LIGHTING CHOICES

Lighting accounts for 25 percent of an average home's electricity bill.

Changing a single 75 watt light to a more energy efficient, 20-watt Energy Star bulb or fixture can save your family as much as $60 a year in energy costs. And when you cut your home energy use, you reduce pollution from power plants that make electricity. That's why replacing that bulb for a more efficient one can be as good for the environment as not driving your car for more than two weeks.

Typically, the five most used lights in a home are found in the kitchen ceiling, in living room table and floor lamps, in the bathroom, and outdoors on a porch or post.

Imagine your home or office without light.

Light allows us to see, create a comfortable environment, and be safe and secure.

The lighting techniques - the ways you arrange lights - and the lamps - the light bulbs - you choose for the rooms in your home or office will make a difference in your comfort level and energy use.

Everyone knows that appliances, like your refrigerator and dishwasher, use electricity.

However you may not realize lamps or bulbs and the fixtures in which they operate (called luminaries) are also appliances. If we consider lighting as a single appliance, it can be much as 25 percent of your home's electricity consumption.

When choosing many appliances, consumers can compare Energy Guide labels, telling them how much it will cost each year to operate the appliance.

This information allows people to choose an appliance at a higher initial cost if they know it's more efficient and will save them money in the long run.

Not so with lamps. It is more difficult to calculate efficiency and savings because of the different lighting technologies.

Light Tubes

Light tubes or light pipes are used for transporting or distributing natural or artificial light. They are by design the most energy efficient way of lighting an area. In their application to day-lighting, they are also often called sun pipes, solar pipes, solar light pipes, or daylight pipes

Incandescent - The usual light bulbs

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb nearly 120 years ago, and it still works pretty much as it did then.

Inside a glass bulb, electricity heats up a wire filament, causing it to glow and give off light.

Of course, electrical heaters work in much the same way, and that's why more than 90 percent of the energy produced by incandescent lights is heat, not light.

As a result, the incandescent are inefficient light sources. The heat they produce can drive up your electricity bill in hot weather if your home or office is air-conditioned.

While regular incandescent bulbs last usually between 750 to 1,000 hours before burning out, some long-life bulbs last up to 2,500 hours.

The trade off is that long-life bulbs are less energy efficient and produce less light per watt.

Smart shopper

As we said earlier, your lighting energy bill can be cut nearly in half if you replace 25 percent of your lights in high-use areas with fluorescents.

That will save you money, but you should consider the environmental benefits, too.

A single 20-watt compact fluorescent lamp used in place of a 75-watt incandescent will save about 550 kilowatt-hours over its lifetime.

A compact fluorescent lamp will initially cost more that an incandescent bulb, but because it lasts longer and costs so much less to run, it will prove to be a better bargain over time.

Just keep in mind that light bulbs cost much more to run than to buy in the first place. A 75-cent, 100-watt light bulb will cost you about six dollars in electricity over its 750-hour lifespan.