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.

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).

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.

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

How Many Watts?
Most CFL bulbs show the equivalent incandescent wattage on the box, but the number you really need to look for is the Lumens, which is a measurement of the light output of the bulb rather than its electrical power consumption. The Environmental Defense Fund has a great table showing incandescent wattage, CFL wattage and typical lumens values. The table also gives you a rough idea of the cost savings and the reduction in CO2 emissions over the life of the bulb.

If you’re worried about the amount of light that CFLs produce being lower than the equivalent incandescent, try upgrading to the next wattage level (as long as it is still lower than the limit on the light fitting of course). For example, if you’re replacing a 60W incandescent, you could try using a 20-25W CFL instead of the 15-19W one normally recommended.

Do CFL Bulbs Produce Cold Light?
In the past, fluorescent lights produced a cold, bluish-white light that was not very relaxing. The color of the light produced by a bulb is measured in Kelvins (it is technically a temperature). Somewhat counter-intuitively perhaps, the lower the temperature, the warmer the light!

A traditional incandescent light bulb has a color temperature of between 2800K and 3300K, so when hunting for a CFL replacement you should be looking for bulbs with a similar color temperature if you want to keep the warm light you’re used to. The cold, bluish light from older fluorescents is 4000K or above (also called daylight).

Old Fluorescents Flicker, Do CFLs?
The older, long tube fluorescent bulbs used what is called magnetic ballast to keep them lit up. That ran at the frequency of the power source (50-60Hz), which can be detected by most people as a slight flicker. This continuous flickering was also said by some to cause headaches.

The much more modern CFL bulbs use electronic ballast that operates at much higher frequencies (10-40KHz), which are well beyond the capabilities of the human eye to detect. As a result, CFLs produce what looks like a continuous, bright light. There are still a few people who claim that CFLs cause them to experience headaches, but it is unclear whether they are really caused by the bulbs, or by other factors relating to the change.

If you have had headaches when working under older fluorescents, perhaps try changing just one room first and see how it goes.

Can I Get CFL Floodlights, and Other Styles?
Yes, absolutely. You can get CFL bulbs now in most of the same form factors as regular incandescent lights.

I have flood lights, like the one shown on the right, in almost all the ceiling can light fixtures around the house, I use “standard” ones in most of the other lights around the house, and a couple of low wattage candle bulbs in the nightlight fixture that our HOA requires we keep on all night (it is connected to a light sensor to make sure it is only on after dark).

I Have a Dimmer Switch, Can I Still Use CFLs?
Yes, you can switch to CFLs even when your lights are connected to a dimmer switch, but you’ll need to make sure you select CFLs that are compatible with dimmers (they will say so on the box). Not all CFLs can be used with dimmer switches, so make sure you check – if in doubt, ask in the store.

Do They Really Last Longer?
Yes, they really do have a much longer life than incandescent bulbs. The technology in an incandescent bulb doesn’t lend itself to a long life, especially if you switch them on and off a lot. An incandescent bulb makes light by heating a thin filament of metal (by passing electrical current through it). Repeated heating and cooling of that metal filament makes it weaker and eventually it fails.

CFLs do not have any filament to fail. Instead, they have the electronics in the ballast which will eventually fail, but people have had fluorescent lights last much longer than the life expectancy on the box. You might find some fail early, but in general they will last longer than the life expectancy on the box.

Do They Contain Mercury? Is That Safe?
The one down side to the environmental story of CFLs is the fact that they do contain a very small amount of mercury. In normal use they are perfectly safe though as the mercury is sealed inside the bulb. The only times you need to think about it are if you break one, and when one fails.

If you break the glass on a CFL, you might want to open some windows to ventilate the space, and leave the room for a little while to let the small amount of mercury vapour disperse. Obviously, much like any bulb, when disposing of it be careful of the sharp glass. Fluorescent bulbs have a tendency to shatter into small pieces of glass, so be careful to get them all!

When a CFL fails, you will need to dispose of it properly and not just throw it in the garbage. They do count as hazardous waste, which makes it illegal in most places to just throw them out. Many hardware stores will take them back for safe disposal/recycling. If you can’t find one that does, try asking you garbage collection service or city authorities how to dispose of them.

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.

Advantages
The bulbs look like regular incandescent ones. Indeed, the company claims that they source them from existing bulb glass manufacturers. They also claim that the new bulbs generate similar quality light as an incandescent, but do so at a fraction of the power. Given that they are using a phosphor coating on the glass though, the same technology as CFLs employ, I’m not sure how they can claim a difference in the light quality between their bulbs and CFLs (many of which now generate warmer light than their predecessors did).

When compared to CFLs, they are fully dimmable and contain no mercury (a concern for CFLs since they require special handling if broken and must be disposed of carefully). They also start instantly, rather than taking a minute or so to build up to full brightness.

They should also be cheaper than LED technology since they are much simpler to manufacture. CleanTechnica reports the pricing will be around $12/bulb – about the same as dimmable CFLs. That seems too high to me, but it is new technology so one can hope that the price will come down as the volume increases.

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.

Compact Fluorescent Lights

The simplest choice today is compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). These use fluorescent technology, but rather than being long straight tubes, the tubes have been coiled up to look like a glass spring. In some cases, like the flood light in the picture, they are then enclosed in a glass shell so they look almost exactly like the regular incandescent bulbs they replace.

CFLs use around 25% of the power for the same light output, and they should last longer than a regular bulb, but they’re not perfect. From a usage standpoint, perhaps the biggest drawback to them is that they tend to start dim and build up to their full brightness over a minute or two. From an environmental viewpoint, they contain mercury, so they need to be recycled carefully when they do need to be replaced and not just thrown away.

If the bulbs you’re replacing are in a 3-way switch or are controlled by a dimmer switch, then you need to look for CFLs that are compatible with those systems. They are available though in most of the same styles as the regular CFLs.

LED Fixtures and Bulbs

A relative newcomer on the scene, and still much more expensive than CFL bulbs, LED lights offer even lower power consumption at around 5%-10% of an equivalent incandescent. They are cool to the touch and should last 10 times longer than a CFL (or 50-100 times longer than a regular light bulb), so they should last you a lifetime. And that’s a good thing given how expensive they are today.

There are an increasing number of options out there to replace most types of bulbs, they come on at full brightness immediately (faster than an incandescent in fact) and many are compatible with dimmer switches too.

Switching Off

Another simple way to save some energy (and money) is to remember to switch off the lights when you don’t need them. During the day, try to make use of natural light whenever possible. It’s free, better for the planet and arguably even better for you. At night, switch off lights you don’t need. If you have multiple bulbs on a single switch and you don’t need that much light, try taking out some of the bulbs (or replacing them with old, burnt out bulbs so they don’t look like they’re missing).