Green is Good?

The Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

For part 2 of our trip through the light bulb, we move to the energy efficient, environmentally friendly, slightly expensive, and a little ugly, Compact Fluorescent Lamp.

But first, lets take a look at fluorescents. A fluorescent bulb is a vacuum sealed glass tube filled with mercury vapor. When an electrical current is passed through, the atoms in the mercury vapor enter an excited state (no joke. check with profgoldfinch.blogspot.com if you want to know more). The excited mercury atoms create a substance called phosphor which is what we see as visible light.

One of the major features of these bulbs is the need for a ballast. A ballast regulates and limits the amount of current in an electrical circuit. These ballasts are used when a load, a circuit attached to a source of electrical power, cannot regulate its own consumption of energy. In the case of these lights, if there were no ballast, a light would continue to consume power until it ultimately destroyed itself. The fluorescent lights that we use in lamps are called Integrated Fluorescent as they carry their ballast as part of the bulb assembly. Non-integrated units are ones that have a ballast installed separately from the bulb. These are the most common form of fluorescent seen in office or warehouse ceilings.

Back to the bulb. The major advantage to the CFL over incandescent lights is the amount of energy consumed by each. I'm sure you've seen written at the top of your light bulb, "60 Watt" or "100 watt". So Watts the deal with Watts? (you see the pun there? lol) A watt is a unit used to describe power. With the naked eye, we know that a 40W bulb is very dim while a 150W bulb is very bright. What you don't realize, is those ratings are telling you how much power is being used to reach that light. A 100w incandescent light uses almost 5 times the amount of power a CFL uses. So where you look for a 100w light bulb, you would now look for a 20w CFL.

When around 9% of power used in a common household is attributed to lighting, why wouldn't everyone be using this? Well, the cost of a CFL are anywhere from 3 to 10 times more than incandescents. But, according to US News and World, "A household that invested $90 in changing 30 fixtures to CFLs would save $440 to $1,500 over the five-year life of the bulbs, depending on your cost of electricity. Look at your utility bill and imagine a 12% discount to estimate the savings."

It's really not up to you to decide as the decision has already been made for you. And the decision is, believe it or not, to go green. As of december of 2007, congress passed an energy bill that will remove the beloved incandescent light bulb off of the market. America is not the first country to do this. Australia has issued an outright ban of incandescent bulbs by 2010. This is just one of the many innovations that I will whole-heartedly back as a wonderful step foreward into the future.

Coming up next, we conclude our journey through lighting with the most energy effecient bulb of them all....The LED!!!

Leave comments, ask questions, LEARN!!!

Light up the World

The Incandescent Light bulb

As you may, or may not know, the light bulb was NOT invented by Thomas Edison. The first incandescent light was created in 1802 by Humphry Davy. He had what was considered the most powerful battery in the world at the time. He passed an electrical current through a strip of platinum which began to glow. 75 years later, Edison used a carbon based filament and began selling it commercially.

An incandescent bulb consists of a filament of tungsten wire housed in glass. As an electrical current is passed through the filament, the filament begins to heat up. This is due to the fact that the filament provides resistance to the current that is passed through it. Think of it as a sponge being lodged in a pipe. While water will still run through the pipe and out the other end, a good amount of it will be held up in the sponge. In the case of the light bulb, that extra energy that is held up produces heat.

Now lets take it a step further. The filament is considered a Black Body which is an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that is supplied to it. At room temperature, Black Body objects emit mostly infrared light, which is light that cannot be seen with the naked eye. As a Black Body object begins to heat pass 100 degrees C, the object will start to emit visible light from red, orange, yellow, white, and eventually blue light before becoming ultraviolet.

After explaining all of that, here's why you wasted your time. Beginning January of this year, companies have stopped production of the incandescent light bulb in favor of the newer, more energy-efficient, and often more expensive fluorescent bulbs. Which will be the topic of our next post.

Please tell me what you think of the new blog. Tell me if everything was explained enough or if it was just confusing. Most importantly, let me know if anything was incorrect. Leave comments, ask questions, LEARN!