Move to energy efficient lighting

Traditional energy wasting incandescent bulb. Turn it off and do your bit to save the planet!

Eco-friendly lighting and quality of light

If you're starting to feel guilty about the energy used in the lighting in your house, then it's time to do something about it. If you havent thought about it, then soon you'll find someone is going to make you feel guilty about it! There is a huge global move towards encouraging us to make the lighting in our homes more energy efficient and eco-friendly. When you think about the fact that we can create the same amount of light for 20% of the energy and the bulbs last nearly five times as long as they used to - then we really should consider it, shouldn’t we?

Of course there's always a negative to going green. There’s no question that we can save resources and energy by using the new technologies now available in lighting and this article will discuss each of these in some detail. However, these new technologies use quite different methods to create light more efficiently than the old incandescent bulb that we’re used to.

The main difference and drawback is in the QUALITY of light that you end up with. If you're not sure about what you're doing, you could end up using the new technology available and creating the same amount of light that you did before but with your house looking bland, cold and inhospitable rather than warm and cosy.

The key to avoid this is to understand how to:

Lower your power usage for lighting
Use bulbs or other light sources that last for much longer
Maintain or, ideally, improve the decorative and functional effects of light in your house
Do this within a reasonable budget

This is a huge subject as you can imagine. You will find lots of scientific and technical descriptions online and if you’re really keen to understand these one of the better places to start is on Wikipedia. However, in the usual style of our website, here is a general guide that most people will understand quickly.

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Space saver compact flourescent.

The “standard” home

We’re going to assume that the current lighting in your home doesn’t look too bad.

Over the past 10yrs or so, the “standard” builders solution for lighting a new home is to use normal incandescent fittings or banks of halogen downlights in the ceiling. This provides the ambient (general) light that you need in all rooms and leaves it to the home owner to add atmosphere by using table lamps and cosy lamp shades where required.

The norm for builders is to also put a fluorescent tube light in the kitchen and in some cases in the bathrooms as well. If fluorescent tube lights are not used, they will often use halogens again in these places. In nearly all houses, you'll find fluorescent tubes are put in the garage and incandescent, high-wattage halogen or fluorescent lamps are used outside.

If you're reading this and thinking - 'thats my house', you're not alone. Whilst you may have an extra couple of halogen sconces and some specific halogen downlights pointed at particular artworks, most of our houses are like this.

So, how do you lower energy and power usage without making your house look cold and unwelcome like a loading dock?

All around the world, governments are encouraging home owners to replace alll of our existing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs but this is not always ideal. The main problem is that many colors, particularly reds and browns, will appear dull and washed out in their light. Incandescent lights provide warmth in their light that even “warm white” fluorescent lights cannot replicate. However there are some immediate things you can do that can reduce your energy consumption considerably.

Install dimmer switches on banks of ambient halogen downlights that are left on for any length of time. Unfortunately dimmer switches aren’t cheap and it may cost about $100 to have an electrician install one for a bank of lights. However, you probably only have a couple of rooms like your living and family rooms (and probably your kitchen) where this would make sense. Dimmers enable you to only use the amount of ambient light you really need rather than flooding the room with light. They also allow you to create different effects very easily.

Progressively replace all of your 50W halogen downlight bulbs with 35W bulbs that give the same light as the 50W bulbs. Other than cost (the bulbs are slightly more expensive than cheap 50W bulbs) there is no excuse for not doing this.

Try to use “task lighting” like reading lamps where and when you need them as reading lamps don’t need to be on all of the time. Use “effect lighting” like table lamps or perhaps even some LEDs to give the light pooling and effects that give a room character. LEDs burn very little power and are great for providing effects but are still expensive and are a long way away from providing decent ambient light at a reasonable price.

Replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs in all service areas EXCEPT those where the light are only turned on for short periods of time or the full brightness is needed immediately. Compact fluorescents are not efficient if they are turned on and off for short periods of time.

Don’t use higher wattage bulbs than you need for the incandescent lamps you are using for general light in bedrooms and other rooms.

You should try a good warm white compact fluorescent bulb and try it in each of your table tamps and other task lights. If you can live with the color rendition it gives from a light, great – use it in that situation, otherwise just install an appropriate long-life incandescent bulb. Warm white compact fluorescent lamps can look good when they are lighting predominantly white items (particularly white furniture) and can be very suitable for a reading task light. They are particularly poor at replacing bulbs in table lamps which are providing pooled light around wood and colorful items.

