ARTICLE: "Wal-Mart Puts Some Muscle Behind Power-Sipping Bulbs," by Michael Barbaro, New York Times, 2 January 2007, p. A1.
No, not the Canadian Football League, but compact fluorescent bulb.
While I had a lot of problems with Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," it did push me on a subject I really believe in: swapping out incandescent bulbs for fluorescent ones.
The key reason: so much less energy used. A comparable 60watt CFL actually uses only 13 watts.
The next great follow-on reason: a CFL 60 watt-equivalent saves about 100 pounds of carbon emissions in a year, because of all the savings in electricity generation.
An unnoticed reason: CFLs are amazingly cooler (heat-wise), meaning fewer fires caused from wires heated to the point of brittleness (a real danger) and less wasted energy to be compensated for during warmer seasons by AC (ever notice how hot lights get with incandescents?).
A real homeowner reason: CFLs go about 5 to 10 times longer than regular bulbs. If you have a decent-sized house like I do, that's reason enough. I'm so tired of replacing bulbs every time I come back from the road.
So great to see Wal-Mart get behind this. The challenge: sell these CFLs and you'll sell fewer bulbs. But since they cost so much more (you won't save money in bulbs, but in electricity), if Wal-Mart gets people hot on these, they'll be selling far fewer bulbs over time. So G.E.'s basically telling Wal-Mart to slow down otherwise it'll put people out of work at factories that produce regular bulbs. Seems to me that G.E., which does pretty well by the American public, could think a bit more long term for our environment.
So a tip of my hat to Wal-Mart on this one.
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Comments (5)
Hey, even better, LEDs for all your Dimmable spots, floods and light tracks . . . We swapped our PAR 40 Spots for comparable LEDs and where a PAR 40 used 40 watts per hour (why not?) the comparable LED used 2 watts . . so even at $40 each, over a year's use, they'll literally pay for themselves . . add to that an aproximate 60,000 hour life, well . . do the math .
And of course, the Neon replacements are excellent also . . You just can't dim most of them . . although there is one out there, a 60 watt equivilent at around $10 each . . not bad if you can use it . .
Posted by large | January 6, 2007 1:13 PM
Hey Tom: I work as a maintainenceman in an assisted living facility. I have over 1100 florescent tubes in place and burning (I go thru a case of 30 about every 6 weeks). I have been converting the usual incandescent flood and regular bulbs over the past six years or so. The cost of the cfb's has come down greatly since I started in that (when bought by bulk) the unit cost (expecially of cfb flood bulbs) is effectively as low or lower than incandecent. Factor that in with the electricity savings. I have both an environmental and economic motive in doing this (I emphasise the economic one to my employers).
Posted by Tom Mull | January 6, 2007 1:28 PM
Household fluorescent solutions have been around for over 15 years. We went to them back then not only because of cost of ownership issues, but also relying on ocassional generator usage (in the NorthWest).
The next great technology in lighting is in led applications. If you are a leading edge technology innovator these are available and have the advantage of 100,000 hour lifetimes (about 33 years of daily 8 hour cycles).
While the life of a bulb was advertised as about seven years, we still have fluorescent bulbs installed 15 years ago that are going strong. The thing that you need to look at is the "K" rating. The soft light is a lower "K" rating and the bulbs are cheaper. The higher "K" rated, and newer bulbs approximate the sunlight and are better in certain conditions such as reading, and detailed work. BTW, these bulbs have mercury in them and require special handling for disposal (hopefully another 7+ years from now).
Posted by Steve Skalski | January 6, 2007 2:06 PM
Hey Guys: I've been keeping my eyes on the LED lights too (I have a bit of an LED flashlight obsession). I'm waiting for the price of LED light to go down and their lumins to go up.
Posted by Tom Mull | January 8, 2007 7:30 AM
I've been trying to get the folks house converted to the CFL thisd year, and have gotten many of the high use fixtures (kitchen, bathroom, porch, lounge room) switched. The biggest issue to them is the light spectrum. I found a "warm white" (2650K) 60w equivelant seems to work best for them, with a 100w equivelent "daylight" (6000K) for the porchlight. The trouble I'm finding is not all the CFL manufacturers print the 'K Rating' on the package or bulb base (Feit did, but their new packaging doesn't have it). So unless you are in a home improvement store where you can see one in operation, its a guessng game. I wish all manuvfacturers would put the K rating on their packages.
Posted by Rich Wolf | July 2, 2007 11:45 AM