Nationwide, artificial lighting consumes about 10% of a household’s electricity use. Use of new lighting technologies can reduce lighting energy use in homes by 50%–75%. Upgrading 15 of the inefficient incandescent light bulbs in homes could save your customers about $50 per year.

New Light Bulbs: What’s the Difference?

Traditional incandescent bulbs use a lot of energy to produce light.

• 90% of the energy is wasted as heat
• That lost energy is money we are throwing away

Newer energy-saving light bulbs provide the choices in colors and light levels you’ve come to expect. The new lights are also much more efficient – so they save money.

What Are the Lighting Choices for your customers?

Three of the most common energy-efficient lighting types include halogen incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs. Compact Flouorescent Lamps are very popular and can be found in our Energy Efficient Lighting section.

CFLs – about 75% energy savings

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) are simply curly versions of the long tube fluorescent lights you may already have installed in a homeowners’ kitchen or garage. Because they use less electricity than traditional incandescents, typical CFLs can pay for themselves in less than nine months, and then start saving you money each month. An ENERGY STAR-qualified CFL uses about one-fourth the energy and lasts ten times longer than a comparable incandescent bulb that puts out the same amount of light.

CFL bulbs are available in a range of light colors, including warm (white to yellow) tones that were not as available when first introduced. Some are encased in a cover to further diffuse the light and provide a similar shape to the bulbs you are replacing. If you are looking for a dimmable bulb for a homeowner, check the package to make sure you purchase a CFL with that feature.

Fluorescent bulbs contain a small amount of mercury, so don’t forget to remind homeowners that they should always be recycled at the end of their lifespan.

Source: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Have you considered how much it costs you to have a light on in your home? Saving the Earth is not the only goal of conserving energy or electricity; saving money is a direct result of energy-saving tools and appliances. Some people don’t even take a look at the electric bill. The monthly bill comes and as long as there is not a noticeable rise in the invoice, the details of your energy use are not typically stats most folks seek out. In fact, the electrical jargon itself inhibits us from even attempting to understand those meter readings. Watts and kilowatts and kilowatt-hours each come with their own code of abbreviations that leave the average, not-professionally-licensed-electrician homeowner, a little bit baffled.

When you make time to get to the pile of bills, sit at your kitchen table and try to focus, ignoring all the background noises, it’s all a person can manage just to get that checkbook to balance, let alone decipher the foreign terms on the electric meter reading. However, it only takes a moment to understand the basics, and getting these fundamentals down will help you make the best decisions when it comes time to purchase green products and energy conserving items.

So let’s get started. First of all, electricity is billed to you by the kilowatt-hour or kWH. On average, one kWH costs about $0.08 to $0.15. To rack up a kWH, you must use 1,000 watts of electricity. To put it in more common terms, 1,000 watts is equivalent to using a 100 watt light bulb for ten hours.

Now that you have a better understanding of a basic fee associated with your electric bill, here are some ways you can go green and get more electricity for your dollar and promote energy conservation in your home.

1. Buy CFL bulbs: CFL bulbs cost more up front, but average to save you $40.50 per year, per bulb in electricity fees. While the out of pocket expense is greater, you will recoup those costs by the 720th hour of usage and from that point on, you are saving money. These green bulbs use less energy, usually a fourth of what a standard bulbs would use up. They also last longer than standard bulbs. Typically, the life of one CFL is equal to about 10 standard bulbs.

2. Don Your Sweatshirt: A sure-fire way to conserve energy is not to use so much of it. In the winter months, keeping the heat on a low setting and adding a layer of clothing, like a sweatshirt or simply a pair of socks, is a highly effective way to save money and energy.

3. Flip It and Exit: An obvious but often neglected green practice is turning off a light when you leave the room. Your mother probably nagged you about this when you were a child – you probably nag your children about the same thing.

Just make sure you are aware of how much energy you are using and how much is either leaking out or being wasted. Keeping a steady eye on things can save you money and even help out the environment.

If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), we could save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for one year. This equates to about $700 million in annual energy costs savings, and prevents 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year (equivalent to the emissions of about 800,000 cars).

An ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) will save about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months. It uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb.