Using fluorescent light bulbs in your home?
 

Is it sensible to use fluorescent light bulbs in homes in colder climates, that use automated heating systems?

Traditional light bulbs are inefficient in producing light and lose energy in the form of heat. Fluorescent light bulbs are more effient and produce less heat as a by-product, but wouldn't all savings in energy efficiency be cancelled out by the need for your heater to work harder?

Discuss.

Hopefully the heaters in your home are more effecient than the by-product of a lightbulb.

If anything, the question of having to cool a house to make up for excess bulb heat is a bigger issue.

Incandescent lighting is not an efficient heat source, particularly compared to gas heating in a forced-air heating system, but even when comparing to electric heat. (Those of us gay boys who had Easy Bake ovens as kids know all about that, they used 60 watt bulbs to cook the food and took absolutely forever.)

Compact fluorescent lighting typically uses about 1/5 of the power that incandescent lighting uses. So if you had, for example, 15 100 watt incandescent bulbs, you could replace them with 15 compact fluorescents, and have 1200 watts left over to use for heat. My guess is you would get a LOT more heat from 15 compact fluorescents and a 900 watt electric heater going full blast (still saving 300 watts/hour) than you'd get with just 15 incandescent lamps.

Hope that helps.

I replaced all the incandescent bulbs during winter a while back and I noticed no increase in the gas bill -- I did notice around a $100 savings per month in electric, however, from the fluorescent bulbs.

We have the fluorescent as well, and they have dropped the electric bill.

The funny thing I just heard about electric bills, is if you want to educe the bill, unplug the washer and dryer when not in use.

Well I don't completely agree chip.

In the case of ligt bulbs (incandescent or fluorescent):

Electrical energy = light + heat

I think it's irrelevant how efficient light bulbs are at producing heat, since the only two things they produce are light and heat. A candescent light bulb's inefficiency in producing light should be made up by its efficiency in producing heat. The total caloric energy of the air contained in a room to keep it at a certain temperature will stay the same, regardless of what is the source of heat (a heater as opposed to a light bulb or a combination of the two). When the bulb produces less light and more heat, the heater will have to produce less to add to the caloric energy of the air, equivalent to the amount of joules per second the light bulb loses in heat.

I'm not even taking into equation that, in a room without windows, all light will eventually be converted to caloric energy.

Or am I missing something?

Of course the merits of using fluorescent light bulbs are evident in hotter climates where an internal environment needs to be cooled.

And chip, the reason it took forever for food to cook in your Easy Bake oven is that it had windows and the rate at which caloric/light energy is lost through the window and the sides of the oven is greater than or equal to the rate at which this energy is produced by those 60W bulbs :winkwink:

i want to switch my bulbs to fluorescent but have been reluctant to do so because from my experience in the past with the they don't give off the same kind of light as incandesent. for example people in offices lit with fluorescent lights complaining of headaches.