We have an older overhead light/fan in our 3 season room that takes 60W bulbs. I believe the light was installed in the 1980's when that room was remodeled. It's the kind that has three buttons: one of them is a power button, the other is a dimmer button that you hold to dim the light and/or press in one direction to turn the light on, and the other is the fan speed button that you hold to make the fan go faster and/or press in one direction to turn the fan on.

The lightbulbs were going bad in it, so I decided to swap them out with CFLs. But they're not working quite as expected:

- turning the light button to the off position doesn't actually turn the lights off. My husband posits that it's because that button is technically a dimmer switch, and you can't dim a CFL without special hardware. Does that seem like the likely explanation?

- so then you have to use the power button to turn the lights off. But when you turn the power button back on, the lights flicker for a second (but don't fully turn on). You then have to turn the light button on to turn them on. I'm concerned about that flicker when you first turn the power on though, like it's some indication that something is wrong -- do I need to be concerned?

I just want to make sure that we're not going to burn our house down by switching to CFLs in this light/fan (which incidentally, we have the same fixture in 3 other rooms in our house). Also, as we're not going to have much choice about using CFL's in the near future, it would help to know if we're going to have to replace all of these lights if it's not appropriate to use these lightbulbs in them...