Want to Save Some Money on Your Monthly Electric Bill?
Want to save some money on your monthly electric bill? Change out your standard incandescent light bulbs with more efficient Compact Fluorescent Lamps (known industry wide as CFL’s). It’s a simple and quick way to reduce your lighting costs, but is it “Greener”?
CFL’s are more efficient, and therefore use less power than a standard incandescent light bulb, and they also last a lot longer. On the surface of the issue you would think that reducing power used is definitely “Greener”, but what do you do with the CFL’s when they do finally burn out? If you just throw them away like a standard incandescent lamp, you are not helping the environment at all.
When fluorescent lamps (not just CFL’s but also linear fluorescent lamps) are manufactured a small drop of mercury is put into the lamp, and is vaporized into a gas when the light is turned on. Most of the gasses in these lamps are inert and do no damage to the environment; however mercury is VERY bad for the environment. It seeps into the ground, and can enter the water table. This can lead to mercury in the water we drink, and the food we eat.
So what are we to do? Fortunately it is becoming easier and easier to dispose of these lamps properly. Building Material Retailers like Home Depot and Lowes sell a box that you can put your old CFL’s in and ship them to a company that will do this for a very reasonable charge the (shipping is covered in the cost of the box).
Commercial business owners, discuss these issues with the contractor who replaces your lamps. Documentation of proper disposal is available, and may actually be in the case of a lighting retrofit project in order to receive rebates and compensation.
The more people learn about “Green Technologies” the better off our environment will be, just make sure that you don’t help in one way (saving energy), and hurt in another (polluting).
Jason
Estimator
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- LED Lamps and Luminaries – Will You Save Energy?
- Energy Saving Parking Lot Light Fixture Retrofits
- Lighting Maintenance
- Phaseout of T-12 Ballast Quickly Approaching
