Saturday, April 17, 2010
An enlightening experience...
In striving for an zero energy home, once your heating and cooling load has been reduced through a tight, well insulated house envelope and geothermal heating/cooling system, your appliances and lighting become a proportionally more significant issue. In looking to reduce lighting energy demands, the use of more energy efficient, long lasting CFLs and LEDs becomes paramount. In recently searching for lighting fixtures designed specifically for these types of bulbs, we found the local "pickings" to be sparse and expensive. Searching online was somewhat more successful, with sites like arcadianlighting.com, lightingdirect.com and tcpi.com offering more choice of fixtures, and maxlite.com, earthbulb.com, creelighting.com, junolightinggroup.com, superbrightleds.com and edgelighting.com offering access to quality bulbs at reasonable prices. We have decided to primarily go with CFLs in conventional CFL-compatible (read: hides the bulb) fixtures, while using longer lasting but more expensive LEDs in key recessed lighting and undercabinet locations. We plan to use cooler color bulbs (5000K)in closets and dressing areas, where their greater accuracy is useful. In the remaining areas, we will be using warmer bulbs (2700K) bulbs for their flattering glow. Part of being a successful "early adopter" is having a high frustration tolerance and a healthy dose of initiative, imagination and stubbornness. It is sometimes tempting to simply yield to the easy, available and less immediately expensive answer, but that will rarely get you to your goal. Plus we plan to enjoy the projected 34 years of use of those little LEDs.
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We are looking for energy saving solutions in our log cabin renovation as well! A lot of the light fixtures that we find attractive are for halogen bulbs. I guess we either go with halogen and hope the technology allows us to retrofit them to CFL's in the future, or use fluorescent now and compromise on the appearance of the fixtures. I am looking forward to exploring the links you have to online sites for CFL and LED lights, but in the meantime wanted to ask you: did you go through this thought process? Are you as happy with the appearance of the fixtures you selected as you are with their energy savings? We are focusing on kitchen fixtures at present, as detailed in our blog, Condemnation Plantation: http://condemnationplantation.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteIt is always good to use LED lights instead of the normal lights that is being offered in the market.For which it has great attributes that is good for the environment and it saves a lot.
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