Not counting outside porch-lights, flood lights, and in-door appliance lights, our residence contains 66 lightbulbs. That's a lot of lightbulbs. Most of the bulbs in the house are standard, garden variety incandescent bulbs. Compact Florescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) use considerably fewer watts of energy to produce a comparable number of "lumens". It only takes 13 watts for a CFL to produce 825 lumens of light, which is about equal in brightness to the 850 lumens produced by a standard 60 watt incandescent lightbulb- less than a third of the energy to produce the same amount of light (I had to look this stuff up in
Wikipedia. Hey, I'm no math-wiz like my friend Sarah's daughter, Kendall!).
Lady Di has been striving, of late, to render 590 Otis Road a "greener" space, so we used a $25.00 Lowe's giftcard we'd gotten to purchase some CFLs. So far, we've replaced about a quarter of the incandescent bulbs in the house. Why not more? Well, CFLs cost about five times as much. The energy savings will let us recoup that expense eventually, but five bucks a bulb is still a lot of cabbage.
...and they're not that pretty, yet, either. No point in having a nice chandelier if you have to pack it with ugly bulbs! Still, the technology's improving. You can get CFLs to use with dimmer switches now, so it can't be too much longer before they can make them attractive enough to display at dinner parties.
Not counting outside porch-lights, flood lights, and in-door appliance lights, our residence contains 66 lightbulbs. That's a lot of lightbulbs. Most of the bulbs in the house are standard, garden variety incandescent bulbs. Compact Florescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) use considerably fewer watts of energy to produce a comparable number of "lumens". It only takes 13 watts for a CFL to produce 825 lumens of light, which is about equal in brightness to the 850 lumens produced by a standard 60 watt incandescent lightbulb- less than a third of the energy to produce the same amount of light (I had to look this stuff up in Wikipedia. Hey, I'm no math-wiz like my friend Sarah's daughter, Kendall!).
Lady Di has been striving, of late, to render 590 Otis Road a "greener" space, so we used a $25.00 Lowe's giftcard we'd gotten to purchase some CFLs. So far, we've replaced about a quarter of the incandescent bulbs in the house. Why not more? Well, CFLs cost about five times as much. The energy savings will let us recoup that expense eventually, but five bucks a bulb is still a lot of cabbage.
...and they're not that pretty, yet, either. No point in having a nice chandelier if you have to pack it with ugly bulbs! Still, the technology's improving. You can get CFLs to use with dimmer switches now, so it can't be too much longer before they can make them attractive enough to display at dinner parties.
2 comments:
I am sure Kendall will get a kick out of THAT comment! If you had only seen her posts on fb (posted regularly) about the "dastatdly subject". :) What the young lady lacked in math skills, she made up for in tenacity!! :) fdb
I hope she does, Frandy. There's a lot to be said for tenacity.
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