Philadelphia Daily News: Don’t Be a Dim Bulb
Filed under: Earth 911 - October 26, 2007
By SHAWN DELL JOYCE
The best way to increase your home-energy efficiency is to have an energy audit done.
The first thing most auditors will tell you is to replace those energy-hogging incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
Follow the auditor’s advice.
Incandescent bulbs use 90 percent of their electricity producing heat, not light. The only thing those bulbs are good for is incubating chicks and warming amphibians.
They are also poorly designed (no offense to Thomas Edison), because those darn filaments break too easily.
Manufacturers could make the bulbs last longer if they wanted to - and some have - but, frankly, incandescent lightbulbs are obsolete. You won’t even be able to buy an incandescent lightbulb in Australia in a couple of years. The Australians are swapping outmoded bulbs for fluorescents as part of a countrywide effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Keep in mind that Australia produces 1.1 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions while the U.S. produces 30 percent.
Fluorescent bulbs are the brightest idea since Edison’s electric candle. These are the squiggly, tubular bulbs that you probably pass up on the store shelf because they are more expensive than traditional incandescent bulbs. Those oddly shaped bulbs will last up to 10 times longer than their egg-shaped counterparts.
What’s most important is that fluorescents will save you up to $45 per bulb on your yearly electric bill, and prevent 450 pounds of greenhouse gases through energy efficiency.
You can replace virtually any regular bulb with the right fluorescent, as they are made in practically all shapes and sizes now.
Jot down the wattage of all your bulbs that stay on for more than three hours per day. Take that list to your local hardware store and buy corresponding wattages in compact fluorescent bulbs. Although the fluorescent bulb package might say “60 watts,” it’s really only about 13-15 watts, but will shine at least as brightly.
These bulbs daintily sip electricity, using 75 percent less than traditional incandescent bulbs. If all the households in America replaced even just one highly used incandescent light bulb with a fluorescent one, we would save 20 percent of our energy consumption, and be able to close down many of our coal-burning power plants, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policies Institute.
Remember to separate those fluorescent bulbs from your regular garbage. They contain a small amount of mercury in the base (about 1/100th the amount in a typical thermometer). Fluorescent bulbs should never be thrown out with regular garbage or put in recycling. Instead, check www.earth911.org to find your disposal option by zip code, or call 877-EARTH911.
Some community solid-waste transfer stations also have collection days for compact fluorescent light bulbs - look up “recycling” in your local phonebook to find their phone number.
Some stores, like IKEA, also take back used bulbs. Additional information is available at www.lamprecycle.org.
For those of you who have already replaced your bulbs, schedule a home energy audit this month and take the auditor’s advice. In most cases, you will save more on your electric bill than the cost of the audit and the cost of suggested improvements. In some cases, the improvements may qualify you for a tax rebate or incentive.
“Buying efficiency is much cheaper than buying energy,” quips energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. *
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning sustainability expert and artist who lives in a green home in the Hudson River Valley region of New York.
2 Responses to “Philadelphia Daily News: Don’t Be a Dim Bulb”
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Nice article, but a list of contractors for energy audits (and there are different types of audits) in the Philadelphia area would help.