Installing Compact Fluorescent Lighting in Your House
ByA quick and affordable way to update your home lighting devices could be to change from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights for your regular lights. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) will pay for itself in about 6 months, and next, manage to conserve approximately $30 in power bills over its lifetime. CFLs need 75 percent less power than a filament-dependent bulb, and will keep working about 10 times longer.
CFLs use much less electricity because of the way they produce light. Incandescent bulbs use a current that travels across a wire filament and heats the filament until it begins to glow. That golden filament glow is the source of incandescent light. By contrast, a CFL sends an electric current the length of a tube which contains argon and mercury vapor. The power heats the mercury/argon mix, which in turn excites a fluorescent coating inside the tube. That particularly excited coating is what causes the visible fluorescent illumination. CFLs suck up slightly more juice when they are just turned on, which is why these light bulbs incorporate a ballast to activate the CFL and then standardize the current to keep light on.
The mercury gas inside a compact fluorescent bulb is required so it will work, but mercury is a poisonous material that a person should not allow to contaminate your home or the environment. How could we responsibly answer this problem? Well, to begin with, CFLs hold only about 4 miligrams of mercury in each bulb, and this mercury is not discharged from the bulb as long as they are whole or being used. Actually, the one time that mercury could be discharged from the fluorescent tube is if the bulb becomes broken, prior to or during the disposal process, that’s why you need quality Ceiling Light Fixtures.
So long as consumers are observing the correct cleanup and disposal procedures when working with CFLs, the percentage of electricity saved far outweighs any potential injury to the environment. The simple fact of consuming less electricity means that switching to CFLs can cut down on the level of mercury which is discharged by power plants. For that matter, if every American house switched only one filament-style bulb with a CFL, the resultant power saved could be sufficient to illuminate 3 million households.
Used CFLs need to be gotten rid of using existing local recycling procedures. If your nearest landfill does not offer a recycling procedure for CFL bulbs, then cracked or used bulbs need to be sealed in two plastic bags and secured in an exterior trash canister to await pickup.
The initial purchase cost of a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is substantially higher than the price of an incandescent bulb, but the lengthy working life and the projected energy savings more than justify the additional cost. CFLs contain mercury, which might be damaging to the groundwater, but if used and thrown away properly, the environmental impact of the mercury is negligible when you consider the electricity conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the conceivable problems, so why not swap to CFLs? Today?
