How Much Do Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Really Cost?
Published on - October 29th, 2007 (Modified on - October 31st, 2007) (by J.D. Roth) Valerie writes: “Someone in our family recently suggested that compact fluourescents weren’t worth it due to their high initial cost compared to incandescent light bulbs. We’ve switched all our lights to CFL, so my husband looked into the actual costs. I thought you might like the results” In this guest post, she lays out the numbers.
It makes good economic sense to switch from Incandescents to compact fluorescents (CFLs) — it’s not just a bunch of hype. Let me use our very conservative electrical bill to demonstrate how making the switch can save you money.
Our total consumption for July and August was 1195 kilowatt hours (kWh). This equates to 19 kWh/Day — far below the U.S. average of 29 kWh/Day. Part of this low consumption is because we’ve already replaced most of our incandescents with CFLs. But let’s say we haven’t, and assume that our electrical bill with incandescents is the same as it is now.
According to the American Lighting Association, lights account for 25 percent of a homeowner’s electric bill. But let’s assume they’re exaggerating, and put this to 20 percent.
Since we don’t use a lot of electricity in our household, 98% of all our electricity is charged at the lowest rate: $0.053 per kWh. About two percent is charged at $0.062 per kWh. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll just assume we get all of our electricity at the lowest rate.
Here’s the math:
- 20% of our total electricity consumption for 2 months: 1195 * 20% = 229 kWh for lighting
- 229 kWh charged at $0.053: 229 * $0.053 = $12.67 for lighting
- In our area, we also have the delivery, regulatory and debt retirement charges totaling $0.038 per kWh: 229 * $0.038 = $7.74 for lighting
If instead of using 60-watt incandescent bulbs we use 13-watt CFLs, we’ll be using 21.67% as much energy (13 watts divided by 60 watts is 0.2167). Applying this fraction to the cost of lighting, we now pay $2.75/month instead of $12.67, which saves us $9.92. Applying the other miscellaneous charges, we now pay $1.68 instead of $7.74, saving us $6.06. Using these numbers, we’re saving $15.98 per billing period.
It’s true that CFLs cost a lot more than incandescents, but their prices are dropping every day. Also, you can always get them on sale and/or use special coupons to get discounts. We replaced most of our incandescents in our house for around $85. (J.D.’s note: When we bought this house, we had a free home energy audit from Energy Trust of Oregon. They gave us six or seven CFLs for free!)
Even if, for the sake of illustration, we put the cost of incandescents at $0, CFLs will pay themselves off in just a few months. It’s been over a year now since we installed ours, and none have burned out. CFLs are rated for about seven years, which means that for the next six years, they’re saving us money. Even after stacking the cards against us, with the low electricity bill, paying the lowest rate, and assuming incandescents cost nothing, CFLs make sense.
Given that the bulbs should last seven years, we can expect to save at least $575.28, which isn’t bad for a couple of hours of work.
Michael Bluejay has an extensive page describing how to save electricity on lighting. Also, I sometimes see people worry at other sites that CFLs are not safe. Turns out this is mostly an urban myth.) Photo courtesy David Hobby of Strobist.
Addendum: One commenter pointed to this video that explains CFLs in plain English. Though CFLs contain less only 1% of the mercury found in the average home thermometer, they must be disposed of safely. For the best information about how to do this, contact your local solid waste department. You can take CFLs to any IKEA store to dispose of them. In the U.S., you can learn more about disposing CFLs at the EPA’s bulb-recycling web site.
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[...] excellent blog about how much we’re saving per billing period on our electricity bill. http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/10/29/how-much-do-compact-fluorescent-bulbs-really-cost/ It comes out to about $16 per bill when CFL’s are used. That’s huge [...]
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I hate the CFL’s. The light is awful and I feel like living under the ground. Beautiful light, clean air and good-tasting water can provide so much comfort, but somehow people want to throw that away for the cost of eating out one night.
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Do CFLs provide the warm yellow glow provided by incandescent light bulbs? That’s the only way My Better Half will convert to using CFLs. If all we get is a cool white glare, then we will wait for a tax break until replacing our light bulbs.
