Shedding light on bulbs' savings (compact fluorescent)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=2355752

Published Thursday | March 29, 2007
Shedding light on bulbs' savings
BY CHET MULLIN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER


Those swirly shaped bulbs, known as compact fluorescent lights, are popping up in stores everywhere.

They may not work aesthetically in that crystal chandelier in the foyer, or in those Tiffany-style lamps in the living room, but boosters say they can save energy over the old incandescent light bulbs.

The Nebraska Public Power District's Web site breaks it down like this:

• Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) use 70 percent to 75 percent less energy than their incandescent equivalents.

• CFLs last about 10,000 hours, which is 10 to 13 times the life of an incandescent bulb.


Lighting up

Listed are several standard incandescent bulbs and their compact fluorescent light (CFL) equivalents.

Incandescent
CFL

40 watts11 watts

60 watts
15 watts

75 watts
20 watts

100 watts
28 watts



Source: Nebraska Public Power District
• CFLs are most cost-effective when used at least two to three hours a day.

• The typical incandescent bulb wastes 90 percent of the energy it uses, producing heat rather than light.

The NPPD Web site said compact fluorescent bulbs will provide the same amount of light, or lumens, at a fraction of the electricity used by incandescents.

In its example, the NPPD used a 75-watt incandescent versus its equivalent, a 20-watt CFL, for 10,000 hours. The old-fashioned 75-watt bulb cost $69.21 to operate; the 20-watt CFL, $23.79.

If operated for four hours a day, the expected life of the light is seven years. It would take 1.08 years to make up in savings the additional cost of the bulb, compared with the incandescent light.

As the NPPD Web site indicates: "You can pay now, or you will really pay later." The 20-watt compact fluorescent used in its example cost about $7, compared with about 50 cents for the 75-watt incandescent, which wouldn't last nearly as long.

Wal-Mart has put its marketing might into a goal of selling at least 100 million CFLs a year by 2008. According to the New York Times, only about 6 percent of households use the bulbs today.

Last fall, Wal-Mart even held a "light bulb summit," bringing together manufacturers, academics, environmentalists and government officials to consider ways to sell more CFLs.

Wal-Mart's Web site asks customers to "Switch and Save." It lays out the benefits of using compact fluorescent light bulbs versus incandescent bulbs and even has a "Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb Calculator" to help consumers learn how much they can save in their homes.

The company says, "Wal-Mart has over 100 million customers. That means if each customer bought just one compact fluorescent light bulb, it would:

• Keep 22 billion pounds of coal from burning at power plants.

• Equate to removing 700,000 cars' worth of greenhouse gases from the air.

• Keep 700 million incandescent light bulbs from landfills.

So, are consumers catching on?

The Web site 18seconds.org, sponsored by Yahoo and the Nielsen Co., keeps a rough running tally of compact fluorescent light sales by nation, state and city. Nielsen collects the information from participating retailers.

Nebraska ranks 20th among states, with 189,014 CFLs sold since Jan. 1. The Omaha-Council Bluffs area has sold 82,390 CFLs and Lincoln, 35,634.

The bottom line is that compact fluorescent lights can save energy and money compared with their equivalent incandescent lights.

The federal government says that if every U.S. household changed one incandescent light bulb to an Energy Star CFL, enough electricity would be saved to light 2.5 million homes, and the reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions would equal the amount produced by almost 800,000 cars.

Because CFLs last longer, fewer bulbs need to be manufactured. That saves additional resources.

For more information, check out the government's energy-saving Web site: www.energystar.gov.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. spousette and I have replaced every bulb that dims with one.

and have gone so far to replace those still good with them. Given that consumer electricity rates just jumped 24% here, this is a good thing.

and it has shown up in lower usage.

[sam sarrha]

2. they say guaranteed 5 yrs of whatever.. i write the date i start using them and save the receipt and

box.. and i take them back when they burn out.. i got some bad ones and got them replaced, i didn't get anywhere near what they claimed to last

[Saturday]

3. All of the lights we use the most are switched over.

Can anyone answer this stupid question for me? If my fixture says I can only use a 60 watt bulb in it I can up it to a 100 watt in flourescent with no problem, right(since the 100 watt flourescent is only 28 watt)?

[Dead_Parrot]

6. *Should* be OK...

...Generally, the max wattage is due to the amount of heat from an normal bulb: CFLs don't waste as much energy as heat (that's why they're more efficient), so as long as the CFL gives off less heat than a 60w incandescent you should be fine.

With the caveat, of course, that if your house burns down your insurance company won't be impressed by what some guy on the internet said. :D Checking with the manufacturer would be the safest option.

[phantom power]

8. In most cases, yes, however I did once melt a "100W" fluorescent.

In a recessed fixture that normally used 60W incadescents. It's good to remember that fluorescents *do* give off some heat. In my case, the fairly small recessed fixture, combined with a complete lack of air circulation in the fixture, combined with the fact that the base of the fluorescent bulb was plastic, caused that base to melt and the bulb burnt out. I have been using a 15W fluorescent (60W equiv) up there with no problems for a couple years now.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. HEAT is the only issue. a 100 watt bulb is used to cook food

in betty crockofshit's kiddie homemaker ovens. You know. the ones that religious folks use to train and brainwash their female spawn.
A 100 watt bulb is WAY HOT.

a 28 watt flourescent has nothing close to that heat. can't even warm butter.

