eZine Articles: Free environemental articles for general use.

Did you know that a typical American household could save up to $1500 over 5 years by replacing 30 incandescent light bulbs by Compact Flourescent Lamps (CFLs)? Does this mean you should be replacing your light bulbs with CFLs? According to published statistics CFLs save 2000 times their own weight in greenhouse gases. For this reason many governments have legislation in place to ban incandescent lamps in the near future as part of the battle against climate change.

Before you run out and buy CFLs you should also understand that there are problems associated with them as well. First, since there is mercury and other dangerous substances in the CFLs they require special attention for disposal. Many smaller towns do not have facilities for hazardous waste disposal. Disposal in landfill sites can result in mercury contamination of ground water, something we need to seriously think about avoiding.

There are also other considerations. There may be more benefit to switching over to CLFs in warm climates as opposed to colder climates. The reason is that the waste energy from incandescent lamps is dissipated in the form of heat. Heat that can come from a light bulb to warm a home instead of a furnace.

CFLs also have a significant turn-on time, up to three minutes to be fully on. This makes them generally unsuitable for automatic turn on with motion detectors or timers, one way of saving energy with incandescents. CFLs are also not suitable for use with dimmers. CFLs also have disturbing failure modes such as smoke (or fire).

I have only covered a few of the issues here. There are many other concerns. Before we make the switch to CFLs we need to make sure we have all of the answers. Better yet, we need to make sure our governments truly understand the issues before jumping on the CFL bandwagon. Otherwise we could be creating more environmental problems than we are solving. Light companies are working on more efficient incandescent lamps and getting the cost of LED lamps down to an acceptable level. These may be better solutions.

If you are making the switch to CFLs then please make sure you understand the dangers of handling the lamps and what to do in case of lamp breakage.