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Chinese toys are cheaper than American toys. But they contian toxic lead. CFL’s are also from China and save us money when compared to American-made incandescent bulbs. However, CFL’s contain toxic mercury which is also not so good for our kids. So why are toxic Chinese CFL’s OK while toxic Chinese toys are not OK?
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Sometimes I feel like I and my wife are the only ones who don’t understand this big push for CFLs.
The idea is great, and we would love to replace our normal bulbs with ‘em, but for one problem… they just don’t work.
We’ve bought various cfls over the years, many claiming to match or exceed the 100w lumens of a normal bulb… Put one in our living room lamp, and sitting in the chair right next to the lamp, you don’t have enough light to read a newspaper with.
Over and over again we did that same experiment and over and over again we were met with disapointment… Now we hear that the govmnt is going ahead with plans to phase out normal bulbs… So that means we’ll need 4 times (or more) as many light sources in the room to get the same lumens we have now… Any energy savings will be nulled out by the increase in number of lights being used. This is nuts!
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For those of you who would like to save a few bucks by using CFL’s, here’s a short critique of the bogus argument that there will be a reduction in toxic mercury into the environment with CFL’s due to the energy reduction from coal plants.
(1) The old Government figures most often cited are incorrect for several reasons. The basic one is that they assume 100% of electricity in the US is from coal plants. Not true. 50% of electricity does not come from coal plants in the US and coal plants are now being mandated to reduce their mercury emissions by between 70% and 90% over the next several years. The most recent calculations from the DOE indicate that, on the average, CFL’s are worse than incandescent bulbs in terms of mercury.
(2) Places like California produce little energy from coal plants, so any CFL energy reductions will not cut much mercury there.
(3) The 5mg of mercury generally claimed for CFL’s is largely a goal and not the current reality which is 300% to 600% higher, depending on the manufacturer.
(4) CFL’s are made in China with energy from mostly very dirty coal plants that emit much more mercury than US coal plants. It likely takes the equivalent of at least 25% of the CFL’s energy savings to produce them there, plus the extra energy for the packaging and shipping compared to incandescent bulbs. Oh, since fuel and power in China emit twice as much CO2 as in the US, on average, there goes up to half the CO2 savings. And since places like California are twice as clean in terms of CO2 as the rest of the US, there may be no CO2 savings realized from CFL’s in many states.
(5) CFL’s made in China spill as much mercury into the environment as goes into the CFL’s.
(6) CFL’s are delivered here on ships using bunker oil, the worst mercury and CO2 producer of the fuel oils. Incandescent bulbs are still almost all made in the US.
(7) There is no recycling program in place or planned that could handle the number of CFL’s proposed. Only 2% of CFL’s are recycled. And after many years, even the industrial recycling programs only handle about 25% of the mercury from fluorescent lights.
(8) It is likely that if any major recycling program is set up, the CFL’s will be shipped back to China for reprocessing.
Thus, a massive CFL program will put a massive amount of additional toxic mercury into the environment and very likely into our kid’s bodies. And the EPA says that a sixth of them already have too much mercury in them. So, if you don’t have kids, don’t expect to have kids and don’t care about other people’s kids, CFL’s maybe for you.
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CFLs will eventually be replaced with LEDs that use even less energy and are virtually mercury free. Wait a year or two. If you live in a cold climate (like I do) the cost of electricty at 0.10/kw-hr is equivalent to heating oil at 3.28 per gallon. My most recent load of oil cost 3.48! It is cheaper to leave the incandescent lights on! (unless they are in recessed cans in the ceiling- then you are wasting the heat) We are all using electric blankets now.
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Read how my family is tracking the impact of ‘going green’ on our electric, gas, and water bill. Read Jan 6th’s blog, ‘Fluorescent vs. LED Comparison: Flood Lights and Buyer’s Regret’.
My goal is to find least expensive options for transforming my family’s consumption patterns while maintaining or improving our standard of living. Watch us compare our monthly 2007 and 2008 electric, water and gas bills.
Find out for yourself from our real-life experiences.
peace,
jlw
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One real advantage to me is that we have a lot of younger kids, and I could spend all my time chasing after them, turning off the lights they always leave on, but knowing we are wasting only 1/4th of the energy, and that the bulbs won’t be burning out every 2 weeks, makes my life a lot more stress free.
