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Join Date: May 2002
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by equality72521 View Post
I think you guys are missing the point of CFL and LED. They are replacing incandescent not because of the "green" label as much as energy savings. The more energy we use the more power plants we need to build/upgrade to keep up with demand. Every time a plant is built/upgraded your electricity bill goes up. It's all about efficiency. I work in the energy group for a major grocery store chain and I can tell you right now that changing from incandescent/T12/sodium/halogen to T8/CFL alone accounted for about a 10-15% decrease in energy use and LED is showing better results in our glass door refrigerated cases. As we say here in the energy group, "the cheapest kWh is the one you don't use". Maybe you don't like it but if you want to have cheap energy you need to be more efficient in your use of it.
Yes you are correct. But you need to use your head.

Putting CFL's in my bathrooms at home where they are on in 5-10 intervals many times a day actually uses more power than a similar incadescent bulb of equivalanet output. This is largely due to the high inital start curretn for CFLs which do not have "energy breakeven" until 15-20 minutes into their "burn". add to that that the light output is not a max until 3-5 minutes makes these bad economics worse because now, I do not have light plus I use more energy.

In many ways, lots of people use CFL's as a feel good, easy panacea. It is not. They need to be used wisely.
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Old 03-26-2010, 10:44 AM
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