10 positive things to do for the environment

I've done that calculation for a project at my church, and 50 hours is in the ballpark. The key is to realize how cheap good CFLs are. It takes very little time to pay back the initial purchase price at VA power's electrical rates.

Consumer Reports gave high marks to the ones carried by Home Depot.

Home Depot had these on sale for under $3/pack last week at my store. But let me work from list price of $1.46 per bulb, as here:

n:vision 14 Watt Soft White Compact Fluorescent Bulb (CFL), 4 Pack - 5M8144 at The Home Depot

Cheapest 60 watt incandescent is $0.22/bulb, as here:

Philips 4-Pack 60 Watt Soft White A19 In.candescent Bulbs - 389361 at The Home Depot

That burns 45 watts more than the CFL. CFL costs $1.24 more. We pay about 12.5 cents/KWH here, so $1.24 buys about 10 KWH of electricity. How long to payback: 10,000 watt-hours/45 watts = 222 hours or so.

Ok, so it works out to 222 hours here, would have been half that if I'd bought them at the price advertised last week.

Point is, payback period is pretty short.

All the old saws about not putting CFLs in places where the light gets turned on and off a lot (because it shortens their life) -- none of those make money sense any more in the face of cheap CFLs.

If these last their rated 10,000 hour life on average (seems plausible given my experience with them so far), savings at VA power rates would be:

Electric: $0.125/kwh * 45 watts savings * 10,000 hours / 1000 (covert watt to KW) = $56.

Bulb purchase: 10*$0.22 (1000 hour life on the incandescents) -$1.46 = chump change.

That $56 in savings hardly seems plausible. From one bulb. But the trick is that it takes forever to collect it -- 10,000 hours is 4 hours/day for close to 8 years.

I converted my entire (fairly large) house to CFLs when we moved in a little over 3 years back. Been collecting the dead bulbs for hazardous waste. Just checked -- I have three so far, and some of those could have been in the lamps from the old house.

I see people complain about short lifetimes, but all i can say is, I change a bulb or two a year. That's so little money I could not possibly care about it.

 

Well, it will vary depending on a lot of variables (insulation - indoor/outdoor temps, etc).

But if you ran a basic electric heater (~1200w), you could only run it for 10 minutes before you used up 200wh. In my experience even heating up a small bathroom takes significantly more power.

Even if you had a heat-pump doing the heating, that only gets you 30-40 minutes of operation which isn't much.