Right Light for a Green Home
Posted by Rahul Chitrapu on Wed, Jun 30, 2010
This is a guest post by Kyle Mentz. Kyle is a content writer for Alluminare where you can find a large assortment of lighting fixtures to decorate your home.
A famous deity once said, “Let there be light”, and there was, and it was good. And frankly, it’s still good. The sun remains the most eco-friendly way to light your home, whether you choose to install windows and skylights throughout in order to illuminate your space, or if you decide to harness the sun’s energy for clean power to run an entire household. It doesn’t get any greener than using the one and only completely efficient, emission-free, natural form of lighting. However, there are some drawbacks. You may not have the funds to knock out walls or outfit your home with solar panels. Beyond that, a reliance on natural lighting could be difficult for people who live in cooler climates and don’t want to eat dinner in the dark in January. Luckily, there are a number of environmentally friendly lighting products on the market to give your home the luminescence you need to get you through the dark times.
The electric light bulb has been more or less the same since the birth of electricity, which is to say, incandescent. The problem with these bulbs is that they depend on a filament that heats up to produce a glow. Unfortunately, the process requires a lot of energy to begin and sustain. Enter the energy-efficient revolution. For a short period of time, it looked like halogen lights were going to be the wave of the future, using 20% less electricity, but certain drawbacks (fixture replacement, rampant heat production) quickly made them obsolete. Today, newer bulbs like compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) and light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) are literally changing the way we see lighting. CFLs have become very popular in recent years due to the fact that they not only work in standard fixtures and produce a ton of light, but also use 60% less energy and last ten times as long as incandescent bulbs. Many also promise to repay their cost (several times over) throughout the life of the product.
LEDs (you may have heard of them…they’ve been telling digital time for awhile) are an even more recent development in home lighting. Some claim to use up to 90% less energy (than incandescents) and last as much as 60 times longer. That’s pretty amazing! Naysayers grumble that LED bulbs are too dim to illuminate a house, but new products continue to come out (in up to 100-watt varieties) in steadfast refute of this argument. The only real drawback with current LEDs is that you will probably have to get new fixtures to use them.
Or, you can always go back to the sun. If solar panels are a bit out of your price range, or you don’t dig the look, you may want to consider a sunlight-transport-device. They bring actual sunlight into your home by gathering the sun’s rays outside your structure, transferring them through fiber optic cables, and sending them to lamps throughout your home. Pretty ingenious, right? Well, during the day, anyway. They only transfer natural light, so when the sky goes dark, so does your luminary. But they are an interesting alternative to cutting a hole in your roof. There are also solar lights, and although they are generally considered outdoor lighting (often used to illuminate driveways, garden paths, etc.), there are portable models that can be charged during the day and then used in place of lamps for soft mood lighting in the evening. Floating models make them a safer bet than, say, floating candles (open flame may be eco-friendly, but it’s always a fire hazard).
Probably your best bet to illuminate your home in an eco-friendly manner is through a combination of some (or all) of the options listed above. Try to use natural light as much as you can (since it certainly carries the smallest price tag at a cost of free), install solar panels if you can afford the initial expenditure (over time, they can actually bring you an income if you have enough sunlight throughout the year to build up a surplus to sell back to the power company), and switch to energy-efficient lighting to cover any additional need. Could you use one last eco-friendly lighting tip? Here’s one your parents told you a million times: turn off the light when you leave a room. You’ll be surprised how much energy you’ll save through a simple flip of the switch.