My furnace is a high-efficiency, it’s 92%.

My spreadsheet is old – that was the prices I was paying for bulbs 3-4 years ago when I did it.

MY experience in MY house is that on average, CFL lifespan is no greater than the cheapest incandescent bulb. Some fixtures seem to eat bulbs, others have gone almost 10 years on the “original” bulbs.

You CAN put a CFL in an enclosed fixture and upside down, but doing so reduces the lifespan because the base (where the electronics are) overheats. The big draw of CFL’s is that the high initial purchase price is offset by the reduced electricity costs over a longer lifespan, so if you reduce the hours down to 500 or less (I have had cfl’s that made it less than 500h in enclosed fixtures hanging upside down) then the CFL cost savings goes totally out the window.)

My house is about 50% incandescent, 50% fluorescent (CFL and plain old tubes.) We were higher, but some fixtures aren’t compatible – dimmers, enclosures, or just plain goofy looking when converted to CFL.

I don’t hate CFL (I use them too) I just find that they’re no magic bullet for saving (me) money – especially in the house I own. As I said in my initial post, I just do what my Dad used to nag me to do when I was a kid – I shut the darn lights off when I leave the room. :)

GE’s website says:
“Can I use a CFL in any position?
Yes, GE screwbase CFL bulbs can be used in any operating position unless there is text printed on the lamp or packaging that indicates a required operating position.

Enclosed fixtures are usually fine too with certain exceptions.

“Can I use a compact fluorescent light bulb in an enclosed light fixture?
Compact fluorescent light bulbs may generally be used in enclosed fixtures as long as the enclosed fixture is not recessed. Totally enclosed recessed fixtures (for example, a ceiling can light with a cover over the bulb) create temperatures that are too high to allow the use of a compact fluorescent bulb.”

Your electricity is far below US average and your gas is well above average compared to US national. So for you the CFL’s aren’t as great in the winter since your electricity is so cheap and your gas is pricey.

But what about summer? You don’t live above the Arctic circle right? In the summer you’d have no heat benefit from the incandescent so for those months you’d be looking at just 13W versus 60W of electricity.

Electricity is 11¢ average and gas would be $11.21 / 1000 cubic feet ~= 32¢ cubic meter

Plus you seem to be using a cost of 30¢ for an incandescent and $1.25 for CFL and assuming 1440 hours. Incandescents last half that long and CFL’s last about 5 times as long. So for 1440 yours you’d be looking at 60¢ for incandescent and 25¢ for CFL.

BTW, your gas furnace isn’t 100% efficient so you’d have to take that into account too, which would actually raise the cost for the CFLs. I’d assume an 80% efficient gas furnace.

Using national averages and assuming you heat with 80% efficient gas half the time then it would be like $3.63 for the CFL and $10.10 for the incandescent over 1440 hours total use.

where I live, electricity is 6.3 cents/kwh
natural gas (what I heat my house with) is 50.51 cents/cubic meter

1kwh=3413btw
1cubic meter of natural gas is 35375 btu

I get $1.84 for 100kbtu electricty and $1.43 for 100kbtu of natural gas.

I then did the math on energy consumption for 1440 hours of 13w cfl electricity + 47w of natural gas vs 60w incandescent.

at 30 cents for a regular bulb and $1.25 for a cfl, it worked out to $5.74 total cost for incandescent and $5.72 for cfl.

This is winter only, this would obviously be WAY the other way if I lived in Arizona.

Also, for TCO purposes, you have to factor in replacing light fixtures if your house is like mine, where every fixture hangs the bulb upside down – CFL’s don’t like those, or it’s fully enclosed (CFL’s also don’t like those.)

My house is about 1/3 CFL, 1/3 regular, and 1/3 “specialty” bulbs – my wife likes her fancy light fixtures that take all special bulbs. I just roll my eyes and install them.

Mercury – As was mentioned previously, CFL bulbs contain only a small amount of mercury; comparable to that in a watch battery. They are certainly nothing to be feared. I’m sure they do break from time to time, but I’ve yet to see it happen. I’m not sure what it takes to break one, but I know they are much harder to break than an incandescent bulb.

Brightness – Its so strange that we think of the brightness of a bulb in terms of watts or incandescent watt equivalent. Its important to understand what the ratings on a bulb mean when purchasing it. If you try a bulb that isn’t bright enough for a particular use just move it to another area and replace it with a higher output bulb. A 100 watt incandescent bulb has an output of 1750 lumens, while a 23 watt CFL bulb has an output of around 1500 lumens (depending on the bulb). The 23 watt CFL is often marketed as a 100 watt replacement, but that isn’t really accurate. The 23 watt CFL is not going to be as bright, because the output is approximately 15% less. The solution, buy a 27 watt CFL with an output of 1800+ lumens.

Color – The color of the light is another of these issues that can be solved by understanding the color (temperature) of light and buying bulbs that match the color you prefer.

Dimming – We have a lamp that has 3 settings and use a 3-way CFL bulb in it with no problems. We also used a regular CFL bulb in a fixture that had a dimmer. We never noticed any problems there either.

