Eco-friendly lighting

• Lighting accounts for 5-10% of the total energy used by the average American home.
• It costs $50 - $150 a year in electricity to light our homes.
• It takes approximately 394 pounds of coal to keep a single 100-watt incandescent light bulb burning for 12 hours each day for one year.
• Burning all that coal creates about 936 pounds of carbon dioxide – one of the biggest causes of global warming, climate change, and air pollution.
• An ENERGY STAR compact fluorescent light bulb uses 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and lasts up to 10 times longer.
• If every household in the U.S. replaced one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent enough pollution to equal removing one million cars from the road.

• Use daylight whenever possible. Remember – it's free. And it doesn't pollute!
• Focus light on the task at hand. Use dimmers for background lights.
• Turn lights off when you leave a room; occupancy sensors will turn your lights off automatically.
• Replace fixtures that use two or more low-wattage bulbs with one that uses only a single bulb. A single 100-watt bulb gives off 20% more light than two 60-watt bulbs and uses less power.
• Keep light fixtures and bulbs clean.
• Replace incandescent bulbs with Energy Star compact fluorescents. You can save $30 in energy costs over the life of the bulb for every 100-watt incandescent bulb you replace with a 32-watt compact fluorescent bulb.

How does a compact fluorescent light bulb work? Here's how General Electric explains it:
Fluorescent light bulbs (including compact fluorescents) are more energy-efficient than regular bulbs because of the different method they use to produce light. Regular bulbs (also known as incandescent bulbs) create light by heating a filament inside the bulb; the heat makes the filament white-hot, producing the light that you see. A lot of the energy used to create the heat that lights an incandescent bulb is wasted. A fluorescent bulb, on the other hand, contains a gas that produces invisible ultraviolet light (UV) when the gas is excited by electricity. The UV light hits the white coating inside the fluorescent bulb and the coating changes it into light you can see. Because fluorescent bulbs don't use heat to create light, they are far more energy-efficient than regular incandescent bulbs.