Lightbulb Exchange
My roommate Marci told me about a series of lightbulb exchange events being hosted by the City of San Diego and SDGE. I was able to go to one yesterday and trade in five incandescent bulbs for five compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Check out the schedule for future trade-ins here (the events at Scripps seem pretty cool since one can also get a 2-for-1 pass to the aquarium at the same time).
CFLs have been covered to death as one of the easiest ways to save energy, as well as a little bit of money (Lighter Footstep has a good article about them here). Normally the savings on one’s electric bill far outweigh the higher upfront cost of CFLs (let’s say you pay $.10 per kWh and replace a 60W incandescent with a 13W CFL, over an 8,000 hour lifespan one would save around $35). When you can trade in incandescents you already have for free CFLs, however, it’s all profit. 
CFLs do have a couple drawbacks compared to incandescents. They take about half a second to actually turn on, and then another 30 seconds to reach their full brightness. During this warmup, they use approximately as much energy as an incandescent, so it’s not really worth putting a CFL in a closet or somewhere where one doesn’t use the light for more than a few seconds. In the majority of use cases, though, they are preferable and indistinguishable from their incandescent counterparts.
I switched over most of my lightbulbs to CFLs back when I moved in, and now every fixture in the house has a CFL, except for the one in my closet and one out on my porch whose devious enclosure I haven’t been able to penetrate…
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Another drawback you forgot to mention is the fact that CF bulbs are full of toxic mercury and are illegal to just “throw away” in the trash. They are considered “hazardous waste” and are supposed to be dropped off at your nearest Household Hazardous Waste station. (like paint, batteries, pesticides, etc.) Since people are used to tossing burned-out light bulbs in the trash, I guarantee that millions of CF bulbs will end up in our landfills, leaching mercury into the ground.
Like you, I have also replaced most of my light bulbs with CF, and I have been happy with the energy savings, but I am troubled by the disposal problem.
And if one is accidentally broken, you have the poisonous mercury dust to deal with instead of just glass. I have seen so many articles praising the “green” factor of CF bulbs, and interestingly none of them even mention the mercury.
I think LED clusters are much “greener” than CF bulbs, since they consume even less electricity and are not full of mercury… but unfortunately they are expensive and can’t be found in most retail stores yet.
August 2nd, 2007 at 3:32 pm
A good factsheet on the mercury in CFLs can be found here: http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/epafactsheet-cfl.pdf It is the first hit on Googling “mercury in CFLs.” As the sheet points out, the lowered energy use of CFLs means that they probably end up preventing some mercury from entering the environment when substituted for incandescent bulbs, at least as long as we continue to get a large fraction of our power from coal power plants.
August 6th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
~S~ Good job, Josh!
Nema’s link failed, Stephen. But check this one out: http://www.epa.gov/region02/mercury/mercurylamps.html