Ideas for Reducing Environmental Footprint #1: Installing CFLs
How can’t I start with this one? There’s discussion of this everywhere.
Over the past months, I have tried to replace virtually every light in the house with compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
This has resulted in mixed successes.
In general, I think this has been pretty successful — I have been able to swap out the majority of the bulbs with little to no problems.
But there have been a few gotchas.
The first gotcha has been dimmable switches. We have a number of dimmers in the house and you cannot use normal CFLs with dimmer switches. I have heard various things from “it will damage the switches” to “it will damage the bulbs”, but either way, it isn’t good. I have heard many other folks run up against the same barrier as they have been trying to move to all CFLs.
The only dimmable CFLs I found were at Home Depot. They have these tiny 4W dimmable CFLs that are intended to be used in chandeliers. (I’m not sure what the technical description is, but these bulbs have a much smaller base than normal lightbulbs and are used with a specific type of socket.)
The first place I installed these was in our dining room. We have a chandelier there and it uses 6 or 7 of these lights and it worked like a charm.
With that success in my pocket, I installed these same lights in a couple other light fixtures in the house that have the same socket.
Here’s where I hit my first failure. These light fixtures only take two lights. And it turns out that these 4W bulbs don’t put out a lot of light and also take a little while to warm up. So, now I have a mad wife. =( And unfortunately, in all of my brilliance, I threw out the non-CFL bulbs and so now I can’t fix the problem which makes my wife even madder.
As much as saving energy is good, mad wives are not good.
What I really need to do is check out a product like this and see if it solves my problem.
In our library, we have a ceiling fan that takes four “normal-size” light bulbs, but the light switch has a dimmer. Initially, what I did was replace all four bulbs with these same 4W candelabra CFLs. (The bulbs came with a converter that allowed you to screw them into a normal-sized base.) Unfortunately, this was too dark and I had a mad wife again.
So, what did was replaced 1 of the 4 CFL bulbs with the normal incandescent light leaving the other three CFLs in place. It now emits enough light (so my wife is happy), but is saving energy on 3 of the 4 bulbs.
Finally, in our basement, we have a number of indoor floodlights that are on dimmers. I haven’t been able to do anything with these yet, so they are still normal incandescents.
It looks like this whole “dimmer problem” is quite solvable though. Again, I haven’t tried any of these, but it looks like there are plenty of dimmable CFLs available.
I know of other people who have complained about the “color” that the fluorescents produce. Again, it looks like there are plenty of choices out there and, if you look closely, you can find the information about the color that the bulb will produce.
My general sense here is that buying CFLs is just a little bit harder than buying normal incadescent bulbs and, because of this, it is easy to buy the wrong bulb and have a bad experience. I am guessing that once upon a time, buying incandescents had similar problems, but over time, they have worked through all of the issues so buying incandescents is now a commodity and you don’t really pay attention to anything other than the wattage.
For now, I think that buying CFLs will take a little more elbow grease to “get it right”, but I think that an educated consumer probably could navigate through all of these choices and figure out the right solution for these problems. For example, I think that if I was really comparing lumens to lumens, I wouldn’t get into all of these problems of things not putting out enough light.
What experiences have others had here?
Has anybody starting playing around with LEDs yet? My understanding is that LEDs put CFLs to shame in terms of both energy efficiency and lifespan, but just have a much higher up front cost.
on April 20th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Your wife sure does sound crazy.
on April 20th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
I’m totally fine with CFLs except where I want to read. I’m sensitive to flashing lights (and there’s a little bit of blink in the CFLs) and need a lot of good strong light which I don’t seem to be able to get from CFLs. But we have installed them in our hall lights. As lights burn out in the garage, we’re replacing them with CFLs. I’m also eager to look into the LEDs, especially as they become more popular and more readily available.
on April 20th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Actually, my wife is an incredibly wonderful person who puts up with all my crazy environmental obsessions. =)
on April 20th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
To add to the success/failure story of the CFLs, I think you need to consider how you use a light before you replace the bulb. I grumble at the CFLs in one location in our house: in the hallway just outside the closet. That light only gets used for short bursts. You walk up, turn on the light, rifle through the closet until you find what your are looking for, and turn off the light. The average time of this entire operation is less than a minute.
You aren’t saving that much energy by using a CFL for such infrequent and short bursts, so it certainly isn’t worth proactively changing the bulb before the old one dies. I would also say this is a case where a warm-up time is hard felt. By the time the bulb would have warmed up, I’ve grumbled at it, found what I wanted, and turned off the light.
on April 20th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
My wife and I have some LED night lights that seem pretty good. The light is bright enough and they use under a watt of power (according to my “kill a watt”). I’d love to get a lightbulb made of LEDs (no warm up time, bright, low energy and last 100K hours).
We’ve found dimmable recessed lights at Ace Hardware. They seem to run around $14 each though. Our house is packed with recessed lights on dimmers. It’d be great to get some (more than a couple) cheaply.
on April 21st, 2007 at 9:41 am
What about humming? Do the CFLs hum like standard florescent bulbs?
on April 21st, 2007 at 9:51 am
I’ve never noticed any sound related to CFLs. Anyone else?
on April 21st, 2007 at 10:44 pm
I started replacing my incandescents w/ CFLs 12 to 18 months ago. By now, I’ve replaced nearly all of them that I can (I simply cannot find CFLs for some of our fixtures, which take non-standard sizes). I’m quite happy overall, although it took my wife a month or two to adapt.
They definitely do take a couple of mintues to warm up. However, except as noted below, we have *never* heard any sound.
We had learned the hard way not to use ordinary CFLs with dimmer switches (who me? follow directions?
). First they hummed loudly, and in one case they sparked.
It *is* possible to find dimmable CFLs online– they just cost a little more. If you are an NSTAR customer, you can get a copy of their ESTAR catalog, which allows you to buy a limited number of these (and other things) at subsidized prices. You can also find more with a google search. I’m very happy with the dimmable CFLs we have. The only drawback is that it is even harder to find dimmable CFLs in nonstandard sizes than regular CFLs.
Also, if you get an energy audit (NSTAR gives them free to all customers– but there is a wait of several months) they’ll give you a few CFLs free. If your lucky, you might get some dimmable ones.
on April 22nd, 2007 at 1:49 am
We have a couple dimmable CFLs in some recessed lights. The dimming range is very short before they shut right off, but they do work. I was in a big furniture store they other day that had tons of lamps and I started looking in them and none of them were CFLs. This seems like something that would save somebody lots of money, but maybe it’s the “color” of the light on the furniture…