Update Your Home with Compact Fluorescent Lights

By Adam Moses

A simple and affordable way to upgrade your home lighting system would be to upgrade from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights while keeping your current lighting fixtures. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) could pay for itself in as little as 6 months, and next, go on to conserve about $30 in power bills during its lifetime. CFLs employ 75 percent less electricity than a filament-dependent bulb, and could serve your purposes about 10 times longer.

CFLs need much less electricity because of the way they create light. Incandescent bulbs include a current that travels inside a wire filament and heats that filament until it begins to glow. That amber filament glow is what results in incandescent light. Alternately, a CFL sends an electric current into a tube that holds argon and mercury vapor. The current heats the gas, which then reacts with a fluorescent layer inside the tube. That particularly excited layer is what causes the visible fluorescent glow. CFLs need somewhat more energy when they are first turned on, so these light bulbs incorporate a ballast to kick start the CFL and then regulate the current to keep light on.

The mercury vapor inside a compact fluorescent bulb is required so it will function, although mercury is a hazardous material which people should not allow to contaminate a house or the landfill. How could we effectively address this problem? Well, for starters, CFLs contain only about 4 miligrams of mercury per bulb, and this mercury is not leaked from the bulb as long as they are in one piece or being used. As a matter of fact, the only time that mercury could be leaked from the fluorescent tube is if the bulb were to be broken, in advance of or during the discarding process, that's why you need good Ceiling Light Fixtures.

As long as consumers are following proper cleanup and disposal process when handling CFLs, the amount of electricity saved particularly overwhelms any theoretical injury to the planet. The simple point of using less electricity means that using CFLs can reduce the level of mercury which is discharged by power plants. For that matter, if every American household switched merely one old fashioned bulb with a CFL, the power electricity conserved could be enough to light 3 million houses.

Used CFLs should be thrown out employing existing local recycling options. If your municipal landfill does not have a recycling procedure for fluorescent bulbs, then busted or used bulbs should be wrapped in two plastic bags and placed in an exterior trash canister to await pickup.

The initial investment in a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is quite a bit higher than the price of an incandescent bulb, yet the extended working life and the projected energy savings more than make up for the price difference. CFLs use mercury, which could be damaging to the ecosystem, but if stored and thrown away properly, the environmental impact of the mercury is insignificant compared to the power conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the potential problems, so why not change your light bulbs? This week? - 33393

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here