Also you get more warning (usually) of a burn-out, so you can change the bulb (as infrequently as it is) at your convenience, instead of a disaster (“dad! my light doesn’t work, I need it fixed now!”).
Finally, if you have enclosed light fixtures, I find that putting incandescents, even at the rated wattage, can fairly quickly start to cause problems with the plastic bulb holders in the fixture due to heat buildup, which can mean anything from a fire hazard to having to replace the fixture. Obviously using 1/4th the wattage, with much less heat, means this isn’t a problem.
Overall, with the cost going down, the reliability going up, the warm up period mostly disappearing, and a huge variety of sizes, shapes, wattages, and colors, CFLs can work for most people and applications.
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A few more tidbits for those of you who want to save a buck by using CFL’s:
CFL’s are largely made in China. Incandescent bulbs are mostly made here. Buy a CFL and help send lots more money and thousands of jobs to China.
Shifting a KWH of production from here to there results in much greater pollution there and here from their very dirty coal power plants; over 2,500% in SO2, over 1,300% in mercury, about 400% in the Nitrogen Oxides, and over 40% in CO2 (nearly 100% based on some estimates).
Even more pollution comes from their mining for the mercury, processing it, building new plants to make the CFL’s, shipping the CFL’s here using bunker oil which is 1,000 times dirtier than regular fuel oil, etc.
The major increase in CFL production in China will result in the building of new very dirty coal power plants there. In almost no case will the supposed savings in energy use with CFL’s forestall the building of new power plants here since residential lighting usage is most always at off-peak hours.
You pay for the lower-priced or free CFL’s in your taxes or as part of your utility bill. There is no free lunch with these things. If they are really cheap and unsubsidized CFL’s, you better beware. As Philips Lighting of China warned in a May 2005 internal technical memo in reference to mercury and lifecycle cost; “…it’s worse to use such cheap ‘energy saving’ lamps to replace incandescent lamps. Also it’s more expensive…” This is in reference to the use of cheap CFL’s even in China with its mostly very dirty coal power generation.
If the Ikea recycling program is the model, we are in real trouble. Check around at their stores. About two-thirds of the bulbs in the CFL bins are incandescent lights and the bins are not sealed. Mercury vapor from broken CFL’s gets out. Only a small percent of the CFL’s they sell are recycled.
In states like California and cities like Seattle, CFL’s are legally hazardous waste. It is illegal to throw them out unless they are treated as hazardous waste. Properly disposing of them is a bit of a hassle at best and near impossible at worst. Last I checked, you have to call and make an appointment to drop-off your CFL’s at the hazardous waste site in Seattle.
What the hell. Who cares? You might still save a buck. You sure aren’t going to save the world or our kids.
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A couple of little tidbits….
CFL’s are great! I love them!
However, I do seem to have an awful lot of burnouts. I think that is due to my current house’s wiring….regular bulbs burn out even quicker. Luckily, we are moving next month.
Second thing….pay close attention to the fixture you are placing it in. Before I knew better, I used to put a CFL in one of the small overhead light fixtures that had a fulling enclosed, small glass shade. To say the least, we were replacing the CFL every two months.
In our new house, I have 6 similar but slightly larger fixtures in storage areas (still fully enclosed), right now I am using incandescent bulbs, but will be changing them out to LED bulbs one at a time (still pretty expensive at $50 a bulb….but for 10-15+ years of use without need to change out…it is worth it, not to mention way lower wattage than even CFL’s)
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Hey I bought 50 CFL on amazone.com for 50 dollars three months ago. Replaced all 40 bulbs in house and bill went from $140 to $70 a month
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Derek, Do you live in a hot climate and use air conditioning now? If not, I suggest you look elsewhere for the cause that reduction. CFLs draw 25% of the power of an equivalent incandescent. For you to save $70 from a $140 bill (using 6th grade algebra here) you spent $93 per month on lighting and $47 for other. Where I live, electricity costs $0.10 per kwhr. Assuming your price is the same, that means you used 930 kwhrs on lighting per month! 31 kwhrs per day. That is 16 60 watt bulbs burning 24 hours a day!
Only turn on the lights when you need them and you’ll save a pile. Keep your old bulbs.
