Color me swirly

How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You’re Looking At It.

lightbulbs.jpg

Swirl bulbs don’t just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it’s not just lighting your living room, it’s dropping quarters in your pocket. The advantages pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; it may be around to help illuminate your 40th.

I stocked up on these yesterday at Home Depot. Curious, then I ran the numbers, and was astonished.

They pay for themselves in less than a year.

Since I live in New York, and pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, the highest electricity rates of any state except Hawaii, that helps the math.

I bought 15 (or 18?) bulbs for $75. Each bulb saves about 40 watts. I estimate 3 hours per day of usage. Over a year, that means I save 657 kilowatt hours (356*15*3*40/1000). At fifteen cents per KWH, that’s a dollar savings of $98.55. Cool. I will recoup my $75 in less than a year. (Except for the NY state cost of electricity, most of these numbers are my own estimates, reflecting a mix of bulb sizes, replacements, and daily usage. A key point - each swirl CFL bulb uses only about one-quarter as much electricity as the bulb it replaces; a 15 watt swirl casts as much light as an ordinary 60 watt bulb.)

A couple more plusses - I won’t have to change them anywhere near as often; they last for years. They don’t heat up and damage/threaten the ceiling and hanging fixtures that we have a lot of.

A couple of minusses - The quality of the light isn’t the warm, friendly, yellowish glow of incandescents. It takes a little getting used to. Actually, the color of the light varies, and it marked on the package. Some are an almost purplish white; others are warm and yellowish. I realized this after I bought large number and installed them randomly. One clashed horribly with an incandescent that was still in a matching lamp. After some fiddling around, I popped in a “warm” CFL bulb that matched the incandescent almost exactly.

Also, they need to warm up; while they do come on almost immediately, some can take up to a minute to reach their full illumination. (Even this aspect can be a “feature, not a bug,” as when you walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night, you are not blinded right away.)

All-in-all, these things are the wave of the future. Uh-oh. Am I being “overly influenced by the power of the last resonating narrative that I’ve read?” Again? That always happens to me. :)

Trackbacks & Pings

  1. SayUncle » Bulbs on 06 Sep 2006 at 8:11 am

    […] I’ll have to get some of these: I bought 15 (or 18?) bulbs for $75. Each bulb saves about 40 watts. I estimate 3 hours per day of usage. Over a year, that means I save 657 kilowatt hours (356*15*3*40/1000). At fifteen cents per KWH, that’s a dollar savings of $98.55. Cool. I will recoup my $75 in less than a year. (Except for the NY state cost of electricity, most of these numbers are my own estimates, reflecting a mix of bulb sizes, replacements, and daily usage. A key point - each swirl CFL bulb uses only about one-quarter as much electricity as the bulb it replaces; a 15 watt swirl casts as much light as an ordinary 60 watt bulb.) […]

Comments

  1. rbj wrote:

    I put one in my outside light. I got sick of having to change the lightbulb every 3-4 months, just wanted something with a little more staying power.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 1:52 pm

  2. John the Marine wrote:

    Since I live in New York, and pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, the highest electricity rates of any state except Hawaii

    Living n NY… If you have Con-Ed you’ll save even more money because the lights don’t come on at all.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 2:06 pm

  3. dorkafork wrote:

    So you save $6.57 in electricity for every $5 bulb you buy? That’s like free money.

    I can attest that those bulbs do last a long time.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 2:21 pm

  4. commissar wrote:

    dorkafork,

    yep. Your mileage may vary. The bulbs may be cheaper. The article talks about $3 bulbs. Maybe I bought 18 of them. And, electricity costs vary widely. In a lot of states, it’s only 7-8 cents per KWH.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 2:35 pm

  5. Hans wrote:

    I replaced nearly all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents a few years back.
    One important thing to keep in mind is that compact fluorescents don’t like to be switched off and on. They’re great in situations where you switch the light on and leave it on for an extened period of time. In places like bathrooms, where you switch it on and off within a few minutes, the CF’s will burn out pretty quickly — a few months will do. I’ve re-replaced all the bathroom light with incandescents. The others are holding out nicely, though.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 2:35 pm

  6. Hans wrote:

    One more thing: if you don’t like the warm-up period, there’s a class of CF’s that uses 1 watt more than the others, but don’t need to warm up. The light is different, though: more harsh white.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 2:37 pm

  7. AMac wrote:

    Here in the Deep South (er, Maryland), there’s another, seasonal advantage to CFs. Most lightbulb energy ends up as heat, so your 657 kWh saved is ~657 kWh of heat left unproduced. If a quarter (164 kWh) was during air-conditioning season, there’s a second savings in cooling you didn’t have to pay for. If your AC is 50% efficient (seems high but I dunno the real stats), then total savings would actually be 985 kWh.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 3:07 pm

  8. Eric Wilner wrote:

    The super-long-life claims are bogus. I’ve been using CFs around the house, to some degree, for several years now, and in my experience they rarely last much over one year in typical household use (a few hours per day). Also, as with old-style fluorescents, the tubes gradually go dark, so the light output degrades perceptibly well before the point of complete failure.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 10:08 pm

  9. commissar wrote:

    I bought a bunch of the first generation CLF’s about 10-15 years ago. Admittedly installed in lesser-used locations, not 3-4 hour per day locations. Nonetheless, I think I’ve replaced one of them.

    But you make a good point. A neighbor pointed out that they do not last so long in frequent on-off situations.

    Posted 05 Sep 2006 at 11:04 pm

  10. Flyfish wrote:

    I replaced all the lights (where possible) in my house with these about 6 months ago. They paid for themselves in 2 months.

    Posted 07 Sep 2006 at 3:11 pm

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