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Being the environmentally conscious sort of people that we are, during the course of this past week, VanRamblings installed a low flow shower head in the bathroom, and visited our local Home Hardware to purchase a surfeit of compact fluorescents, this time for the living room, bathroom, bedroom, dining room and kitchen. All and all, we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Seems, though, that with Canada banning incandescent bulbs by 2012 — in Ontario alone, replacing the 87 million incandescent bulbs in that province with more efficient bulbs will save six million megawatt hours every year, enough to power 600,000 homes — the hunt is on for an alternative, other than compact fluorescents, to the traditional incandescent bulb.
The knocks on compact fluorescents are few, but for some significant. Initially, concern was expressed about the tube design of CFs, but now that you can purchase a CF in the traditional incandescent bulb shape, for any room in the house, that concern would appear to have been dealt with. For some, the fact that CFs take awhile to “warm up”, that the lights can’t be placed on a dimmer, and many consumers believe the light seems a little harsh and unforgiving (VanRamblings believes we’re still gorgeous, though, when we look in our mirrors) are barriers to switching to more efficient lighting. Is there an alternative to compact fluorescents, then?
Seems that there is, or soon will be. In this Associated Press story, destined to be the next big thing in the lighting market, we will see the emergence of the LED “bulb”. According to the AP story, at the recent Lightfair Trade Show, in New York, the Dallas-based Lighting Science Group Corp. showed an LED “bulb” that screws into a standard medium-sized socket, producing a warm light equivalent to that of a 25-watt incandescent bulb, consuming just 5.8 watts. Although the bulb currently costs $50 — let’s face it, kinda pricey when we can purchase a 4-pack of standard bulbs for only a couple of dollars at our local grocery store — word out of New York was that “by the middle of next year, they’ll be priced for consumers.”
