These bulbs last much, much longer than regular, incandescent bulbs. They don't break when you drop them, either, Ms. Klutz discovered (bonus!) and they are supposedly environmentally friendly.I buy them at Sam's Club, so my savings is pretty significant. Still not as cheap as incandescent bulbs, but when you consider they last 8-15 times as long!? I've had one in the lamp next to my bed for two years, and it's never burned out. Two YEARS! Woot!
As for the environmentally friendly part, well... there is a concern about mercury, I guess. (Can't have everything--where would you put it, right?) They use 1 mg of mercury in them when they make the bulbs. Of course, 1 mg of mercury isn't all that much... there's 1 mg of mercury per cubic meter of sea water, right? So they say... but still, put a million of them in a landfill, and you've got a math meets mercury disaster leaking into our water supply, right? Of course, burning coal to make the electricity that goes into incandescent lightbulbs actually produces mercury, too. Can't win for losing...
So I guess I have to do the right thing and recycle the new bulbs when they finally burn out! I did find some place local from this site: Earth911.
Now I'm just waiting for them to come out with affordable LED bulbs. Right now they're cost prohibitive (like $50 a bulb! Eek!) but I have a feeling they'll replace the CFL. Kind of like cassette and video tapes getting replaced by CDs and DVDs.
Why?
A 1.4 Watt LED bulb replaces the standard 60 Watt incandescent. The CFL bulb uses 13 Watts. You do the math!
I can't wait! 
2 comments:
Hi Dawn,
I am replacing the bulbs throughout my old farmhouse too, but a problem! the old decorative ceiling fixtures don't fit the spiral! So I have bare spiral lights now. How did you handle that?
Unfortunately... the only solution I know of is new ceiling fixtures. *sigh* I replaced two or three of them myself... just cheap home depot ones. Had to make sure they were long enough, so I measured!
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