Heating – I wonder if a study has been done regarding the effectiveness of using incandescent bulbs in the winter instead of more energy efficient bulbs because of their ability to produce heat. While a bulb that generates heat is certainly going to have a small impact on heating bills, is it enough to offset the additional energy used by the bulb? As mentioned earlier, lights may not be on when you need the heat the most. Also, for ceiling mounted lights you’re putting the excess heat where its least needed in most cases.

Having said all of that, there are certainly situations where CFL bulbs are not a good solution. That was always true for incandescent bulbs as well. I’m hoping that, if nothing else, the CFL discussion raises awareness about choosing appropriate lighting for each task.

I went to Cuba in 2008 (I’m from Canada, remember, so it’s ok) and one thing I noticed down there was that EVERYTHING was a CFL.

In a country that has issues delivering enough power to all citizens, and is nice and warm, mass conversion to CFL’s probably saved them from having to build a new power plant and/or having rolling blackouts.

CFL’s are not full of toxic waste requiring hazmat teams. You should handle them property if they break and dispose of them properly but they’re really no worse or inconvenient then any of the numerous batteries in your home or the bottle of bleach in your laundry room. If you’re actually worried about toxins and the environment then you should be more concerned with the mercury that coal plants pump into our atmosphere. You get more mercury emissions from coal plants when using incandescents than you do with CFLs.

CFL’s are not a good way to heat your home. In the winter the energy wasted in heat isn’t really wasted since it offsets your heating bill. This is true. However electricity used in light bulbs is a pretty inefficient way to heat your home. Thats why most homes in colder climates don’t rely on electric heat. Plus any incandescent bulb worsens the situation in any warm climate area where you use AC during the summer. Nationally we spend about as much cooling our homes as heating them. Most people living in cold climates don’t heat their homes all year so that impact is generally only in the winter months. You’re still wasting the energy in the summer, autumn and spring. But this is still a valid point and if you live in northern Canada then CFLs will save you much less than if you live in Arizona.

I agree the light from flourescents can be harsher than an incandescent. THe light from CFL’s varies. You can get CFLs with different lights. Some are more yellow and some are more bluish. If you get the better CFL then their light is almost indistinguishable from an incandescent. If you get a crappy CFL then the light looks awful. THe light spectrum has gotten a lot better in the past 10 years. So if you’re used to old flourescents then things have changed. Theres a picture on the wiki page for CFL’s that shows side by side of several bulbs and illustrates how a good looking CFL light compares to incandescent.

CFL’s do really last many years. Of course theres exceptions. If you bought cheap crappy CFLs of low quality manufacture then they may burn out fast. If you use CFL’s in a room whre you frequently turn the light on and off then it will die quicker. Theres always a ‘bad apple’ in any bunch and random CFLs will die faster than normal. I replaced my whole home with CFL lights over 10 years ago and the vast majority of them are still working. I’m sure you remember buying an incandescent bulb to only replace the same bulb a couple months later. I’m sure you know if you buy the cheapest incandescent bulb then they will be lower quality. I’m sure you know that turning incandescent bulbs on and off regularly will result in more frequent failures.

There’s a limited number of places they don’t work (my garage door opener is one), but I even recently replaced the light in my refrigerator with one. The “quality of lighting” difference to me is not worth the 4x energy cost, and humans quickly adapt to different environments. I honestly could not identify the type of lighting if you put me in identical rooms with CFL vs Incandescent bulbs but didn’t let me see the lighting fixtures.
(Deruiter – mercury, while not particularly healthy, is not a carcinogen)

1 – Incandescent bulbs that are not used much should never be replaced with CFLs or LEDs until they burn out. If a lightbulb has an expected life of 1,000 hours, but is only on 2-3 hours a week, it will last for about 10 years. That it burns more electricity during those few hours than another variety is not a good reason to replace it.

2. – The real value is in replacing the bulbs that are on long and often. I replaced my reading lamp and my kitchen floods with CFLs, since those are on for hours every day, but closet, laundry, basement, bedroom, and others will be replaced only when they burn out, which may be years.

My understanding is that incandescents are NOT wasteful indoors in cold climates during the winter. The “extra” energy they use is heat energy that simply reduces the need for other heating. If I had enought extra incandescents on hand, I’d swap them out in the cold months even in the high-use fixtures where I use CFLs usually.

Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing.

#13 Jessica: You mentioned that the bulbs you tried were in a ceiling fan, but they were not enclosed. Was the design such that the bulbs were vented at the top? Since heat rises, if the a CFL bulb is surrounded by a glass fixture that opens downward, but is not vented at the top, the bulb can still overheat.

I actually had an electrician recommend I replace a fixture outside for this very reason (the fixture opened downward, but did not have ventilation at the top) if I wanted to use CFL bulbs in it. He told me if I used CFL bulbs in the fixture, they would probably burn out much faster than normal, despite the fact that it was open on the bottom.