Go Greener Tips

Dimmer switches can give a extra relaxed really feel to your home, and prevent energy as well. But with the growing prevalence of compact fluorescent lights or CFLs, many individuals are questioning what choices they have for utilizing a dimmer with these lights – or whether or not it saves extra electricity to use a regular CFL, or to use incandescent or halogen bulbs on a dimmer switch.

Let’s begin by placing to rest some misconceptions folks have over the relative power use of fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen bulbs.

Many homeowners put in halogen bulbs, starting within the 1990′s, on the mistaken idea that these lights are more environment friendly than incandescent lights. In reality their energy efficiency is fairly much the same as that of incandescents. So don’t suppose you’re saving energy through the use of them.

CFLs, meanwhile, are very efficient – it takes about one fourth as much electricity to mild up a CFL as to light up an incandescent or halogen lamp with the identical light output. They also happen to final about eight occasions longer than incandescent lights.

So if you’re using a dimmer primarily to avoid wasting power, you is likely to be better off simply switching your incandescent or halogen lights to CFLs, and holding the dimmer switch on full, or going back to an ordinary on-off switch. That provides you with more light for much less power.

If you desire a more mellow lighting all the time, a method is to place in light bulbs that are not as bright. Whether you go down from, for example, a one hundred watt incandescent to a 60 watt incandescent bulb, or down from a 100 watt incandescent bulb to an 18 watt CFL, you may still get much less light and you may use much less electricity. Of course, the CFL solution will prevent much more electricity within the long run.

But chances are high you want the best of each worlds: the low running price and better sturdiness of CFL bulbs, with the pliability to dim them when you do not need their full light.

You might have heard that you cannot put an everyday CFL on an everyday dimmer switch. In reality you can, but it is not recommended, because it may possibly really scale back the life of the bulb. There is no increased risk of explosion or fireplace from installing a daily CFL on a standard dimmer swap – you may only increase the risk of shortened bulb life. And because the higher value of CFL bulbs is offset by the truth that they outlive incandescent bulbs by a ratio of 8 to 1, putting common CFLs on a normal dimmer destroys that value advantage.

If you select to dim CFLs, you have got two real options: buy a special dimmer switch that’s compatible with CFLs, or purchase dimmable CFLs which are designed to work with commonplace dimmers.

Both choices leave you with the energy-saving benefits of CFLs, as well as the potential to dim those CFLs. But for now at least, dimmable CFLs seem like the more affordable option, as a result of fluorescent-compatible dimmer switches are prohibitively expensive, while the worth difference between standard and dimmable compact fluorescents is miniscule.

Let’s consider the total cost for both options, for a fixture with three 60-watt mild bulbs. Let’s assume you already have a normal dimmer swap and regular incandescent light bulbs. If you want to upgrade to CFLs, your decisions are:

1. Installing three 13-watt commonplace CFLs at $3 a piece, and a $49 fluorescent dimmer switch. Total cost: $58.

2. Going for 3 13-watt dimmable CFLs at $3.50 a piece, and use the existing dimmer. Total cost: $10.50!

As you possibly can tell, using an current dimmer change is a more inexpensive alternative. Since both options use the same amount of energy, when it comes to payback period the answer with dimmable compact fluorescent lights is definitely much shorter.

Even if you need to buy a dimmer change because you don’t have one, it still is sensible to go with an ordinary switch and dimmable CFLs. You can get a regular dimmer switch for underneath $10. Even a trendy one for $25 is more affordable than a fluorescent dimmer at $49. And with the fee gap between commonplace and dimmable CFLs so small, the one way a fluorescent dimmer switch can be cost competitive is that if its value drops substantially, which it probably will over the coming years.

If your solely motive for using a dimmer swap with CFLs is to save lots of money, and you don’t already have an everyday dimmer switch, I would recommend you stick with basic CFLs and forego the dimmer switch. Use the cash you save on the dimmer switch to buy more CFLs for different areas of your house. Dimmer switches resulted in main savings for incandescent or halogen fixtures because the bulbs were so wasteful. For example, my rec room has six 50-watt bulbs on a dimmer switch. By using the dimmer at about half power, we use 150 watts as an alternative of the total 300 watts. Assuming an hour on each day, that might save 150 x 365 watts, or fifty five kilowatt hours a year.

But if we were to switch those halogen bulbs to 13-watt dimmable CFLs, we’d save 81 kilowatt hours a year at their full strength. By turning them right down to half, we might only save an additional 13 kilowatt hours a yr – that’s about $1.30 price of electricity. Not really sufficient to make it worth considering this alternative.

Consumer response to dimmable CFLs has been less than overwhelmingly positive. There were actually some teething issues with these lights – early burn-out, flashing light, and loud buzzing noises. These issues have been just about resolved in the more recent dimmable compact fluorescents. But if there is not a strong motivation for you to dim your CFLs, I would suggest sticking with customary compact fluorescents for a year, till the market offers a wider vary of choices for dimmable fluorescent lights. Who knows – in a 12 months or two, fluorescent dimmer switches might be as low-cost as normal dimmers.

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