Friday, June 22, 2007

Hey! Who Turned Out The Lights?

We're all trying to conserve energy these days. If not for environmental reasons then for money saving reasons. One very simple way of doing this is to switch your old-school light bulbs for the energy saving bulbs. I think they're a little more expensive per unit, but they last for a long long time, and they use about a third the power per unit light.

In my room in the Sault I had a ceiling fan with three light bulbs in it. I found 60W bulbs weren't bright enough so I put 100W bulbs. That was plenty bright, but I didn't want my rent to increase because of all the extra energy I would be consuming. Also, when the lights started burning out (which didn't take very long for the first one) I didn't want to keep buying new bulbs. Furthermore, I am a bit of a tree-hugger. So I went out and bought some energy-saving bulbs and used those. All three together, as bright as three 100W bulbs, was still consuming less than 100W. That's less than three 60W bulbs!

After reading Today's article I'm really glad I never dropped and broke one of those bulbs.

It turns out that these bulbs contain mercury, and breaking one can cause your room to be a bio-hazard zone, and can cost upwards of $2000 to clean up.

I'd call that an inconvenient truth.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice tag line, but you're spreading urban myths (again? ;)):

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/the_real_dirt_o.php

or

http://www.homeimprovementsdepot.com/category/interior/

Nothing that can't be handled by thinking clearly....

C.F.B said...

I thought I had a lot of time on my hands to think...now I am convinced that you have much more time to think!