Low-Energy Light Bulbs

With “green” rapidly becoming the buzzword of the decade, switching to low-energy light bulbs is a must. Here’s some numbers to consider — traditional incandescent bulbs are responsible for about a quarter of a home’s energy usage. That means 25% of your electric bill is caused by flipping light switches on and off. Incandescent bulbs may be cheap to buy, but the energy they use over the lifetime of a single bulb costs four or five times as much as the original purchase price of a single bulb. Would you buy that incandescent bulb if it cost around forty bucks? Probably not. What seems cheap in the short term proves difficult to swallow economically in the long term.

When we talk about “low-energy light bulbs”, we’re talking about compact fluorescent (CFL) or light-emitting diode (LED) lights. Until the past ten years or so, every home was light with some combination of incandescent bulbs (the boring little white guys in paper sleeves) and fluorescent lighting. Fluorescent lighting sucks — if you’ve spent any time in an office setting, you know the headaches and bizarre visuals associated with constant exposure to fluorescent lighting. Incandescent light bulbs are expensive to maintain, and aren’t much better than fluorescent in terms of light quality. CFL and LED bulbs are better light sources and cost anywhere from a quarter to half the operating cost of more traditional bulbs.

Switching to CFL or LED light

CFLs are really just miniature versions of the full-sized fluorescent we all remember from school or the office. These CFL bulbs screw into your standard lamp sockets and give off a light that looks very similar to the common incandescent bulbs. That’s where CFLs have the advantage, they run as cheaply as fluorescent lighting but don’t make that awful artificial light we’re all used to from places like factories, schools, and hospitals.

LEDs are very small, solid light bulbs (not hollow like traditional florescents or CFLs) and they are amazingly energy-efficient. Advancements in LED tech are being made on a daily basis — newer LED bulbs are grouped in clusters and have all kinds of fancy add-ons like diffuser lenses that spread the light further and plenty of other geeky stuff that’s too boring to get into here. Suffice to say, the new styles of LED bulbs have really expanded the scope of LED applications in homes and other environments.

The main thing you’ll notice if you switch to LED lights is the cost. Yes, LED bulbs are currently quite expensive. This is because the technology to build LED lights is currently very expensive — LED lights are sapphire based. Luckily, new styles of LED bulbs are coming out that use inexpensive silicon components and really drop the cost of LED bulbs. Another thing you’ll notice? Lower electricity bills. Some experts state that LED bulbs use about 1/5 of the energy of traditional incandescent light bulbs.

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