February 19, 2010

Installing Compact Fluorescent Lighting in Your House

A quick and cheaper way to upgrade your house’s lighting fixtures is to upgrade from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights while keeping your existing lights. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) will pay for itself in the first 6 months, and then proceed to conserve about $30 in light bills during its lifetime. CFLs use 75 percent less electricity than an old fashioned bulb, and will serve your purposes approximately 10 times longer.

CFLs use significantly less electricity as a result of the way they produce light. Incandescent bulbs include a current which runs across a wire filament and heats the filament until it begins to glow. That amber filament glow is the source of incandescent light. By contrast, a CFL sends an electric current into a tube full of argon and mercury vapor. The power heats the mercury/argon mix, which next excites a fluorescent surface inside the tube. That chemically excited surface is what created the visible fluorescent illumination. CFLs require slightly more power when they are just turned on, which is why these light bulbs contain a ballast to kick start the CFL and then regulate the power level to keep light on.

The mercury vapor inside a compact fluorescent bulb is essential to its work, although mercury is a dangerous material which you should not enable to contaminate a building or the environment. How could we effectively solve this issue? Well, fortunately, CFLs hold only around 4 miligrams of mercury in each bulb, and that mercury won’t be discharged from the bulb when they are intact or being used. Actually, the only time that mercury may be discharged from the CFL is if the bulb becomes broken, in advance of or during the discarding process, that’s why you need quality Ceiling Light Fixtures.

So long as consumers are observing the correct cleanup and disposal process when working with CFLs, the level of electricity saved substantially outweighs any theoretical harm to the water table. The simple point of consuming less electricity means that using CFLs can reduce the level of mercury which is produced by power plants. For that matter, if every American house replaced just one old fashioned bulb with a CFL, the power power saved could be enough to illuminate 3 million homes.

Used CFLs ought to be thrown out using existing municipal recycling procedures. If your municipal landfill does not have a recycling program for fluorescent bulbs, then cracked or used bulbs ought to be wrapped in two plastic sacks and put in an outside trash canister to await pickup.

The initial purchase cost of a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is quite a bit higher than the cost of an incandescent bulb, although the lengthy working life and the potential energy savings more than make up for the price difference. CFLs contain mercury, which is harmful to the ecosystem, but if used and recycled sensibly, the environmental impact of the mercury is slight when you consider the electricity conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the conceivable downsides, so why not swap your light bulbs? Today?

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