This solution alone will save between 35-60% of the power you use on lighting and using the dimmers on your banks of halogen lamps will allow you to create more lighting effects within your house without compromising the light quality.

Compact flourescent bulb disguised as an incandescent bulb

Make changes gradually

As you already know (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this article) lighting quality is very important in a house. We believe a home should be a gentle, welcoming place at night and light quality more suited to a garage forecourt needs to be ushered in carefully. We recommend you experiment with a couple of compact fluorescent bulbs first rather than installing lots of them in a rush and then throwing half of them out after a few weeks when you realize that you don’t like their light.

We do tend to overlight rooms since our love affair with low voltage halogens began. Think about other lighting schemes for your home that use less light and turn off lights in unused rooms. The accompanying article on lighting explains effects in more detail.

Our Guidelines

There is a common fallacy that low voltage halogen downlights consume less power. This is not the case. A 50W low voltage halogen bulb burns 50W just as a 60W incandescent burns 60W. A bank of 6 50W halogen bulbs (very common in lounge and family rooms nowadays) burns 300W. Changing to 35W bulbs (giving the same light) and dimming to 60% would mean that the same bank of bulbs are now burning just over 125W. Quite an improvement and it would also look good.
Incandescent bulbs (normal bulbs and halogen downlights) give the warm, comfortable colors that your eye perceives as being a good substitute for daylight. In technical terms their “color Rendition Index” or CRI is 100%. ANY other light, even if it calls itself, “warm white”, or “daylight” will give you a different perception of many colors. Flesh colors, neutrals and reds look very different under fluorescent light. As a result, if you’re going to change these bulbs think about the purpose of the light you’ll be moving to and whether the alternative light will kill atmosphere.
Remeber that fluorescent and compact fluorescent lamps are only truly efficient when they are left on for more than a few minutes. Many fluorescent bulbs also take a few minutes to come up to full intensity and if you want immediate light you’ll be frustrated. If you only need light for a short period then they won’t save you much money.
LED lights show great promise for the future but at the moment they are very expensive. Another disadvantage is that there are no LED bulbs currently on the market that functionally take the place of incandescent or halogen bulbs for ambient light at a reasonable price. However, for effect lighting they can be quite spectacular. They burn very little power and have an extremely long life. It is likely that LEDs will form a major part of our lighting solutions for the future.

DO

If you need lighting in an area with a lot of wood or other materials that have a red or brown hue, do not use warm-white compact fluorescent fittings. They are ideal for reading or next to white walls and white furniture.
Look for opportunities to use LEDs all around the house. They are still expensive at the moment, but LED strip lights hidden behind pelments can provide wonderful effects and a reasonable low wash of light when not much light is required. They are also very energy efficient.
Fit dimmers switches to all incandescent and halogen lamps in living areas. You’ll find that a lot of the time you only need a fraction of the total lighting capability to give you the light that you need.
Use fluorescent lamps in your garage or carport (use warm white lamps unless you want the effect of colder lamps for a specific purpose).
Get rid of ALL high-wattage halogen lamps. There is almost no situation in a normal home where you need 500W, 300W or 150W halogen bulbs, but they are commonly installed in yard lighting and in halogen sconce lights. A 24W compact fluorescent bulb in a good yard lamp will give a lot of light when it is needed.
Use the latest efficient bulbs for halogens. Some manufacturers such as GE manufacture 35W halogen bulbs that produce as much light as 50W bulbs. This immediately saves 30% off your power and gives you the same quality of light.

DON’T:

Rush in to replacing of all your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. You’ll just end up throwing many of them away.
Overlight your rooms. Only use additional lighting when you need it.
Do nothing. Using a combination of better lighting strategy, more efficient and longer lasting incandescents, dimmers, compact fluorescents and LEDs you can substantially reduce your lighting bill and create less waste. Remember, many cheap bulbs are not as efficient for light and burn out quickly. Check the expected life.
Leave high-wattage lamps on. If you want lights on around your house for effect then make them as low energy as possible either with dimmers, low wattage bulbs or by using LEDs
Use fluorescent bulbs where the lights get turned on and off for short periods of time.

Now that you're armed with information on the right way to go, you'll probably find the task of moving to energy efficient lighting quite enjoyable and very satisfying. You can then start looking at the lighting in your friends' houses and making them feel guilty if they haven't made the move too!