As you can see, i today uploaded a picture of an economy box of two 15W 3U Eurolux CFLs.
These lamps produces only 800lm for their 15W wattage rating.
When i divided their lumens by the wattage rating to get their efficiency, guess what was the result: Well!!! 53lm/w!!!!, worser than even the T12 halophosphors fluorescent magnetic fitting from the 70"!!!!!!!
Picture here:
So i would suggest you: Continue to buy magnetic ballasts (But please verify that the starter is either electronic or thermal in case of external starter, to furtur prolong the eqipment life), PL lamps and magnetic adapters. PL lamps on magnetic ballasts are MUCH more efficient than the current energy saving CFLs and last much more, even on bathrooms and toilet rooms.

In the design of CFLs, EVERYTHING POSSIBLE is sacrificed for compactness and cheapness

Thats what this light source was mean to be : affordable replacement for incandescents, that saves energy, gives better white light.  Some applications need exactly this, and CFLs are the best currently existing option for them

And by affordable i mean :
In the 80's there was SL*18 and it did not got widely used
In the 90's there was Orion with PL + Osram German CFLs + Philips PLE-T + whatever and they did not get widely used
In the 2000's there appeared the cheap Eurolux / AFLA / whatever CFLs, and you immediately see them everywhere overnight

So it was result of trial and error on the market, that showed how much sacrifice in quality should be done to get this light source to be used in every home. So it should not surprise you that the quality is not high. Those ARE the CFLs that are meant to be affordable by the standards of most people, if you want something better by efficiency or quality, use another light source



The thinking of not using a light source anywhere due to some of its efficiency properties, is the same thinking that leads to lamp bans

It is ofcourse not the same approach, since you dont actualy ban me from buying CFLs. so its fine with me that you boycott them, your right

But think of it : Would you also boycott Incandescents due to being 4 TIMES more inefficient than this CFL ? HPS due to it being nasty yellow light ? Halides due to EOL explosions ? Fluorescents due to flicker at startup ? Glow sticks due to having life time of just 8 hours ?

I would not, each of those has a place where its the best light source for the task (believe it or not, even CFLs have such aplications) and no reason no to use it



I can think of at least 2 "innocent" ways how the wrong efficiency rating was printed on the package of CFLs which you have found

1.
The guys at the marketing department of Illumina type in a file what they want to be printed on the box. Then they go buy some CFL with box (from a competitr company) as example and go with it to a graphics designer, that would design the enire artwork for the Eurolux lamps box

(If they got the box of a PL-S instead of CFL to give to the designer, or a box that allready had fake energy rating as well, that would explain the "A" rating)

The designer makes the box with the data he got from the company (that does not include the "energy rating" due to lack of knowledge or ignorance), but copies (due to lack of knowledge whats it all about) the efficeincy rating as is from the box of the other CFL / PL


2.
In the marketing (not engineering, they probably dont even have one) department of Illumina, they write the data to be printed on the box

They dont know what "efficiency" is all about, so they either clone the entire drawing (to them this is not more thn a drawing) from the package of another lamp (possibly another type of lamp, or one where it was allready fake as well) or try to come up with the rating following their logic, but lacking the knowledge : "Its a CFL" --> "So its the most efficient lamp ever" --> "So it must be A"



Neither of this should happen, but you'd better call the company and kindly ask them why the energy rating does not match the calculated efficiency (all this kindly, they might simply not understand what is it all about, and you'll probably not be speaking with the one who deigned the box anyway)

Boycotting right away, not even before checking what is going on, is quite unfair, and redundant

Also, other CFL manufacturers did nothing bad to you

Just sayin'

The efficiency wasn't written on the packages. What that are written, was the lumens, wattage and lifetime.
I was the one, that revealed their inefficiency. These are 15W and produce 800lm. I divided the lumens by the wattage and got 53.3..., which is not a figure that i even saw in the triphosphors area of the fluorescent lighting.
And most of the halophosphors fluorescent tubes are more efficient than this figure, even on magnetic ballasts.

Some examples:

Phillps Sl*25 - 1200 lumen - 25 watts

-> 48 lm/w

Phillips PL*9 - 600 lumen - 9 watts lamp and 4 watts ballast

-> 46 lm/w

Tungsram E5 German made cfl from the 90's
900 lumen - 15 watt

-> 60 lm/w

Thorn 2D adapter for 16 watt 2D lamp (magnetic ballast)

1050 lumen - 16 watts lamp - 4 watts ballast

-> 52,5 lm/w

So I think 50 - 60 lm/w is the typical range for cfls. Linear fluorescent tubes are much better (T5 with electronic ballast)

The 50..60lm/W is indeed the typical efficacy of bare CFL's, but it drop to 40..50lm/W when you put them into light diffusing fixture (majority of household fixtures are spreading the light over large surface, as the naked incandescent is too glary). Moreover typical room lighting fixture consist of multiple lamps (again to not cause glare problems), so it sup up to about 3000lm of diffused light. That mean about 65W of CFL's

Fluorescent you may mostly use naked, higher power tube being not an issue (as higher power = larger dimensions) so the same service (~3000lm of diffused light) could be done with single 4' lamp, what mean about 50W with magnetic and 30..35W with HF electronic ballast.

