We are in a recession right now. Our heating bill is through the roof, gasoline prices are outrageous; the money we make just doesn’t seem to go as far as it use to. On top of that, every time we burn that over priced gasoline or turn that thermostat up another degree, the world gets a little bit warmer, the ice cap recedes another inch, and a polar bear dies. Well maybe that last part was exaggerated, but it doesn’t change the fact that to a point, that is the reality we are living in right now. So, what could a family of six possibly do to change all that? What would you say if I told you that saving money and the environment was as easy as changing a light bulb? Well in this case 43 light bulbs, considering that’s how many light bulb sockets are strewn about our home. The way I suggest we do this is, simply, by replacing our old incandescent light bulbs with new compact fluorescent lights or CFLs.
Currently incandescent light bulbs are the ones we have in the house, generally coming in 40, 60, or 100 watts and becoming very hot to the touch when on. The light bulbs heat up because they generate their light from heat. An electric current is run through a thread of metal until it becomes so hot, that it produces light. The light bulbs are not very energy efficient. However they are extremely easy and cheap to manufacture, thus why they have stayed popular in the majority of homes since they were first invented (Really more efficient?).
A compact fluorescent light is a light bulb that can fit in most incandescent light fixtures though it’s extremely different then its incandescent brother. A fluorescent light uses a very different method to produce light. There are electrodes at both ends of a fluorescent tube, and a gas containing argon and mercury vapor is inside the tube. A stream of electrons flows through the gas from one electrode to the other. These electrons bump into the mercury atoms and excite them. As the mercury atoms move from the excited state back to the unexcited state, they give off ultraviolet photons. These photons hit the phosphor coating the inside of the fluorescent tube, and this phosphor creates visible light (Really more efficient?). What does all this mean? It means compact fluorescents are more expensive to produce, but much more energy efficient then incandescent light bulbs because they do not depend on heat to produce their light.
However, to really appreciate and grasp the advantages of fluorescent lights over incandescent ones, you need to compare them. Fluorescent bulbs run on average 20 to 25 percent of the energy it takes to light an incandescent bulb with the same lighting capabilities (Hodges). So, if we were to measure the amount of light given by each bulb using the standard lumen unit, a regular 75 watt bulb would produce 1150 lumens. As a result, it would only take an 18 watt fluorescent light bulb to produce about the same amount of light, “about 1100 lumens”, as a 75 watt incandescent light. In our house, the majority of our light bulbs are 60 watts. To have one 60 watt incandescent bulb on for 5 hours a day, every day, for a year uses about 109.2 Kwh in energy. According to an associate I spoke to on the phone PPL charges around 9 cents per Kwh so one incandescent bulb would cost you $9.63 per year in energy costs. One fluorescent bulb only takes about 32.76 Kwh a year, costing around $2.95 a year. However, we have 43 Incandescent light bulbs in our house each costing $9.63 a year equaling a grand total of $414.09. The 43 fluorescent light bulbs cost much cheaper at $126.85 a year. That’s $287.24 you would save alone every year on your electric bill if you switched over to compact fluorescent bulbs.
I know what you are thinking: Aren’t Fluorescent lights more expensive to buy then incandescent ones? So how much money would I really be saving? Well to answer your first question, yes, CFLs are more expensive. Nevertheless, they are a lot cheaper then they were just a few years ago, and their prices are always coming down. Now to answer your second question, the costs of the CFL we will need in our home is approximately $6.89 (bulbs.com). A normal 60 watt incandescent bulb will only cost you 55 cents, but it only has a projected 750 hour life span where as the 7 dollar CFL has a projected 10,000 hour life span before it burns out (Hodges). So for every one compact fluorescent bulb you buy, you would have to buy 13 incandescent ones. The cost of these 13 incandescent bulbs would run you a total of $7.15. As a result, in the long run an incandescent bulb will cost you about 26 cents more then the initially more expensive fluorescent bulb. That’s a grand total of $11.18 we would actually save in bulb costs when taken in to account the other 43 bulbs in the house. Now add that 11 dollars to the almost $300 a year in energy cost you’re saving, and it becomes very obvious, for our coupon cutting family, to leap on the opportunity to save on this economical venture. Incandescent light bulbs are a money draining pest we can no longer afford. With the economy the way it is right now that 300 dollars could be spent more wisely.
Florescent light bulbs are not just green in the economic sense they are also green when it comes to the environment. The largest producers of green house gases in
Compact Florescent bulbs have been around since the 80’s and while they do have many benefits they have never really taken off. The reason for the slow adoption rate is for a number of reasons. Until recently, Compact Florescent bulbs were expensive, extremely expensive. In fact they were around 20 dollars a bulb compared to 7 dollars a bulb in which they now cost today. Older models of CFLs would emit a low buzzing noise and some times would have a slight flicker. This has been resolved in new models by creating solid state ballasts and running the bulbs at such a high frequency the eye is unable to detect any flicker of light (Hodges). Also, older models would occasionally take about 15 seconds to turn on. This again has been remedied in the new models by adding rapid starters to make them turn on almost at once (General Electric). The hard white light that many people define fluorescent light by is no longer completely true, many CFLs now have phosphors inner coating that creates a softer light more inline with an incandescent bulb (General Electric). However CFLs aren’t meant to completely replace Incandescent bulbs. CFLs do not really work well with dimming switches or i in vibrating environments like a ceiling fan. You would have to by a special bulb to work with the dimming switch and vibrating environments tend to shorten the life of CFLs (General Electric). CFLs have also received some bad press recently in the news about containing the chemical mercury. However, the bad press is for the most part unwarranted. CFLs contain about 5 milligrams of mercury where as old model thermometers contained about 500 milligrams (General Electric). According to General Electric CFLs are indeed safe to use. Despite this, they continue to note that one should take precaution when installing and removing CFLs. G.E. also gives instructions on their web site as to how to properly clean up and discard a CFL if it were to break.
While compact fluorescent lights are not perfect, the negatives seem very much trivial when thinking about the benefits. By simply changing our light bulbs, we will be doing our part to help save those dying polar bears, and making 300 bucks a year to boot. Three hundred dollars is a substantial amount of money in which could be used in numerous ways other than needlessly wasting it on our electric bill. After reading this, I hope you have come to the same conclusions I have that to simply ignore the monetary and ethical benefits of CFLs would be unintelligent. We should waste no more time in switching to Compact Fluorescent bulbs, every second longer we burn one of our old incandescent bulbs, it’s costing us money and hurting the environment.
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