Green Homes—Lighting

If you want to install eco-friendly lighting in your home, here are several tips:

• If you use CFLs, check now with your local government to find out how to dispose of a bulb in case it breaks. According to the EPA, here are your initial steps. If a CFL breaks, a small amount of mercury escapes. Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Do not use bare hands to pick it up; use disposable rubber gloves. If the bulb broke onto on a flat surface, scoop up fragments and powder with stiff paper and place them in a plastic bag. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes and place them in the plastic bag. Seal the bag. If a CFL breaks on a carpet, remove as much material as you can using sticky tape. Once all visible material is removed, vacuum the area, remove the vacuum bag and put the bag and the sticky tape debris in a plastic bag and seal it. In both instances, place the first sealed bag in a second plastic bag and seal that bag. Dispose of the bags according to your community’s local disposal rules.
• Since energy use for lighting homes is only around 10 percent, says Jay Hall, acting director for LEED for Homes, changing out many or all of a home’s incandescent bulbs may not make a huge impact for an individual—perhaps $100 a year—but it will make an impact in the larger picture. According to the Department of Energy, if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star-qualified bulb, the effort would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year and more than $600 million in annual energy costs as well as prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

In checking for light output equivalency, compare lumens. If a 60-watt incandescent produces 800 lumens and a qualified CFL, at 13-15 watts, produces 800 lumens, you are getting similar light output but with differing amounts of power needed to produce that amount.