With this comparison make me mad as hell, when the CFL's are promoted everywhere like "the most efficient lighting", when these are even not able to reach the performance of more then 30years old technology. And what the linear tubes are really missing is a bit of support in getting them acceptable for living space use, that mean mainly availability of usable fixtures (and in my eyes the long tube would have way better expectation to win the acceptance living space then the rather harsh incandescent design, would both came at the same time)

My preferred indoors fixture is louvered T8 (maybe some light is lost in the louver, but it eliminates glare completely unlike most lamp shades that just diffuse the light

In the absence of glare you need very little light to see well - so i consider them the greenest - maybe they are not as good LM/W as just a shoplight, but with such good light control you need less light than you'd need with a shoplight to see well, so overall you still need the same power input if not less

In my room i use 11W PL on magnetic bllast, since the smallest louvered fixture readily available (ie without buying 1xT5 electronic fixture for 100's of NIS) is 4x18W T8, which is overkill even with just 2 lamps in it, and with 1 lamp it makes less light and takes more power than 11W PL

Going back to the original picture of the box, it states their `cool white` in colour, the general rule with fluorescent lamps is, the cooler the colour, the less light output they produce, are these `budget` lamps using tri-phosphours or halos?

Hard to say. I've seen both. But if the tri-phosphor mix is poorly designed and/or made, the light output and quality could be as low as halophosphates.

But there is some rule (I don't know the name) what describe the required color temperature as function of the illumination level. Not following this rule mean, your lighting would look dim and unnatural.
So maybe the CFL's are of rather low light output, what mean the illumination level is low, so colder temperatures woudl look dim.

I found the contrary - /10 (daylight) halophosphate is brighter than /33 (cool white) halophosphate - or is it only me ?

Ash: Daylight halophosphors are more efficient than coolwhite halophosphors in terms of lm/w.

You talk about efficiency, so ecologic in a way (if not why care about consummation ?)
CFL are destined to home use, so you have only few lamps, you don't care so much about consummation unlike if you had 1k lamps.
So i will talk in a home use case.
You have to considers some other fact:
- for the production of theses CFL, you needed a lot of component, for the electronic, gas (mercury) and phosphor. For find all theses component, and make the lamp you use much more energy than for a simple tungsten, even halogen.
- You have to trash the ballast each time, but the ballast could live longer time (never seen non sefbalasted E27 lamp in france)
- Most of peoples put the lamp in regular trash !!! And they are so polutive !
- I'm not sure that recycling lamp is actually efficient. And when the tube is broken, is polutive anyway
- Lifetime is very bad, my tungsten lamp of my room (lot of use) was older than the CFL i had before in the corridor.
- Lamp could leave very more long time with very good efficiency : induction (a bit less efficient than T5 but quite good). But we can't find induction exept chinese or expensive.
- So if phosphor can leave more long time in induction, even T8 should leave much more long time !

For me CFL are just product of consummation for make people think they do something good by buying and the way to sell more expensive bulb, but it's worse than incandescent even with the (big) difference of efficiency.
And why not use incandescent in winter ? When i'm cold i light a 800w Redhead
So care about lm/w is realy stupid i think

If you realy want fluo, assume, trash your E27 and put a separate ballast

Personally, at home i use only incandescent. And i have some other reseon to hate these lamps (bad CRI, sometimes very bad, people don't care about temperature of color and don't have coherence in linghting, that product more UV than incandescent, you can't dim it, flash, switch on instantly… and for heal what most natural than a light with the quality of the sun as is incandecent ??? Led reduce a lot of theses problems, but they are bad for heal)

I think CFLs when they are of good quality and used properly (for the application where they are good for, recycled properly etc) should be better than incandescents

But those conditions are by for not the case everywhere, and indeed in many places the incandescent is the better (and greener) solution for those places

And in many places you have so much better stuff like fluorescents / HID so why limit yourself to stuff that works on unballasted E27 in the 1st place



I use incandescents and CFLs sparingly. Anywhere else PL, I'd 2D if they were a bit more available here, FL and HID

50lm/w? Nah! Nothing beats my 22lm/w CFL I got in a supermarket the past year. 

As you can see, i today uploaded a picture of an economy box of two 15W 3U Eurolux CFLs.
These lamps produces only 800lm for their 15W wattage rating.
When i divided their lumens by the wattage rating to get their efficiency, guess what was the result: Well!!! 53lm/w!!!!, worser than even the T12 halophosphors fluorescent magnetic fitting from the 70"!!!!!!!
Picture here:
So i would suggest you: Continue to buy magnetic ballasts (But please verify that the starter is either electronic or thermal in case of external starter, to furtur prolong the eqipment life), PL lamps and magnetic adapters. PL lamps on magnetic ballasts are MUCH more efficient than the current energy saving CFLs and last much more, even on bathrooms and toilet rooms.

I even saw some American CFL lamps with that efficacy with 800 lumens for 15w.

Every such "compact, directly replace..." is a heavy compromise. Costing either a hughe technology complexity (so cost), poor reliability or bad output.
So if you want a reasonable performance at a reasonable cost, dont use any of those retrofits, but a proper purpose made fixture, not needing those extreme compromises in their design.
This applies to all af the technologies ever used: Incandescents replacing oil lamps at homes 120 years ago, HIDs replacing incandescents for street lights 70 years ago, fluorescents or LEDs replacing incandescents at homes the last three decades.
No exception.