Sep 08 2008
Compact Fluorescent Lights: Are They Worth It?
Over the past few years, I’ve been making sure that we switched most of our light bulbs over to compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs. We’ve done this partially for environmental reasons, but mainly to save a little money on our electricity bill..
In the past, we rented, so when we moved, we brought all the bulbs with us.. When we bought our current home about 18 months, ago, I put in all the bulbs, with the exception of our kitchen that uses floodlamps, and our bathrooms that have “globe-style” bulbs. My intention was that as these ones burn out, I’d replace them with their compact fluorescent equivalents.. Up to this point, I’ve been very happy with the performance of the ones I’ve bought so far.
So.. In the last few months, all three of the incandescent floodlamps in the kitchen and a several of the bathroom globes go out. No problem! I went out and bought new CF ones.. Then, I start to notice things..
First, the CF floodlamps and globes, take time to come to full brightness.. This is a pain, but I can deal with waiting a minute for them. It’s a little dim in the kitchen/bathrooms at first, but it’s manageable. Within two weeks of buying a floodlamp, it burns out.. Within 6 months of installing a globe, one of them burn out.
Now, for a product that costs up to five times the cost of an incandescent bulb, I expect it to outlast the bulbs that I haven’t even replaced! Why am I wasting my money on bulbs that don’t last, or at the very least don’t seem to function properly..
So, while I’ll continue to use CF bulbs for “normal” lamps and lights, I think that I won’t be wasting my money to save money in the kitchen and bathrooms..
As someone who sells light bulbs for a living, I am constantly bombarded with questions about how much energy is actually being saved by using compact fluorescents and whether they live up to all of the hype that they receive. It seems to me that a lot of the negative things said about incandescent bulbs and their energy usage is borne out of a poor understanding of basic physics. The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, just changed from one form to another. So many people speak of incandescent bulbs “wasting” energy as though they are defying the laws of physics and destroying energy. I live in a fairly cool climate and during the winter I use an electric heater to heat the particular room that I am in. If I use an incandescent bulb and 90% of its energy usage is for the production of heat, then it is simply generating heat that I would have to generate anyway with my 1000W heater. It’s June here and we are still dealing with cold and rainy weather, so there is a significant portion of the year where the heat energy produced by incandescent bulbs indoors is useful and not “wasted.” For me, it is an obvious choice given the mercury content and poor light quality that comes from compact fluorescents.
I think it’s one of those things like Brita filters…when they first made these flourescent compacts, they were really high quality, but now that they’re so very much in demand, they have to produce them at a higher rate, so the quality control goes to hell…similarly, I got rid of my Brita in the summer, because the filters are really bad quality now…originally, they’d only spew out little flecks of carbon when they were brand new, and after a few runs of water, they’d be okay…now the entire life of a filter is a big spew of carbon flecks which invariably end up in my water…it’s totally a thing of quality control on a vastly popular product….