Converting to Fluorescent

A couple of weeks ago, my father in law has converted his entire house to compact fluorescent bulbs. He made multiple trips to the store to get the various bulbs that he needed to replace every incandescent light to fluorescent. While I thought that might be a little extreme, it did made me think a little. I do have a few fluorescent bulbs in the basement and kitchen, but never really gave it much thought. Then, I decided to actually calculate how many watts of light we had in our house, and how much money would be saved if I converted my entire house to fluorescent too.

At first thought, it seems cost prohibitive to purchase the bulbs which are somewhat expensive. But, the bulbs have become increasingly cheaper and more readily available, and they supposedly last for up to 7 years. In our house, we have almost 6000 watts of available light. If I replaced every bulb with fluorescent bulbs, the total wattage drops to about 1600. Wow, that is an amazing difference. It all adds up pretty quickly. And, I think the savings could add up pretty quickly as well. For example, in our living room, we have a ceiling fan with a 5-light fixture, which is 300 watts. That light is on a lot, and with that fixture alone, we can save 230 watts. In our master bath, we have a 10-light vanity strip above our double sink. That's 400 watts, but drops to only 90 watts if using fluorescents. Wow. When you think about individual lights, it doesn't really make sense, but when you think about multi-light fixtures, I think the savings could be substantial. We typically leave the lights on during the night on the front of our house. That's 300 watts for up to 12 hours or longer. If using fluorescents, that's only 75 watts.

Of course, there's no easy quantitative way to measure the savings, but the qualitative savings should be very noticeable. The initial startup cost may be somewhat high, but I'm willing to absorb that for the significant savings we'll see in the long run. The lights do take about a minute to fully brighten, and are just a slightly different color than incandescents, but those are acceptable limitations.