The Home Lighting System
If you currently use incandescent light bulbs, changing to more efficient bulbs can have a significant impact on your home electricity usage. Incandescent lights use more electricity and produce more heat than CFLs or LEDs. LEDs last five times as long as a CFL and fifty times longer than an incandescent.
This is an incandescent light bulb:
Only approximately 10-20% of the electricity it uses produces light. The rest produces wasted heat.
Tip: Replacing one high-use (6 hours per day) 100 Watt incandescent light bulb with a 24 Watt CFL can save you approximately $150 in electricity costs over the lifetime of the light bulb.
That is over 1,000 kWh that don’t have to be produced, saving more than 1,370 pounds or 0.63 metric tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.
Want to know more? Use the CURRENT ENERGY CFL savings calculator and start saving money and preventing CO2 emissions today.
Compact Florescent Light Bulb (CFL)
CFL light bulbs are available in brightness variables equivalent to incandescent light bulbs, but use much less electricity. They also provide a color that is truer to that of sunlight. For example, our 13 Watt Spiral Helix T2 CFL offers the same brightness as a standard 60 Watt incandescent bulb, but only uses 13 Watts to produce it. It also lasts up to 10 times longer.
How they work: A compact florescent light bulb has gas inside of the glass (either a spiral or loops), which heats up and causes the coating on the glass to glow.
The EPA estimates that if every household in the United States switched out one incandescent light bulb with a CFL, the national savings would be great enough to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.
Light Emitting Diode (LED)
LED lights have an even longer life than a CFL. For example, an R30 LED Floodlight provides a brightness equivalent to a 65 Watt bulb, but uses only 10 Watts and has a 50,000 hour life. Compare that to the standard 1,000 hours of an incandescent and the 10,000 hours of the CFL and you can see why LED is the preferred choice for uses that require as long a life as possible. While the initial cost is higher than an incandescent or CFL, the LED saves hundreds of dollars over its lifetime.
Energy Savings
Calculate your own cost savings when switching from an incandescent to a CFL or LED light bulb from Current Energy with the CURRENT ENERGY CFL savings calculator.
For more information, review the Lighting Technology Fact Sheet from the Energy Star program.