Where I live, heating oil is mere expensive than electricity per BTU delivered. It is cheaper to leave the lights on than have my furnace run. Rochester NY
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[...] We’ve been focusing on reducing our energy bill lately. For example, my husband has been looking into switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. [...]
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[...] your local power company giving them away. My first CFLs were from a giveaway at a local festival. Here’s a good post from Get Rich Slowly about the cost and cost savings of CFL bulbs. Also, here’s one sponsored by a power company that has some good [...]
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I’d like to point out that LEDs are now the preferred energy saving light source. They use a fraction of the energy that CFCs do, and they radiate very little heat -so you don’t fight your air conditioning with your lights. My old CFCs had a surface temperature of 230°, my new LEDs get up to about 108°.
I recently replaced almost every bulb in my home with CREE LEDs using between 3 and 12 watts of electricity each. The LEDs aren’t glass bulbs so they don’t break, and they do not contain mercury.
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someone said “probably 3 or 5 have burned out way before the 7 year life statement.”
well, they are solid state devices, and most are designed to be used in open fixtures so they can stay cool (high heat loosens the solder connections on many circuit boards, killing the device.
If they are in enclosed fixtures, it will shorten their lives.
I write the date of purchase on them w/ a marker, and a code, and write the same code on a receipt and file it. If it dies before the warranty, I can get a replacement for free.
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re: the glass cracking on the CFLs-
don’t turn them ever by the glass, it’s fragile. turn them only by their bases.
re: the mercury in the bulbs:
cleanup procedures are still evolving. Check out recent (2008) articles on it, I won’t go into it here. basically, air the room. Never vacuum, instead uses adhesive tape to pick up residue. Put the shards in a glass jar and seal it. The mercury will seep through plastico ordinary plastic. Mark the glass as as Hazardous waste.
if you’ve got kids or rambunctious pets, consider not putting them in table lamps that can get knocked over.
Currently, sorbent materials are being developed and marketed which will neutralize (bind up) the mercury from lamp spills. They are not on the market yet, though.
re: the energy spent to start them up–
these days it is negligible. So turn them off every time you leave the room if you want, you’re not wasting energy by starting them up again. It takes between 2 and 10 seconds of their level running energy for them to start up.
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Autistic,
As Jeffeb3 Says earlier on,
2) “new CFLs don’t flicker. If you aren’t judging your bias on a recent CFL, then don’t talk to me about it.”
(Well, actually, technically, they do flicker. But they do it 20,000 times per second. CFLs operate in the 20,000 Hz range.)
With all due respect I have serious doubts that any human, Autistic or not, can detect flickering at the rate of 20,000 cycles PER SECOND. I think you are associating the negative quality of flickering (from older style fluorescents) with the CFLs. It ain’t happening. If it is, maybe we can do a Discovery network program about it.
If you are for real, and autistic, and can detect that, then I apologize. Otherwise, forget it.
Sorry.
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With all these unresolved problems and potential hassles, not to mention an essentially non-existent nationwide recycling program, seems these things are not yet ready for primetime. You want BILLIONS of them out there? You must be kidding.
They also don’t seem to fit Obama’s theme of keeping jobs in America since almost all CFL’s are imported from China while most incandescent bulbs are still made here.
Oh, speaking of CFL’s from China, way more Mercury is lost to the environment in their production there and long range shipping here than goes into the CFL’s. This means that even if there is an impossible 100% recycling program, way more toxic Mercury will get into the environment and into kids than could be saved from power plant reductions.
By the way, I did see a medical show on CNN several months ago that was based on British Medical Association studies indicating a link between CFL’s and migraines, etc.
Maybe we should just wait the few years for LED’s to make it to primetime.
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I find CFL’s VERY expensive since a third of them have gone bad on me out of a six pack within a few months! They weren’t used in a closed enclosure either.
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@yeahbut
Then you’re buying garbage bulbs, handling them improperly, or have electrical problems in your house.
I don’t think I’ve replaced a CFL yet in my house (I have at least 4 installed), have lived there nearly 3 years (2 of them were there before we moved in), and each one gets daily usage. One of them is even outdoors and has operated in temperatures from 0F to 90F.
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Hey Andy,
The electrical problems seem to go away as soon as the bulb is changed out. I always take a rag to them after installing to get my oily prints off of them. They are GE bulbs made in China.
