Thread: Maybe we should be as passionate

As long as I don't break one, I should be able to live a long life...

Right Madam Speaker?

LOL. When I moved into the house Im in now, about two maybe three months in, I swapped every light in the house with a CFL. I did see a nice drop in our utility bill. But I am concerned about the mercury in them. I dont know how many it actually takes to amount to anything nor why they use mercury. But they do save money. I guess if I ever drop one and break it I'll have to don the environmental protection suit and eveacuate the family and clean up the mess.

I did not realize the mandatory date was 2014. I had originally heard it was like 2010, maybe 2011.

Originally Posted by SyntheticShield

LOL. When I moved into the house Im in now, about two maybe three months in, I swapped every light in the house with a CFL. I did see a nice drop in our utility bill. But I am concerned about the mercury in them. I dont know how many it actually takes to amount to anything nor why they use mercury. But they do save money. I guess if I ever drop one and break it I'll have to don the environmental protection suit and eveacuate the family and clean up the mess.

I did not realize the mandatory date was 2014. I had originally heard it was like 2010, maybe 2011.

If you don't mind me asking how much did you spend on the light bulbs and how much do you save a month? Does it pan out?

We outfitted our house with bulbs for about $75 when we moved in. Our bill is usually under $150. The last place I lived was about the same size with regular bulbs and the bill was $160-175 each month, so assuming all the other electric stuff was close to the same, that's a $10-25 a month savings.

They aren't all made in china the ones we sell at work are made in Germany

And I believe it is a small amount of mercury in the gas, regular fluorescent bulbs also contain mercury.... I understand why CFL bulbs exist, but outlawing Incandescent bulbs is as stated by the congressman Unconstitutional, this is a free market society and the incandescent bulb serves no threat to human life/health and should not be outlawed....

Originally Posted by Andrew_99GTP

If you don't mind me asking how much did you spend on the light bulbs and how much do you save a month? Does it pan out?

Dont quote me on the cost of the bulbs as that has been a few years ago. I bought some 25 bulbs and at the time I bought the rounded looking ones. The ones that looked like regular incandescent bulbs, not knowing any better (I could have gotten away with the corkscrew looking ones) and they were not nearly as popular as they are now. They came in packs of three and cost me about $12 per pack, so roughly $110 to change out all the bulbs, including the ones in the garage.

My bill was running about $135/mo (Id have to see if I can dig up some old utility bills to be exact). After getting all the bulbs switched over I was seeing around $110 on average. Of course there is some variance but our energy useage tends to be somewhat consistent. So I figured I was saving about $15 per month and if you do the math you'll see that ends up being way more than I spent on the bulbs. Ive only had to replace a couple of them so they have all been working now for about 4 years. So in my opinion they are well worth it. If I should ever build a custom house it will most definitely start life with CFC bulbs.

When I grow up, I wanna be on the EPA Lightbulb Police...

In regards to what the congressman said... Word.

We just did our whole Apartment building with these
and we supply the bulbs if they burn out or stop working..
We also won All Ontario Building award for 2008
and our having a hudge party on the 24th of June for this ..

I've had to remove dimmer switches to run these though
as it makes the bulbs strob lol

But anyways we cut our hydro bill in half with these bulbs...

I've had to remove dimmer switches to run these though

That's one thing a lot of people don't realize, you have to completely remove the dimmer switches. Even if you leave them on the highest setting, they can still cause problems (including fires).

While CFL's are good in some applications, there are a lot of problems with them too. Here's a good article about some of the problems with CFL's:
Ban Incandescent Lamps?

Bottom line, Congress shouldn't be in the business of endorsing products. There are a lot of other efficient lighting products besides CFL's (e.g. halogen, LED's, etc), and advances in these are being stifled as everybody jumps on the CFL only bandwagon. The consumer should be free to choose what products to buy.

Another problem is that your savings will be short lived....

Wal~Mart changed to CFL's in one of their Distribution Centers to see what the savings would be. It was about 150.00 per month savings, so they changed the other Distribution Centers in the area (I think it was 3) over to CFL's neting them a savings of 600.00 per month on the electric bill.

3 months later, the electric bill went up and now they are paying the same price as before the CFL's.

Now I am not saying that they will monitor your house and increase you bill, but if enough people switch over to CFL's and they are cutting into the profits, they will up the rate.

Just more food for thought.

webracin

I don't think they're upping the rates due to the CFL's because you're using less power, but because CFL's require more power to be transmitted than they use. CFL's have a significantly lower power factor (usually around 0.5) than incandescent bulbs (which have a unity (1) power factor). Power factor is simply a relationship between real power (ability to do work, measured in watts) and apparent power (voltage x current draw, measured in volt-amps or VA).

This means (without going too in-depth) that assuming a 0.5 pf, a CFL will require twice as much electricity as you'd think when you read the package (i.e. a 20W CFL @ 0.5 pf will consume 40 VA). Electric companies have to generate and transmit 40 VA for each CFL, but your electric meter only sees 20W of power consumption. Because of this, some electric companies charge extra for customers (especially commercial customers) with low power factors.

Here's a pretty good explanation of pf and real vs apparent power:
Power factor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's a link from a utility company explaining that they charge more for low pf:
Power Factor FAQ

Our circuits at work were initially designed for 60W incandescent lights. Some time ago, they were replaced by 2x20W fluorescent tubes. As these wore out, we replaced them with 3x20W fluorescent tubes. Since this consumes 60W, what the circuit was initially designed for, there should have been no problems, right?

Wrong! We were tripping circuit breakers on all of our lighting strings, and had to remove one bulb from each of the new fixtures to get them to work. We contacted the manufacturer, and found out that our lights had a power factor of 0.55. 60W / 0.55 pf = 109 VA, so the fluorescent lights were drawing more current than a 100W incandescent light bulb with a unity (1.0) power factor (100W / 1.0 pf = 100 VA).

This isn't to say that fluorescents use more energy for the same light output (the 2x20W tubes were still brighter than the 60W incandescents), but they don't save as much energy as the wattage rating on the package would indicate.