[Spiffarino]

16. The Easy-Bake oven? I remember those things.

They used to burn the crap out of my sister's fingers!

OT, but it reminds me. My brother and I had a "Creeple Peeple" set from a company called Thingmaker. It had an electric burner, metal molds, and plastic goo you poured in to make little toys that attached to pencils. The molds got wicked hot and had to be removed with little tongs. One slip and you got second-degree burns. I still have a scar on my leg.

Toys were awesome in those days.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

22. i LOVED those creepie crawlers. Weird, LSD based colors,

hairy looking legs, fangs, wings, those were so neat.

Ever play doctor, where you had tongs and you had to pick up bones from a game board in the shape of a human body? If you touched the sides, you set off a buzzer and got an electric shock.

[Warpy]

4. From the Fly in the Ointment Department

originally posted at Buzzflash:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - There's an old joke about the number of people it takes to change a light bulb. But because the newer energy-efficient kinds contain tiny amounts of mercury, the hard part is getting rid of them when they burn out.

Mercury is poisonous, but it's also a necessary part of most compact fluorescent bulbs, the kind that environmentalists and some governments are pushing as a way to cut energy use.

(however)

U.S. regulators, manufacturers and environmentalists note that, because CFLs require less electricity than traditional incandescent bulbs, they reduce overall mercury in the atmosphere by cutting emissions from coal-fired power plants.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032800598.html?nav=rss_technology

I would imagine that also deducting the mercury emissions from coal fired energy to use making incandescent light bulbs that have to be changed every few months versus the trace mercury in CFLs would make this whole complaint look a little silly.

I love CFLs and some of mine have been working for 10 years.

[eridani]

13. My employer has a fluorescent recycling program

They get sent to a facility which crushes them and recoveres the mercury.

http://www.besmart.org/hazwaste/business/bulb.html

[Warpy]

24. Wow, that's great!

I wish there was a recycling facility like that here, I'd pay for the privilege of having things like fluorescent lights and computers recycled so that the heavy metals don't end up in the landfill.

Unfortunately, there is not. My strategy has been to patch up old computers so they'll function and then recycle them to charity.

CFLs have an astonishingly long lifespan, so at least I've contributed very few of them to the landfill.

Thermal depolymerization plants at landfill sites would certainly help: everything organic (paper, garbage, plastic) gets converted into crude oil and water. The water is where all the dissolved heavy metals end up in a super concentrated solution, easy to reclaim and recycle.

That makes too much sense, though, and oil barons don't like it.

[WhiteTara]

5. CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7431198
February 15, 2007 · The Environmental Protection Agency and some large business, including Wal-Mart, are aggressively promoting the sale of compact fluorescent light bulbs as a way to save energy and fight global warming. They want Americans to buy many millions of them over the coming years.

But the bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin, and the companies and federal government haven't come up with effective ways to get Americans to recycle them.

"The problem with the bulbs is that they'll break before they get to the landfill. They'll break in containers, or they'll break in a dumpster or they'll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens," says John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, the trade group for the people who handle trash and recycling.

Skinner says when bulbs break near homes, they can contaminate the soil.

But LED is coming and it is going to be the evolutionary jump in lighting

[Spiffarino]

14. It's a fair point, but think of it this way

Burning coal - especially soft coal - produces far more mercury, most of which is pumped into the atmosphere. It settles wherever the wind blows it. If much less coal is burned by our switching to CFLs, wouldn't we still be far better off?

[NNadir]

27. This is true, but coal should be banned CFL's or not. The most dangerous

coal waste is not mercury, but is carbon dioxide.

[Javaman]

26. If you have an IKEA near you, you can drop off the old ones there

for recycling.

[thecrow]

7. Fluorescent bulbs give me migraines

I'll wait for LEDs

[Omaha Steve]

10. Try the full spectrum (daylight) lights

They have several therapeutic things in their favor. Reducing the number of headaches compared to non full spectrum lights is one of them I understand.

[tridim]

17. CFL's are not typical fluorescent tubes.

Those 60hz tubes make me sick too, but CFL's don't at all. They vibrate at high frequency and don't buzz. Give one a try, I bet you'll forget about it in a day or two.

[guruoo]

21. You won't have to wait long

http://www.google.com/search?q=LED%20home%20lighting&btnG=Search+Images&svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw

[ChairmanAgnostic]

23. LEDs would be great, but a few hurdles to fix

I listened to an LED expert at a local meeting. The promise is wonderful, cool light, extremely efficient, and they won't burn out. But the power supply has to be clean and accurate, you will need to rewire the light switches at the source, and a bunch of other hurdles need to be fixed.

[Nihil]

30. Never heard that one before ... can you expand on it please?

> ... you will need to rewire the light switches at the source ...

