This is Day 10 of the Green in 365 series!
Now that we’re inside our homes, one of the rooms that gets a fair amount of use is the living room, or family room in some homes. I’m talking about the space where we hang out with our families, watch TV, listen to music, relax, play games, and more. Most of the tips we’ll talk about over the next few days and weeks will cover the main living area in our homes.
Our family lives in a smaller home, so our living room is the first room you enter in our house. It’s our main living space, and connects to our dining room, so this is where most of our family life happens on a day to day basis. There are a lot of ways that we can make our living spaces more eco-friendly, while still being a place that is inviting and relaxing for our families.
One of the first, and easiest, changes you can make in your living space, is to make sure that you are using energy-efficient lightbulbs in all of your light fixtures. CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) bulbs are accessible at many retail locations, and though they cost slightly more than incandescent bulbs, they last up to six times longer and use 75% less energy, saving you around $40 over the lifetime of the bulb. (source)
LED (Light Emitting Diode) lightbulbs are a newcomer to household lighting, but they use between 75-80% less energy and last 25 times as long as traditional incandescent bulbs. (source)
If you switch out 15 inefficient traditional lightbulbs for new energy saving ones, you can save around $50 per year. (source) Use the Energy-Star Guide, and start making the change to energy efficient lightbulbs around your home!
Have you made the switch to energy efficient lighting in your home?
Find all the Green in 365 posts.
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If I have a box of old incandescent bulbs, what’s greener – throw them out or use them up? Love the series!
If you know anyone who is ranting that efforts to phase out incandescent bulbs are a big government conspiracy, give the bulbs to them. If you don’t, but you can donate them to a rummage sale in such a way that they probably won’t get broken, do that and let the ranters find them.
By the way, here is a clear response to the claims that CFL bulbs are very dangerous.
Thanks for sharing that link ‘Becca!
Thanks Kristin! I always say it’s greenest to use what you have before you buy something new, but I like ‘Becca’s idea to find someone who actually wants to use incandescents and give the bulbs to them! 🙂
Emily–a ton of schools have light bulb fund raisers–my son had one last year–so I counted up ALL of the lights in the house and just bought them all at once! It was a huge saving vs. Home Depot!
But what I did find at Home Depot is this light socket type thing that screws into where the light bulb goes–it has sensor on it so the light goes on at dusk and off at dawn. That also saved money vs buying new fixtures that would have it built in.
Great Series!
Thanks for the great tip Renee!
We bought a few CFL bulbs as soon as they became available in enviro-catalogs in the late 1990s. The first ones were very dim when first switched on but got brighter gradually; this is much less noticeable in the newer ones, even cheap ones. A lot of those first bulbs we bought lasted 10 years or more, but I think we’ve used up all of them now. We now use CFL for all our normal light bulbs, but we have 2 chandeliers that only take expensive candle bulbs with small bases, and we’ve never found energy-saving versions of those. Our bathroom sconces are just barely big enough for incandescents and will not fit over any style of CFL we’ve tried so far. So we try to minimize use of those lights by using other lights in the room when possible–for example, the bathroom also has a shower light that takes CFLs and lights the shower brightly and the rest of the room dimly but enough to see your toothbrush, etc. Here are my tips for using less energy on lighting.
I switched all of the table and floor lamps in our house to LED not just because of the energy, but because I have two small children in the house and LED bulbs don’t give off heat like inc. do. I don’t have to wory about either of them burning themselfs on a light bulb.
CFL’s are much more energy efficient, but they do contain mercury, so PLEASE be careful about disposing of them properly. And if you break one, use caution when cleaning it up!
I would stick for CFL bulbs for now as they are the better mixture of quality and efficiency. But within the next couple of years LED bulbs will be beating them on every category.