Let's Be Bright About This

Light Bulbs

With the exception of a few odd-sized and shaped bulbs, we’ve changed out all of our incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. We’ve spent around $120 to replace 31 bulbs in the house, garage, and basement. By doing so we have reduced our lighting wattage requirement by 1739 watts. That's an energy draw reduction of 83% for our lighting. That seems significant.

The packaging that these CFLs come in show the wattage numbers for the requirement of the bulb plus the equivalent incandescent wattage for the light output. They also estimage a savings in dollars over the expected lifetime of the bulb. According to those estimations, we've just spent $120 to save $1700 over the service life of the bulbs. I'll take that deal.

The light quality is different, but I won’t say it’s worse or better. The color of most of the lights appears somewhate whiter and brighter.

We tried to replace a couple three-way bulbs for reading lamps in the living room. The CFL three-ways are quite a bit larger than the single wattage bulbs (which are basically the same size as the incandescent bulbs they replace). One of our lamps couldn’t handle the larger bulb, so we put a single wattage bulb in it that is supposed to be the equivalent brightness of a 100 watt bulb. It appears brighter than that. It also makes a slight buzzing sound. I've since replaced that with a softwhite 19 watt bulb (which is the incandescent equivalent of a 75 watt bulb), and the light quality is much nicer. The softwhite 19 watt bulb also doesn't buzz.

The other three-way lamp could fit the fluorescent three-way bulb. That bulb lasted all of two days before it stopped working (I won’t say burned out, as that doesn’t appear to be what happens with these new bulbs. We’ll return that one as well as the one that wouldn’t fit.

We’re using another 100watt equivalent bulb and it buzzes too.

So far here’s how we feel about the bulbs and the light: quite satisfied with the lower wattage and smaller profile bulbs. Not satisfied with the larger, more complex, or specialty bulbs such as three-way, 100 watt equivalents, or chandelier bulbs.

We also prefer the light quality of the soft white bulbs signnificantly over the bright white or daylight styles. The soft whites appear more like the incandescents they replaced.

Fortunately most of the bulbs we replaced are of the smaller single wattage variety. They fit into the lamps and fixtures just as well as the incandescent bulbs and appear to perform as well or better in terms of brightness and reach. And while the light quality is different, it’s not worse. After just a few days, I’m used to it and rather like it.

Light Patrol

In addition to swapping out bulbs for the lower wattage CFLs, we’re training our kids and ourselves to turn around when we leave a room to check for any lights we left on and shut them off. Plenty of times have we walked by a room to see all the lights on with no one there to make use of the light. It’s a simple habit that can waste quite a few KwHs. Leave a 100 watt bulb on for an hour just ten times, and that’s a kilowatt hour. Multiply that by the actual number of bulbs you leave on that no one is using, and imagine how often you do that.

All we had to do to begin reversing that habit was to give it a name and remind ourselves to do it periodically. We call it going on light patrol. The kids remember more easily than my wife and I, but we’re all doing well with it. We’ll see how it’s going a few months from now. And, we’ll track our electricity usage compared to previous years during the same months. 

CFL Update

After using our compact flourescents for a few months, we've also noticed that when used in an enclosed fixture such as a glass ceiling light, they tend to burn out or otherwise fail much sooner than expected.