Going Green the Easy Way

The Best Bulb for Your Buck AND The Environment

by Bernie Eshel

Good The average American home consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year of electricity (1 ). If you keep your lights on 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, a single 60-watt bulb is costing you roughly 175.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, or about $25.00 (PER bulb) on your electric bill (2 ). The most obvious thing you can do is turn off lights you are not using. This common sense discipline will cost you nothing while putting money back into your pocket and reducing your household impact on the environment. Also, many inexpensive motion sensors are available at your local home improvement store that will turn your lights on and off, assuring that the lights are on only when a room is occupied. That simple green move will pay for itself in the first year in energy savings alone.

Better Many Californians have already switched to more efficient Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs). A 22-watt CFL lamp will produced an equivalent amount of light to a 60-watt light bulb with over a 60% energy savings to start! There are many options out there that range in price from a couple of dollars to over $10 per lamp. When you look at the energy consumption in dollars per year you can go from around $25.00 per bulb to under $10. Factor in the higher cost of the lamp and there is still a $10 saving per year, per lamp. Many of these lamps will last two to three years in an average California home creating a budget saver while hugely reducing energy consumption. The down side to CFLs is that they contain mercury, a heavy, toxic metal that eventually ends up in land fills. So, while you are taking two steps forward toward a greener family lifestyle you can really be taking one step back at the same time by adding toxins to your local land fill.

Best The latest move toward green lighting is arriving now in the form of Solid State Lighting (SSL). SSL is based upon LED technology, which is the most efficient way to create usable light. Until recently, the technology had not advanced enough to create a viable alternative to the CFL and traditional light bulbs, but that has all changed with the introduction of high lumen output LEDs like the Cree® XLamp™, available in California from ETG Corp. (www.etgtech.com). XLamps have been integrated into many industrial lighting applications that are now trickling down to consumers. Since SSL lamps are directional, they do not have to put out as many lumens to achieve the same lighting effect. The light that is normally lost back up into a fixture with a traditional lamp is directed back without loss. An SSL lamp will draw under 10-watts compared to a traditional 60-watt light bulb or the 22-watt CFL. That is over an 80% energy saving compared to the standard light bulb and over a 50% savings over the most efficient CFL lamp. So that same lamp that will draw 480 watt-hours a day will now only consume 57.6 watt-hours, or 1/8th the energy over the same period of time. That makes the cost of running an SSL lamp under $3 per year.

The other factor is lifetime and post-consumer waste. The standard light bulb is rated for around 2000 hours. (That is the time at which one-half of the bulbs will have burned out.) CFL lamps are rated as high as 10,000 hours (3) or five times the life of a standard bulb! An SSL lamp, like the ones produced by California's Infinilux, Inc. (www.infinilux.com) is rated for over seven times the life of a CFL! The case for SSL gets even stronger when you consider how lifetime is calculated. SSL lamps calculate lifetime as the point at which the lamp reaches 70% of its initial output, not when it "burns out". So even after 70,000 hours (8 years on 24 hours per day or 24 years on 8 hours per day), the SSL lamp will still be producing 70% of its initial light. A CFL rated at the maximum life would have been replaced a minimum of seven times and as many as 14 times, that is a lot of mercury moved to the local community land fill.

There are many applications in the average family home that are ideal for an SSL, outdoor flood lamps, motion/security lamps, track lighting, garage, utility, closet and anywhere a traditional flood style lamp may be used. The SSL technology is not ideally suited for sealed down lights, ceiling fans, and traditional table/floor lamps; CFL technologies still have the edge for these applications. However, it is just a matter of time before the average family home can be outfitted with nothing but Green SSL lamps and fixtures that will reduce carbon emissions, lower electricity bills and provide a 100% recyclable "light bulb".

The case for sounding the end to the incandescent bulb can be made on the economic impact alone or on the Green impact alone, but when you combine the two, switching your family's lighting over to SSL will create a win-win for both your family and the environment.

1. US Department of Energy 2006 2. based upon a $0.14 per kW-hr 3. For lamps that care the Energy Star mark. – DOE Energy Star Campaign Flyer 4/23/07 Assumptions and Facts.