"Help The Planet, Save Money & Brag About It"

There are rumours going around that these may shortly be made compulsory in this country. I think it’ll be a positive step, though I do have my reservations about some non-standard bulbs and whether or not energy efficient variations will be made available.

I believe they are already compulsory in some other countries and hope that the UK is soon set to join them. Let’s hope it’s for the right reasons though and not just more spin from the Government to try and convince the public they are taking the environmental issue seriously.

Yes, I heard about those it seems that they cost a little bit more but you save a lot of energy and money after you instal it. A normal light bulb which would consume 100W can be replaced with one which only consumes 25W. I think this is great!

saves money and reduces emissions, what are we waiting for?

Compact Florecent Bulbs run about $4 to $14 a pop and will last for over 8,000 hours and will generally pay themselves off in energy savings in a year.

Get some today!

thanks for the link Adam. i can see they have all kinds of energy savers and they are not that expensive and even if they are they save a lot of money on long term. i don’t know why people don’t buy any because even if they don’t really care about the environment they can at least buy them to lower their energy costs

I have some of these in my home and I also convinced my sister to get some for her home. They are very good and they really save energy. As I told you in another post I also have a monitor which saves a lot of energy but that is not enough. I think of buying more energy savers but I can’t really find any stores which sell them here.

We’ve got energy saving bulbs for most of our lights, though there are actually very few available for less popular fittings such as spotlights. Hopefully that will change with the Government’s new green policies.

Anyone else struggle to get certain types of bulb in energy saving form? I guess the main problem is fitting a tube in such a compact design - spots just weren’t designed to be environmentally friendly.

It seems to be hard to find the more energy efficient bulbs in sizes other than ones that replace your typical incandescent.  Does anyone know if there are any specialty stores/retailers that sell a variety of the energy efficient bulbs?

I have noticed this too.  I do think some stores specializing in “home remodeling, building, repairs” etct might actually carry them.

Check out the Black Energy sponsor on the left side fo the screen, they have flood lights and spotlights.

It seems like such a small thing to do - change the lightbulbs - but so many people don’t even think about doing it. We recently have decided to live greener, so that is one of the things we have committed to doing. Does anyone know the lifespan of these lightbulbs?

The typical lifespan of a high quality Compact Fluorescent Light is about 10,000 hours which is about 7 years @ 4 hours per day.

So they cost more but they will end up saving about 70% over their lifespan as compaired to incandescent lights.

Here is a compairison between CFL’s and incandescent over the CFL’s lifespan of 10,000 hours:

Description—————————-CFL————————Incandescent
Life———————————————10,000 hrs————1,500 hrs
# Bulbs————————————-1——————————6.7
cost——————————————-$4.00———————-6.7 x $0.32 = $2.14
Input——————————————13 W———————-60 W
Elect. Used——————————-130 kwh——————600 kwh
Elect Cost($0.08/kwh)————$10.40——————-$48.00
Total Cost———————————$14.40———————$50.14

Total savings—> $50.14 - $14.40 == $35.74

Thats $35.74 savings for changing just one lightbulb. I really dont think people realise how much these CFL’s can actually save them.

Just think if you changed every bulb in your entire house…

Now go get some here!

It IS a good move, I don’t dispute that. But for a family who is strapped for cash, the initial outlay can be VERY difficult.

Its the same as some other reusable items like cloth nappies/diapers. Over the two years that we have been using them, we’ve saved over a thousand dollars, but the initial outlay was huge-about $300 compared to $15 for a pack of disposables.

No, I seriously LOVE them. My daughter went through seven colours of h*ll with diaper rashes in disposables, and even huge sores on her legs where the paper cuffs rubbed her. When I switched to cloth I did it a bit at a time-started with six fuzzi bunz, which was enough for a two month old to be in cloth all day and then in paper at night. I washed whilst she slept-poop and all went in the machine since she was breast fed and so it was all absorbed by the cloth.

So it’s really down to what you consider convenient. Breast milk poop is liquid-and yet it is too thick to be absorbed by the paper. So you are expecting two tiny strips of elastic to hold a huge amount of liquid poop in a puddle between the kid’s legs.

That ain’t gonna happen. So kid ends up with poop up their back, in their hair, all over the crib…..so you have to change and bath the kid, change the bed, scrub the poop stains out of everything…..

The cloth absorbs the poop far better, and so although I had to launder nappies, I no longer suffered from the clothing issues from exploding diapers. And if you use something like fuzzi bunz or another pocket diaper like royal bunz, rather than prefolds, you have the convenience of a disposable because it just snaps onto the kid.

You can see the snaps and the absorbent insert there. Washing take time but is easy if you have a machine in the house-cold prewash or cold cycle, hot cycle then an extra rinse. Then it all goes in the drier.

And they come SO cute;

That is one of my daughter’s. If you have more questions I am MORE than willing to help! I’ve been cloth diapering for close on two years. Sorry for the interchangeable nappy/diaper terms, I’m a Brit living in America, and it gets confusing at times.

I figure that with a big house, maybe you can buy three bulbs a week until all of your bulbs are replaced. Great idea on the diapers. They have patterns for pocket diapers online too for those who are handy.

Except that three bulbs may be half of your grocery money for the week. It’s not doable when things are really tight. You could, perhaps, save fifty cents a week until you have enough to buy the first one, and then increase that to seventy five, or work some other way of saving, but when things are tight like I know tight, three a week would mean being VERY hungry.

Although energy saving bulbs are an answer you need to be careful when purchasing, there have been documented instances of interference with other
devices around the home such as remote controls. I believe this is due to emissions in the infra red spectrum whch is where most remote controls operate