Why?

[WyLoochka]

11. Dumb question

Fixtures and sockets that were designed for incandescents usually specify the maximum watt bulb that can be used safely.

Does this mean that one should use only the CFL watt bulb that puts out the equivalent light that the original incandesent did? Or can one safely use a CFL that consumes a little higher wattage thus also gives more light?

Many small lamps and some fixtures have a maximum 40 or 60 watt rating. A CFL trade-out for a 60 watt incandescent bulb would be a 13 watt CFL bulb (I'm looking at the package from a CFL I purchased). Could I safely use a 20 or higher watt CFL which would give more light?

I realize this would somewhat compromise the original reason to replace the incandescent, but in some places - like my basement - I would like a little more light without having to replace the fixtures entirely as I rent. It's the watt usage that is important as far as electrical fire safety - right?

[RC]

12. Not to worry.

The are talking about power used to light the bulb, not some measured equivalent for the light output.

Fluorescents are more efficient than a regular light bulbs, which most of their output is in heat, not light.

Replace away. More light, less power used.

[WyLoochka]

18. Thanks - that was

my understanding, just wanted to make sure.

[tridim]

19. Just don't over do it.. They make some big honkin' CFL's now!

Remeber the most important goal is to save energy.

[Spiffarino]

15. Nearly every bulb in my house is a CFL

Only the basement stairs and one bathroom still have old-fashioned incandescents because they don't stay on for more than a few minutes at a time. Anywhere the lights stay on more than an hour, the bulbs have never had to be replaced. Some have been in place for three years.

I just bought a six-pack of 13-watt CFLs from Lowe's for $9 - a buck-and-a-half each - and replaced the last of the old ones in the kitchen. I may not have to buy another new bulb for years.

They're cool, bright, and best of all, they're squiggly. How could you not love them?

[guruoo]

20. LEDs will soon make fluorescents obsolete

And you can buy them now...
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=led%20home%20lighting&btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi


LED LIGHTING

The US government's Energy-Star site says, "If every household in the U.S. replaced one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent enough pollution to equal removing one million cars from the road.

That's impressive. But the trend is hardly over, for now electronics technology has given us the ability to make silicon emit light. The basic device is the Light-Emitting Diode, which has a theoretical efficiency about triple that of the fluorescent light (imagine the equivalent of a 100 Watt incandescent bulb running on 7 Watts!). Already, colored LEDs are replacing traffic lights; they use a tenth as much energy and last five times as long as incandescent bulbs. White-light LEDs are under development and can already be bought in various forms, including flashlights (here is a sample site). Neil Savage, in "Turning on LEDs," Technology Review (January 11, 2006), says that "If the technology can be improved so that half of all lighting is solid-state by 2025, it will cut worldwide power use by 120 gigawatts, saving $100 billion a year and reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 350 megatons a year." This projection appears fairly reasonable because white-light LED technology is on track "to produce 150 lumens of illumination per watt of input power by 2012, up from just 25 lumens/watt in 2002. That’s 10 times the efficiency of an incandescent bulb and substantially more than the 50-100 lumens/watt from a fluorescent bulb."
More... http://technoprobe.blogspot.com/2006/09/led-lighting.html


In a remote mountain community of Mexico's Sierra Madre, people are tending fields, cooking meals over open fires, and field-testing light-emitting electronics woven into colorful swaths of fabric. Depending on how a person folds or hangs one of the hand-towel-size pieces of cloth, it serves as a cordfree wall light, table top reading lamp, or hanging lantern.

Sheila Kennedy's team at Kennedy & Violich Architecture in Boston designed the solar-powered lamps, which depend on light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The researchers' goal: a safe, clean, rugged, and long-lived alternative to kerosene and candles for the world's 1.6 billion people living in homes without electricity. However, the biggest appeal of LED lighting for the world's poorest communities may be its low cost relative to those liquid fuels, notes Evan Mills of Lawrence Berkeley (Calif.) National Laboratory. His analyses indicate that without subsidies, 2-watt battery-powered lamps using white-light LEDs could pay for themselves in a year or less.

More.... http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060520/bob9.asp

[NMDemDist2]

25. wonder if the US gov, uses all CFLs? and how much could be saved

if all the governments (fed, state etc) switched out all THEIR bulbs?

I've done all mine......

[emmadoggy]

28. Can anyone tell me if...

there is a CFL equivalent for those bathroom "Hollywood style" light bars?? We have those in both our bathrooms and they are energy hogs.

That style of incandescent bulbs come in, I think, 25W and 40W, maybe higher. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to ever find the right base/bulb size for our fixtures in less than 40W, and our light bars have 6 bulbs each!! If I can't get CFL's for them soon, I'm thinking it might be worth changing the light fixtures to something which would be CFL compatible.

Another question. We have recessed can lights in our family room on a dimmer switch. As far as I know, the CFL's can't be used with a dimmer. Can we still use them but just lose the ability to use the dimmer or would there be any problem there??

Thanks!

[emmadoggy]

29. Nevermind. I think I found some. Thanks.