Switching to Energy-efficient Lighting
Thursday, December 29th, 2011Incandescent bulbs produce light through heat: an electric current passes via a thin filament, heating it up. The heat helps make the filament white-hot, producing the light that you simply see. 90% of the energy accustomed to produce the heat that lights an incandescent bulb is wasted.
Compact fluorescent light bulbs use a different technology: they contain a gas that produces invisible ultraviolet light (UV) when the gas is put in the presence of electricity. The UV light hits the white coating inside the fluorescent bulb and also the coating changes it into light you can observe. Because fluorescent bulbs avoid using heat to create light, they’re far more energy-efficient than regular incandescent bulbs.
Based on the U.S. United states doe, if all households in the United States replaced just ONE regular incandescent light bulb with an Energy Star approved compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) we’d save enough energy to light a lot more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and stop greenhouse gases equal to the emissions in excess of 800,000 cars.
This type of savings can be done because a fluorescent bulb creates light utilizing an entirely different method that’s much more energy-efficient, in fact, 4-6 times more effective. This means that you can buy a 15-watt compact fluorescent bulb that creates exactly the same quantity of light as a 60-watt regular incandescent bulb.
ENERGY STAR qualified lighting provides bright, warm light but uses about 75% less energy than standard lighting, produce 75 % less heat (cutting energy costs associated with home cooling), and lasts up to Ten times longer. They save about $30 or more in discovered another means over each bulb’s lifetime, are available in different sizes and shapes to suit in almost any fixture, for indoors and outdoors.
For drawbacks, CFLs don’t operate well in frigid conditions, limiting their use for exterior lighting in cold areas. But the biggest trouble with them is their mercury content. It’s recommended to recycle CFL bulbs, since breaking or incinerating them releases mercury in to the air. The poisonous metal can then find its way into soil, water, fish and fish-eating humans.
The mercury issue will be ignored through proper handling and recycling of the bulbs. Other than that, given that lighting makes up about roughly 7% from the average lighting bill (compact fluorescents will reduce that by over half), CFLs make sense for just about everybody, both financially and environmentally.