Get Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs)
Posted on January 7th, 2010 by admin
So you’ve been thinking about doing what you can to go green, and you want to start with something simple like lighting. Using compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) instead of regular incandescent light bulbs is the right approach because CFLs have a higher efficacy and operating life. Efficacy is a measurement used to describe how much lighting (measured in lumens) can be produced by a bulb after giving it a certain amount of power (measured in watts). In other words, the higher the efficacy the better.
Regular light bulbs have an efficacy of 10-17 lumens per watt, and an average operating life of 750-2500 hours. CFLs on the other hand can generate about same amount of lighting by using approximately a quarter of the power that regular bulbs use, and CLFs can last up to 10 times longer. In addition CFLs produce only about 10% of the heat that regular light bulbs produce.
Sounds great right??? …ehm one of you may say, but wait, I was at the store the other day and I saw that the cost of CFLs was 3 to 10 times MORE than regular bulbs that can give me the same amount of lighting… I wanna save money, CFLs are not for me.. ok, well let’s look at this closely using a US Department of Energy post on CFLs… assuming you leave the light on in a room for 6 hours per day, and your electric utility company charges you at a rate of 11.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, you can look at the table below and see that you would have actually SAVED MONEY by buying CFLs:
25-Watt Compact Fluorescent 100-Watt Incandescent Cost of Lamps $3.40 $0.60 Lamp Life 1,667 days (4.5 years) 167 days Annual Energy Cost $6 $25 Lamps Replaced in 4.5 years 0 10 Total Cost $29 $134 Savings Over Lamp Life $105 0 Yep, you would have had $105 in your pocket after 4.5 years… I don’t know about you, but I would gladly spend that on Chipotle over the course of 4.5 years.. ok we digress, but you get the point: CFLs for the win! For more information on CFLs and a great buyer’s guide, visit this great Energy Star website. And as always, if you are interested in getting a more thorough energy efficiency audit for your home or small business, where you can learn about other things you can do to become part of the solution, start you search for an auditor on sobuka.com by clicking here.
Tags: Business, compact fluorescent lamps, Do it Yourself, Home, Lighting
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Do it Yourself, Featured Content, Green Remodeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I still need to do this around my house
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