A quick and inexpensive way to upgrade your home lighting system is to switch from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights for your existing lighting fixtures. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) could pay for itself in as little as 6 months, and next, manage to let you keep about $30 in light bills in the course of its lifetime. CFLs need 75 percent less power than a filament-dependent bulb, and could last approximately 10 times longer.
CFLs need much less energy resulting from the way they create light. Incandescent bulbs use a current which runs through a wire filament and heats that filament until it makes it glow. That amber filament glow is what makes incandescent light. Alternately, a CFL shoots an electric current into a tube that holds argon and mercury vapor. The electricity heats the gas, which then excites a fluorescent surface inside the tube. That chemically excited surface is the source of the bright fluorescent illumination. CFLs require a bit more juice when they are first turned on, so fluorescent bulbs have a ballast to activate the CFL and then control the power level to keep light on.
The mercury vapor inside a compact fluorescent bulb is essential to its work, although mercury is a poisonous material which people should not let contaminate a building or the landfill. How could we responsibly address this issue? Well, to begin with, CFLs contain only around 4 miligrams of mercury for every bulb, and the mercury won’t be leaked from the bulb if they are in one piece or being used. Actually, the single time that mercury might be leaked from the CFL is if the bulb gets broken, before or during the disposal process, that’s why you need good Ceiling Light Fixtures.
So long as consumers are using recommended cleanup and disposal procedures when handling CFLs, the percentage of energy saved substantially outweighs any potential injury to the ecology. The simple issue of using less energy means that using CFLs can reduce the volume of mercury which is released by power plants. As a matter of fact, if every American home changed out only one filament-style bulb with a CFL, the resultant savings could be sufficient to illuminate 3 million houses.
Used CFLs should be disposed of employing available county recycling procedures. If your municipal landfill does not have a recycling option for fluorescent bulbs, then broken or used bulbs should be wrapped in two plastic sacks and placed in an exterior trash container to await pickup.
The initial investment in a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is quite a bit higher than the cost of an incandescent bulb, although the extended working life and the potential energy savings quickly justify the extra expense. CFLs use mercury, which might be dangerous to the environment, but if used and recycled sensibly, the environmental impact of the mercury is negligible compared to the energy conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the potential problems, so why not switch your light bulbs? Tonight?