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I’d wager that incandescents are a lot less sensitive to line problems than CFL are.
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I see from Wikipedia that some CFL’s are designed to run base down only. The electronics in the ballast apparently can’t stand up to the heat base up.
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Funny, all my CFLs are mounted base-up.
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Andy do you have shades on them or do they get good air circulation?
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All are in fixtures. 3 have glass globes/shrouds around them (open at the bottom), 2 of which are very close. The other was inside a “sealed” globe (outdoor fixture) with zero circulation until last week; now it’s a lantern style fixture.
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I assume they are the ‘hot’ type rather than the instant on cooler bulbs. What brand?
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Haven’t been able to check them all, but at least a couple of them are Sylvania.
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I did some research recently into what private consumers do with their electricity. Both in the US and in Norway, where i live, we use far less than 20% on energy for lights, 8%-12% according to official studies. I’m qestioning the use of massive resources on one of the smaller uses of energy at home. Resources would be much more well spent on reducing the need for water heating and space heating/cooling. Even kitchen appliances uses far more energy than domestic lighting. I would rather insulate a bit more and enjoy my lights as they are.
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I’ve been using these bulbs in a hostel setting for the last four years. There may be different brands, but the ones we’ve been sent down from the head office were bought in bulk and they lasted hardly no time at all. Some of them I put in were dead as soon as I put them in. And these were ones that were supposedly a better quality. Even had some sort of “fresh” scent generator built in. On the front was a picture of a doe-eyed dog and cat looking up at the owner (tell me that ain’t commercial manipulation). I live on an island and they are supposed to charge you $1.00 at the dump for every CFL you throw out. That was actually more than one of the bulbs I bought for the place I worked at cost, I think.
People worry about the cost of using incandescent bulbs. They’ve been around for decades. They should be very inexpensive to produce by now. They come packaged in cardboard. Florescent bulbs are often in elaborate plastic packages to protect them from breakage. And you can’t tell me producing those little curley-cues costs less than a decades old normal bulb. Now you can recycle both packaging materials, but what do you think costs less to make and recycle? What kind of carbon footprint does packaging everything in plastic make?
I also spent three years in a computer lab at the Marine Institute. That was enough to convince me that fluorescent bulbs were not in my future. The (quite noticeable) constant buzzing and flickering did me in by the end of a three hour lab period. Sucks the energy right out of you. I would never buy those things myself. Sooner use a Coleman lantern. Tonight I’m staying in a rented room with CFL’s and the room is so dark (with 4 of these things on) that I’ve turned on an incandescent desk lamp to compensate. Its a Reveal series and has lasted for years. I’ve had some of these bulbs since about 2006, or before. I bought a few packs when they were on sale. And I love them. I believe that the reason so many of the incandescents fail so fast is that the later ones I’ve seen are engineered as cheaply as possible to push a worldwide change to fluorescents.
Where is the savings if you have to have 4 bulbs on to realize the light output of one incandescent? Another thing I’ve noted is that even when people are “serious” about saving money and the environment, etc, they often have no qualms about leaving these CFL lights on ALL night; because obviously they burn no electricity.
Well, each one in here is a 13 watt bulb. That’s 52 watts over a total of maybe 10 hours left on… only 520 watt hours, sure. If I don’t leave a 100 watt bulb on for 10 hours, that’s ZERO watts I burned. I grew up shutting off lights I wasn’t using. At least with incandescents, people who really want to save money turn them off (maybe its too bright to sleep with them on) because they’re aware of the cost; but I think with CFL’s, sometimes people are lulled into a false sense of how much they are really using.
So I don’t like them at all. I did read one interesting book by Buckminster Fuller once (called “Grunch of Giants”). In it he explained that the uber-rich are always dreaming up new ways to get their hands into our pockets. He mentioned that as time goes on, the cost to make things or to provide services should get lower and lower; and they do, but the end consumer never sees it because the number one priority of these companies is to make money for their top tier investors, and that means squeezing whatever they can from me and you. Even if it means “developing” new-fangled ideas like ethanol from corn or cheap mercury filled light bulbs (that come in too much plastic packaging) that devastate your health and that you even have to pay to dispose of (in some cases). So how many times do they get ya here? Let me count the ways!
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