Home & Garden

Everyone is talking about saving energy, and quite rightly too.

In the home, saving energy means saving money, and one of the quickest and easiest ways to save is in lighting.

Most homes use incandescent bulbs for their lighting.  These are the standard bulb with a coiled filament that glows when you apply electricity to it.

But did you know that these have an energy efficiency of only about 2%?  That means for all the energy you feed into it, only one fiftieth of that energy is converted to light energy.  The rest is mainly heat.  That’s why light bulbs get so hot.

The new Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) on the other hand have an energy efficiency of between 7% and 10%.  That still doesn’t sound very good, but what it does mean is that to get the same amount of light out of it, you only need to supply it with between one quarter and one fifth of the energy.

Now that we’ve established that they use a lot less energy, what about the cost?

The prices of CFLs has come down rapidly in the last year or so, and they are now about 3 times the price of conventional incandescent bulbs.  Furthermore, they last about 10 times longer, so you don’t need to replace them quite as often.  So in real terms, they actually cost about one third of the price of conventional bulbs.

Consider that in the winter, you might leave a light on from 4pm to 11pm (7 hours).  Let’s say that it costs 1 penny (UK) to run a 100 Watt incandescent bulb for 1 hour.

In 1 month, it will have cost about £2.97 to run that light bulb.  For the four months November to February, that would come to £11.88.

A CFL of the same light output uses just 22 Watts.  Over the same period, that would cost £2.62, a saving of £9.26.  That’s enough to buy 3 CFLs.

Now that’s for just one lightbulb.  How many more do you use in your house?  You could easily save up to £100 a year by switching.

Don’t wait until your incandescent bulbs have blown before replacing them with CFLs - it’s cheaper to throw away your incandescent bulbs now!

In the UK, incandescent bulbs will be withdrawn from sale in 2012.  You don’t need to wait until then to switch over.  Do it now and save some money.