Monday, April 30, 2007

Day 23 - "Old fashioned lighting"


I was reminded the other day by Northman in a message at Worth that there are new, much more efficient, lighting solutions available to us now. I must admit to being far from the cutting edge when it comes to energy efficient light bulbs. My house is largely lit by traditional tungsten light bulbs (like the one in today's photo). Although these are very cheap to replace when they burn out, they do use much more energy than the equivalent Compact Fluorescent Lamp.
Compact Fluorescent Lamps are sold by the wattage, in much the same way as normal bulbs. However because they use a lot less energy, a lower wattage bulb will be needed to give out the same amount of light. Although CFLs cost more to buy, they save money because they use less electricity. The cost of a low energy light bulb can be as low as £2 and they are now available in most retail stores. A CFL will typically last for a total of 8,000 hours, compared to only just over 1,000 hours on average for the best conventional bulbs.
Guess it's time I started to convert!

2 comments:

Norm said...

As a follow up to that, I heard today that California has banned the sale of incandescent bulbs and also the entire country of Australia?

kimbomac said...

Yeah, Australia is talking about that. Or may have started it - I don't know. Our house has mostly low voltage lighting. Don't know how that compares for energy efficiency.
As to this image, I love it. It has a very spacey glow about it. Nice work.