theworldisgrey

Compact Fluorescents

I’m not always the most conscious when it comes to environment and energy conservation. I don’t always separate my garbage into recyclables (Which doesn’t always make sense for all materials anyway, higher energy cost to recycle than to make new). But I have at least started to use compact florescent light (CFL) bulbs in my apartment. Not just because its better for the environment, but because it makes sense.

Lets look at the numbers, I’m going to base the energy cost on $0.08 per kwh as thats the average price in Minnesota. The comparison will be between a 75w incandescent and 20w CFL, both have a comparable light output.

Cost Per Year for incandescent:

• $1 per bulb - Depending on quality
• 1500 hour Lifetime
• 109.5 kwh per year at 4 hours per day (about 1500 hours)
• $8.75 per year of energy usage.
• Total Cost for one bulb per year: $9.75

Cost per year for CFL’s:

• $4 per bulb ($0.74 cents when normalized to 1500 hours)
• 8000 hour lifetime
• 29.2 kwh per year at 4 hours per day (about 1500 hours)
• $2.37 per year of energy usage.
• $0.50 Recycling fee (.09 normalized to lifetime)
• Total Cost for one bulb per year (normalized): $3.20

The total cost of of using CFLs is about a third of what it costs for incandescents. This may not seem like much, but if you multiply 20 or 30 bulbs, its starts to ad up. My apartment only uses 15 bulbs, and changing all of them to CFL would result in an energy cost savings of about $100 per year.

CFL’s do have a disadvantage, they do contain mercury. However, the amount of mercury contained in a bulb is less than the amount of mercury that would be put out by coal power plants to generate the electricity difference. The mercury in CFL’s can be recycled and reused, unlike mercury put out by power plants.

From the 2000 census, the US has about 105 million households. If every household switched a single light bulb to a CFL, we would have an energy savings of about $700 million per year. A reduction of 8.5 billion kwh would also reduce carbon dioxide by 35 million tons per year and other pollutants that are created with burning coal would be reduced as well. And thats just one light bulb per household.

For more information on CFL’s visit Wikipedia.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Energy, Environment, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.