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The Kimhi Lighting guy is right about the halogen, but same goes to a lower extent about the incandescents

The Home Center guy really does not know any damn thing he's talking about. Lets begin with the claim that "80% of the energy of incandescent lamp is going to heat" (which is not true, its about 96-98% that is going to heat). This claim is a proof to the propaganda of CFLs sellers : The 20% efficiency of incandescent is a result of simple math : CFLs are 100% efficient, and save 80% power compared to incandescents. And nothing said about halogens

The efficacy rating claim is interesting. So, will there be halogens >60W with the new IR reflecting coating avaiable ? If yes, its a good thing that they can be used in the existing halogen fixtures. However i am concerned about lamp life & performance on low dimmer settings vs standard halogens

Ash: I saw IRC (Infra-Red Coating) halogen lamps in Osram and Philips websites. However they are only available in 12V and not 230V.
I still don't know why the PL fixtures were disappeared and why the E27 fixtures distribution was increased and why today, desk lamps aren't available with 2-pin PLs, but only with E27 CFLs (I means the desk lamps that mimic the shape of the PL desk lamps, with the lamp always horizontally mounted to the fixtures).
This is the result, when the government interfering with a field that they knows zero about it.
The CFLs don't realises the full efficiency of the fluorescent lamps. PLs do this better, even with magnetic ballasts.

@Ash:
The IRC would perform better then standard halogens in all dimming settings, I would even guess on lower setting the difference would be even larger, in favor of the IRC's.

But still the dimmed high power incandescent would be way less efficient then using nondimmed low power lamp for the same task (e.g. 7W incandescent would be still way more efficient then 35W IRC halogen run dimmed at 5% of it's full light output, so about the same as the 7Watter...).


But the "math" used by these sellers is really ill...

And with incandescents the "efficiency" is very tricky term: What is still the "useful radiation" and where begin "the losses"? What wavelength belong to the "light" and what to the "heat"?
Playing with this definition you may simply end up with whole range of efficiencies between 2..10% for the same lamp run at the same conditions (so obviously for the same lm/W figure).
Somebody define the "light" as the radiant energy responsible for given (even high, e.g. 98%) fraction of the total lumen output, then the "efficiency" figure would seems to be low (at about 2% or even below for the ncandescents).
But when someone count any radiation the eyes respond to even a bit (so include the near infrared), the efficiency figure would be many times higher (may rise easily up to 10%).
That is, why the "efficacy" (so lumens emitted per unit of input energy source, so watt in the case of the electricity) is essential to use to quantify the "economy" of a light source.

But then you get to the issue of different efficiency per application. For example, HPS vs MH in floodlighting HPS is more efficient in plain Lm/W, yet HPS vs MH in low light application such as small pathway MH is more efficient as your night vision won't work properly with the yellow light of small HPS, but will wrk with MH, so you'll need larger HPS while can suffice wth smaller MH for the same visibility

Indeed, the lumens figure needed for the same visibility may vary nearly factor of two (depend on the spectrum), but with radiated power the figure woud vary by factor way more then 10.

So lumens is not a good unit for the purpose (and so should be used carefully), but it is still the best standardized metrics we have.

i made a wrong post