GurnBlanston

1 compact flourescent light bulb (you know, those energy saving ones) contain enough mercury to contaminate 6,000 gals of water.

I'll stick to my incandescents on a dimming system, thank you.

brian_wilbanks

I've got them in many of my sockets, but as I've said many times before, the bulk of electricity usage in most homes does not come from light bulbs. Hell, an average desktop computer consumes around 500 watts.

As I sit typing this @ 7:25 EST, I turned the first light on in my house about an hour or so ago. So I've lit my house with nothing but ambient solar for 11 or so hours.

It doesnt take a marvel of technology to just be frugal with your power consumption. Cutting off lights when you leave the room goes a long way.

The biggest benefit I can see from the CPF bulbs is the absence of the heat generated by incandescent bulbs. I started noticing one month that my AC was running more than usual. It was either too cold or too humid in the house. I had a 75 watt bulb installed in a standing lamp near the thermostat, and the excess heat was causing the stat to read incorrectly.

But as far as the savings from CPF vs Incandescent goes, I cant see them as being cost effective.

lets say a household burns 5 75 watt bulbs for 10 hours a day.Which is probably a high number. If you're buring that much incandescent light, then you're either in a large family, or are pretty careless about leaving lights on....Or maybe you're a night owl.

That amounts to 3.75KW per day in just electric lighting.

If you are paying 10 cents per KW that means you are paying about 38 cents per day to run your eelctric lights. Which is about $12 a month for incandescent bulbs.

If you switched the 75 watt bulbs for 15 watt CFL, you would save about $9 a month.

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OldManOnFire

Now factor these assumptions by 120 million residential units in the USA and approximately 7 million businesses.

127 million (x) $9 (savings) is $1.143 billion in savings per month or $13.716 billion per year in savings.

(5) bulbs per house (x) 60 watts* (x) 127 million properties (=) 38,100,000,000 watts per year that no longer need to be produced by CO2 emitting power plants.

* 60 watts is the savings in wattage between 75 and 15 watt bulbs.

Note: It can probably be assumed that the average lighting watts in businesses are a factor of 10 or 50 or 100 over residential units so the 7 million (x) 5 bulbs in the above assumption is actually quite conservative. It also does not include thousands of government facilities and the military.

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SPRINGFIELD

Wow, I did not know that. Did anyone else here actually play with Mercury as a kid? I hope I'm not alone on this one. I actually had a jar full of mercury, and I'd roll it around on the floor, let it shatter, use a peice of paper to let all the little droplets regroup. I used to love the way it felt in your hand, and how heavy it was, and how it was a liquid but didn't make your hands wet. I can't believe it didn't poison me.

Veronica

I also played with mercury in science class on many occasions. Don't know what the consequences were to my health. Could be loss of IQ.
I am getting more and more forgetful .

Titanium Cat

A few comments Gurn:

• You are right, one should be aware that CFLs contain Mercury (about 5mg per bulb). No longer functioning CFLs should be disposed of at specific sites that handle that sort of waste. Fortunately most of the big box stores and a few of the smaller ones have CFL deposit programs.
• Care should be taken cleaning up broken CFLs. A thorough clean up and disposal of the broken pieces combined with a short period of ventilation for the room where it occurred will keep the hazard to a minimum.
• You can purchase Alto brand CFLs which have less (about 25%) mercury than typical CFLs.
• You could skip CFLs and buy new LED bulbs. They are even more energy efficient than CFLs and last about five times as long. Of course at almost $100 a shot for a 100-Watt incandescent equivalent, I haven't started stocking up on them!
• Most importantly, usage of CFLs reduce the overall amount of mercury introduced into the environment. The ACEEE estimates that CFLs keep between 2 to 10 times as much mercury out of the environment as they contain. This stems from the fact that a little over half of the US's electricity is produced by burning coal which is the number one source of environmental mercury. Of course the environmental savings include a reduction of other nasty emissions from coal plants and other energy sources as well.

Overall CFLs are considered a significant plus from an environmental standpoint.

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brian_wilbanks

Nice post indeed. I like to see things broken down into numbers like that.

We could save butt-loads of power to be sure if we all used them, but unless there is a way to effectively recycle the bulbs, then we're trading one ecological disaster for another one.

These CFL bulbs are very subsceptible to dirty power/voltage spikes, so from my experience, they dont last any longer than standard bulbs.

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Heretic

I played with it as a kid, but never touched it. My father only let us roll it around in soemthing else, because he knew then it was poisonous.

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brian_wilbanks

An old GF of mine played with some once and it dissolved the gold ring off her finger.

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OldManOnFire

TC...have you read about Robert Kennedy Jr's idea about installing an electrical grid in the USA that is DC instead of AC??

I always thought DC was great in short runs but too much power loss over any distance. If so, how can a DC grid possibly work? If they're going to boost the power every mile or less, which will no doubt require AC, then what's the point?

The use of low-voltage DC lighting in the homes is a great way to offset AC and incandescent lighting...

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