- for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again)
- Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort.
- If you are heating using gas rather than electricity, it is far more efficient to heat air with energy from the gas boiler than from the electric lighting
What's the energy cost of making a CFL bulb vs. an incandescent? Also since in practice they don't last a lot longer, and are annoyingly dim for the first few minutes, and are considered an hazardous waste when you need to dispose of them, why does it make sense to replace a $0.50 bulb that has none of those issues with a $5.00 bulb that does?
Not sure what you are doing to your CFLs to make them not last longer than incandescent bulbs. I think i've had maybe one CFL break, and that was an early model. LEDs are of course much much more reliable and will most likely outlive you, though personally I don't like this obsession with trying to cram them into traditional light socket formats - I'd like to see something a bit more innovative. They work particularly well as spotlight replacements and ikea have a nice range of innovative designs that don't cram the LEDs too close (which causes heat buildup and reduces efficiency).
CFL is crap, use LED lights. Last 20x longer with 1/20th the energy use. Replacing incandescent with CFL is a wash, replacing them with LED is a no-brainer.
You can get LED lights in a variety of color temperatures. You can even get ones like my Phillips Hue bulbs whose color can be adjusted remotely. They aren't cheap but they're a lot of fun!
For sure. I just meant that if you prefer bluer light, you can get that with CFLs, but they can't give you the 'softer' light that we're used to from incandescents, while LEDs can (if that's your preference).
This is likely mitigated somewhat if you have good natural light sources. The warmer it is, the less you need to run artificial lights (assuming a "normal" sleep schedule.)
I wish whoever downvoted this would indicate what part of my comment they disagree with... I said "If A then B", and then the response was "wrong, because if not A then C".
Of course it saves energy if you don't heat the house, that's obvious. What's less obvious to many is that it saves much less than you think if you live in a house in Northern Sweden, heated with electric heat (which I happened to grow up in).
- for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again) - Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort. - If you are heating using gas rather than electricity, it is far more efficient to heat air with energy from the gas boiler than from the electric lighting