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One of the most popular ways to go green and save money without making dramatic changes is to change incandescent or halogen light bulbs to a CFL bulb. CFL’s or compact fluorescent light bulbs can use 60 to 80% less energy than their traditional counterparts, which can lead to big savings on your electric bill. It’s a simple change you can make that can help save major energy.
If you haven’t given a CFL a chance in your home yet, you should know that compared to a life of about 1,000 hours with a traditional bulb, your new CFL’s will last about 6 to 15,000 hours, and can save about $30 over the lifetime of the bulb. Now imagine if you changed all the bulbs in your house. That’s some major savings on your electric bill.
Need more convincing? Buying CFL’s is one of the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint and add a little green to your home. One CFL can reduce carbon emissions from your home by 2000 times it’s weight. That’s a lot of carbon emissions. That’s a lot of carbon emissions that you’re keeping from putting into the environment. Add all that eco-friendly information to the fact that new technology is helping to make CFL’s light look a softer white and they’re even developing ways to make dimmable CFL’s. Not to mention the fact that these wonderful light bulbs are now much less expensive than they were in the past. This is helping to make the switch to compact fluorescents easier and less expensive than ever before.
Another upside to CFL’s is that you don’t need to change your lamps or light fixtures in your home. Compact fluorescent light bulbs are starting to come in all different sizes, but they all fit in standard light fixtures and lamps. Just go to the store, pick up a package and bring them home, change them out. Flip a switch and bam, you are now contributing to improving the environment.
So, still not convinced about compact fluorescent light bulbs? The downside of CFL’s is that they can release small amounts of mercury into the environment if they break. Disposal of the CFL’s is iffy, as you can’t throw them into the garbage. Without proper handling, they could break, which could contaminate the environment, water and you with slight amounts of mercury. Although experts agree that there isn’t enough mercury in a compact fluorescent light bulb to hurt people.
The general agreement is, however, that they still cause far less mercury to be released into the environment that traditional bulbs, as incandescent bulbs burn far more energy than CFL’s and the burning of that energy from power plants all over the country releases far more mercury than a broken CFL would cause. So, for now, compact fluorescent bulbs are the best way to green your home without a major overhaul and save money, good money, in the process.
