is generated

So I guess it's not so easy to say which is better, maybe we need more data to make an informed decision, I remain unconvinced with CFLs green credentials.

I have CFL bulbs in both of my lights and in fact around most of the home. No particular reason other than they were giving them away at 20p each and they do save energy.

My test equipment seems sufficiently isolated that this causes no problems whatsoever. But... in order for the manufacturer to sell these, they have to already meet EMI standards.