The Bogosity Forum

General Bogosity => General Discussion => Topic started by: nilecroc on January 12, 2014, 08:26:11 PM

Title: Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?
Post by: nilecroc on January 12, 2014, 08:26:11 PM
I accidentally broke one in my room. It's mostly mostly cleaned  up, but do I need to do anything else? I opened up one window for about ten minutes?
Title: Re: Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?
Post by: dallen68 on January 12, 2014, 08:31:47 PM
Run the vacuum. Unless you step on a piece of the glass, you should be safe.
Title: Re: Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?
Post by: Ibrahim90 on January 12, 2014, 08:53:54 PM
Quote from: nilecroc on January 12, 2014, 08:26:11 PM
I accidentally broke one in my room. It's mostly mostly cleaned  up, but do I need to do anything else? I opened up one window for about ten minutes?

just clean the place up: you did what you could. it's not as if you're basically eating that stuff to become immortal...like some other people I know (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)..
Title: Re: Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?
Post by: MrBogosity on January 13, 2014, 06:27:13 AM
Make sure it was well-ventilated. A lot of the mercury in those things is vapor.
Title: Re: Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?
Post by: evensgrey on January 13, 2014, 11:58:47 AM
Firstly, the dominant predictor of the mercury content is the age of the CFL device:  The older ones have much more (for a given value of 'much more') mercury in them than the never ones.

By 'much more', however, I mean the older ones might have as much as 5 mg per bulb, while newer ones have less than 1 mg per bulb.

Don't worry about the mercury released from a single bulb, worry about the glass fragments.