Everybody knows that to reduce energy usage at home we should be switching to compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). At the same time, most people are now aware that these bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, a metal that is best not released into the environment, especially inside a home. So what is a planet-friendly consumer to do?

Safer CFL
One option is a CFL made with safer materials; in the case of the ClearLite ArmorLite CFLs that would be amalgam, a safer type of mercury. Even better, they’re also wrapped in a silicone shell that keeps them sealed in the event that the glass should be broken.

LED
Even better than CFL is a newer alternative lighting technology: LED lighting, like the Pharox III, a dimmable 6 watt replacement for 60 watt incandescent bulbs. OK, nothing new about LEDs; they’ve been showing up as the little red, green, amber and more recently blue indicator lights in your electronics for literally decades now. More recently, they’ve gone bright white and turned up in flashlights (torches) and even cars and traffic lights. But now you can also get them in light bulb form factors for use at home.

Currently, they’re even more expensive than CFL technology, but the prices are coming down. And they should last longer than CFL bulbs and don’t have any mercury in them.

While walking through Venice, we noticed an unusual looking public bench being installed. Looking somewhat out of place amongst the very old buildings, this bench has a number of metal stalks coming out from its center and reaching towards the sky. On the top of each of these stalks is installed a small solar panel.

I have no idea what these solar panels are going to be used to power. If I had to guess, I would say that there are batteries under the seating and the power will be used to provide lighting after dark. The lower one of the two collectors in the close-up shot looks like it might have a light fitting there. And if it is light the rest of the Venetian public lighting we saw, it will be using CFL, or perhaps another low power technology (perhaps LEDs).

Venice is famous for many things, gondoliers, glass, its canals and architecture, but included in that list are its street lamps.

Take a look at the photo to the right, and you will see a photo of one of those famous lamps, in the area of St Mark’s square, and the bulbs inside each of those pink lamps are compact fluorescents. The same was true for most of the street lighting we saw around the city. I haven’t seen any other city with so many CFL bulbs in use for its street lighting.

So, you’ve heard the buzz about switching to CFL to reduce your energy consumption, and in doing so help the environment and save you some money on your electricity bill. You might even have seen some of the funny coiled bulbs in stores.

But how do you know which ones to get to replace your existing incandescent bulbs?

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Lighting company Vu1 (formerly Telegen) announced a new technology for low power lighting this week: Electron Stimulated Luminescence™. The new technology is remarkably similar in principle to the old cathode ray tube TVs. The bulb generates a stream of electrons that excite a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb’s glass. That has the effect of making the entire surface of the bulb glow.

Incandescent bulbs run current through a filament, heating it to produce. CFLs send current through mercury vapour to generate UV light which excites the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. LEDs use special semiconductors which emit light when excited electrically. Vu1′s technology does away with the filament (which is the achilles heel of the incandescent bulb, resulting in the eventual failure of the bulb when all the heating and cooling causes the filament to break), which should improve the lifetime.

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Anchorage, Alaska is joining the growing list of towns switching some of their street lighting to energy efficient LED lamps by joining the LED City program. The city will be converting about a quarter of its street lights to LED lamps at a cost of $2.2M. The savings from this investment could be as much as $360,000 per year.

The LED City program was started by Cree, a US-based manufacturer of LED components in 2007. They have a number of cities around the world already signed up for the program, including Raleigh, NC; Ann Arbor, MI, Austin, TX; Toronto, Ontario; Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy.

A simple change that everybody can make around their house is to change some of those old incandescent light bulbs into new, energy efficient ones. That not only helps the planet, but it will reduce the household electricity bill too. But how much difference does it make, and which option should I choose?

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