Homes

Hi Beetler,

I think it is better to replace your lightbulbs one by one when they finish. Not only is the impact on your cashflow less but I don’t believe in throwing out things that do still work. This way you can also make a bigger investment in cavity walls insulation. Buying low energy light bulbs will save you money in the long run because they last 12x longer and off course they use less energy.

We moved into our house a year or so ago and just replaced the most often used bulbs (in the hall and landing) with energy savings ones, and keep them to use for spares. The others we replaced as they have blown – most are spots which are actually still quite expensive in their energy saving form so its a less painful way to go. A year on there aren’t many non-energy efficient left, so it doesn’t take long to replace them as they break!

Hi Butterfly,

I was going with Eclipse’s strategy but two years of following this only one or two of my traditional bulbs have gone on the blink. So I was wondering whether I should take the plunge and make a total switch.

This was prompted by a stunt that Greenpeace did in Germany where they steamrolled 10,000 traditional lightbulbs because of the CO2 emissions that would have resulted.

Sounds like it would have been a great spectacle!

Like all above, think switching is generally not the right thing to do. But IMHO there are exceptions; I think they include compact flourescents, old fridges and condensing boilers. It would be good if some organisation could collate embodied energy and energy use tables so that we could work this out.

I’ve been trying to find the answer to this for ages, but not even google could help. I have a stock of incandescant lightbulbs, I reckon it will take 5-10 years to use them all up. Also, some of my lampshades are not compatible with any of the “compact” flourescents I’ve seen – they may be more compact than 2m long strip lights, but they’re still bigger than incandescant bulbs. On balance, I think I’ll use the old bulbs up, and get CF bulbs and new fittings later.