Getting Compact Fluorescent Lighting for Your Home

By Adam Moses

An easy and cheaper way to update your house's lighting system could be to upgrade from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights in your current lighting fixtures. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) could pay for itself in about 6 months, and then go on to save about $30 in light bills in the course of its lifetime. CFLs need 75 percent less electricity than an incandescent bulb, and could serve your purposes near to 10 times longer.

CFLs use much less power resulting from the way they create light. Incandescent bulbs depend on a current which passes through a wire filament and heats it's filament until it begins to glow. That golden filament glow is what results in incandescent light. Alternately, a CFL sends an electric current the length of a tube filled with argon and mercury vapor. The current heats the vapors, which then excites a fluorescent layer inside the tube. That chemically excited surface is what causes the bright fluorescent light. CFLs suck up slightly more juice when they are initially turned on, so these light bulbs incorporate a ballast to power up the CFL and then standardize the power level to keep light on.

The mercury gas inside a compact fluorescent bulb is required so it will glow, yet mercury is a poisonous material which you should not enable to contaminate your home or the landfill. How could we effectively solve this problem? Well, fortunately, CFLs contain only about 4 miligrams of mercury per bulb, and this mercury won't be leaked from the bulb if they are unbroken or lit up. Actually, the single time that mercury might be leaked from the fluorescent tube is if the bulb becomes broken, before or during the discarding process, that's why you need good Ceiling Light Fixtures.

So long as consumers are observing the correct cleanup and disposal methods when working with CFLs, the amount of power saved substantially overwhelms any possible harm to the environment. The single point of requiring less power means that employing CFLs can reduce the volume of mercury being discharged by power plants. Believe it or not, if every American household changed out only one incandescent bulb with a CFL, the resultant savings might be enough to light 3 million households.

Used CFLs should be gotten rid of using established municipal recycling procedures. If your nearest landfill does not have a recycling procedure for these bulbs, then busted or exhausted bulbs should be contained in two plastic sacks and secured in an outside trash container to await pickup.

The initial investment in a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is quite a bit higher than the price of an incandescent bulb, yet the extended working life and the projected energy savings more than make up for the price difference. CFLs use mercury, which could be damaging to the ecosystem, but if stored and thrown away properly, the environmental impact of the mercury is insignificant compared to the power conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the potential problems, so why not change your light bulbs? This week? - 30228

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