Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs will save you money. Forget about the green movement's environmental stuff. Just focus on the money savings.
For anyone that doesn't know, Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulbs are the curly Q light bulbs that use about a quarter of the power of regular incandescent light bulbs.
After seeing these light bulbs show up in more and more places, I actually ran the numbers and converted my house. I saw my electric bill drop by several hundred kilowatt hours per month. First, lets show the facts.
Incandescent Wattage / CFL Wattage
100 Watts / 26 Watts
60 Watts / 13 Watts
40 Watts / 11 Watts
Electric bills are calculated in kilowatt hours. In order to get one kilowatt hour, you would need to run a 100 watt incandescent bulb for 10 hours. The equivalent CFL bulb is 26 watts. In order to reach one kilowatt with the CFL equivalent, it would need to be run for roughly 38.5 hours.
Let's do a real world example. Let's say you come home each day after work and turn on ceiling fan lights running 4 100 watt incandescent bulbs and 4 more 100 watt incandescent bulbs in your kitchen or another room. Also, let's assume you run them for 5 hours at a time. That's 8 lights x 100 watts x 5 hours x 30 days in a month which equals 120,000 watts or 120 kilowatts. At $.15/kilowatt, that would cost you $18/month of your electric bill. With CFL bulbs giving off the same light, the example would be 8 lights x 26 watts x 5 hours x 30 days which equals 31,200 watts or 31.2 kilowatts. At the same $.15/kilowatt, that would cost you $4.68/month. That's a savings of $13.32/month or $159.84/year just for changing out 8 light bulbs. The more you change, the more you'll save.
I know several people that want to change light bulbs after the incandescent ones burn out. Run the numbers yourself. You'll see that it makes sense to change out the bulbs now.
A couple of side notes from personal experience on CFL lights. I had a garage door light that would consistently burn out an incandescent bulb every 3-4 months. I switched it to a CFL, after a year and a half, I'm still on the same bulb. Also, for those that don't like the amount of heat generated from standard incandescent lights, CFLs run about 85% cooler.
Walmart has an online savings calculator here if you want to see how much you can save in your particular house.
