*~*All Organic - All The Time*~*

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Let There Be Light!

I just replaced every single one of these in my new house:








With one of these:




Why?

Because I'm a mizer, that's why. 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.


According to Wikipedia (the lazy woman's research guide *grin*)": a CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) can save over $30 in electricity costs over the lamp’s lifetime compared to an incandescent lamp and save 2000 times their own weight in greenhouse gasses.


But can it cut an aluminum can in half, that's what I want to know!


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:

Grandmama Carla said...

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?

Country Dawn said...

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!