Whenever you get into a conversation about electricity, CFL’s are bound to come up. In case you aren’t familiar with them, CFL’s are Compact Fluorescent Lights, and are basically much more efficient versions of the regular old incandescent light bulb. Take for example, the ever popular 60 watt bulb. Look around - you probably have dozens in your home if you counted them all. These are painfully wasteful, even if you don’t know it. That small bulb uses 60 watts to light up a room - and most of that energy gets wasted as heat rather than producing light.

This is where the CFL comes in. A CFL that produces the same amount of light ( measured in Lumens ) as a standard 60 watt bulb, consumes just 13 watts of energy. That’s about a quarter of the energy to produce the same amount of light. Those old-style bulbs seem downright wasteful now, don’t they? Just imagine for a moment how much energy you could save by replacing your most commonly used lights with CFL’s - it’s astounding.

Rough estimates say that about 30% of a home’s energy usage is for lighting. If you replace all your incandescent bulbs with CFL’s, you will reduce your lighting expense by 75%. 75% of 30% is 22.5% - and that’s how much you could potentially reduce your monthly electric bill by. The best part? There’s no downside. CFL’s have come a long way, and aren’t the humming, flickery beasts that they once were. They are silent, flicker free, and produce the same kind of light as incandescent bulbs. So head over to your local hardware store and pick up a few boxes of CFL’s - you can thank me later for your lower electric bill.

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