The humble light bulb has never been so confusing

Behold the humble light bulb: it doesn’t look revolutionary but its invention, refinement and adoption triggered mass literacy and shift work, forever changing our culture and propelling us towards the digital age
It’s also causing us a lot of confusion. Walk down the aisle of your local big box hardware retailer and you’ll find a bewildering selection of bulbs. There’s incandescent, compact-florescent (CFL), florescent, halogen, LED and, coming soon, a new, improved and energy efficient incandescent, just to name a few.
So, which bulb is right for what space in your house? Do the higher costs of the CFL or LED lights pay off in reduced energy costs over their lifetime? What about the health risks posed by the mercury inside CFLs?
Let’s see if we can, er, cast some light on all these and other questions.
The venerable incandescent light bulb is the probably the one most people are most familiar with. Incidentally, it wasn’t invented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s. He merely refined the design that had been around for 75 years or so and created a distribution system for electricity and lighting which made it more practical and desirable.
The result is a simple design found all over the world, but it’s a notorious energy pig.
The bulbs are cheap to buy but over their lifetime 90 per cent of the energy they consume will be lost as heat, which is why the federal government has been trying to ban them since 2007 and why, as of Jan. 1, they’re been banned in the U.S., China and Europe.
The shock for consumers, however, is that their replacements — compact florescent and LED bulbs — are much more expensive, though they do pay for themselves by consuming less energy over a longer life span.
First, if you’re still buying old bulbs, you’re not breaking any laws. The Canadian federal government has now pushed back the deadline to ban incandescent importation to 2014 and Ontario announced in December it will shelve its own legislation to ban stores from selling them this year.
This shift has also contributed to consumer confusion because there’s an expectation incandescents are about to vanish and some folks are even hoarding supplies.
“It is confusing,” admits Pierrette Leblanc, senior standards engineer at the Office of Energy Efficiency at the National Research Council Canada. “And one of the reasons the government delayed barring imports of incandescent bulbs is so we can bring in a new labelling system which will made it easy for consumers to be informed and clear up the confusion.”
Like food labels, the new labels will have easy-to-read graphics listing the type of bulb, strength of light in lumens (a more practical measurement than watts) and how efficiently it turns power into light and colour balance indexed by a number.
The labels will also note whether the bulb is EnergyStar rated, which will go a long way to illuminating consumer choices, she said. Incidentally, those low wattage bulbs for appliances like fridges and ovens are unaffected.
Currently, the most efficient bulbs on the market are LED Light Emitting Diodes — which are miserly consumers of power but hard on the pocket book, costing $30 or more.
“But they are coming down in price as manufacturers work on them,” said LeBlanc. “And the quality is also improving.”
Still, changing 30 or 40 light bulbs in the average home to LEDs will be an expensive proposition, even with the power savings. The other drawback to LEDs is that while some versions will retrofit to a standard light socket, they are better off in a specifically designed fixture, one that better dissipates the heat, she said.
“The heat and how it is dissipated is what will determine the life cycle of the LED bulb,” she said.
LEDs can last as long as 25,000 hours (that’s about 20 years or more of usage) compared to CFLs at about 10,000, both well ahead of the 1,000 hours the incandescent lasts.
The technology is still developing and what’s in the laboratories now bodes well for the future, she said.
A word of caution, however; Those thinking about switching to LEDs should stick with big brand names, says Rhomney Forbes who runs Light Brigade, a Toronto commercial and residential light designing company.
“I’ve been offered ‘deals’ on LEDs but they just don’t last and the consistency (of colour) isn’t there,” she said.
Forbes said what kind of bulbs we choose and where we use them will determine what kind of light we get. What consumers want is also a matter of taste, adding some of the resistance to replacing incandescent bulbs was that newer bulbs didn’t give off the same warmth.
That’s changing as technologies develop, she said, and the colour temperatures are much better for home lighting but still not to everyone’s taste.
“There’s a difference in how you’d light a contemporary home as opposed to a century home,” he said, noting in the latter there would be more light in the range of fireplaces and candles for a warmer effect.
Our preferences for the “warmth” of incandescents is likely rooted in our cultural reference to the comfort and romanticism of hearth fires and candlelight, not any biological need, she said.
Kitchens, for example, need strong clear lights that render true colours for food preparations, Forbes said. For the most part, we put track lighting or pot lights in but it creates shadows right where the cook is working and that’s where under cabinet lights and LEDs do well.
That said, the CFL remains the most viable option on the market in terms of price and value for most homeowners in most situations, she said.
“Generally, CFLs probably provide the best value (right now),” she said. “Given their cost and energy use and life cycle, they are much more affordable than LEDs and while they may have a shorter life cycle, it’s not so great that the extra cost for LEDs is justified.”
Indeed, CFLs have come a long way. They’ve shed their “scrunched spaghetti” look and are contained in a sphere, are dimmable and generate more lumens, making them an obvious choice for incandescent replacement. They’re a little more expensive but last longer and use less power.
The one drawback is that they contain trace amounts of mercury, which require careful handling if one gets broken. NRC recommends opening a window in the room the clear any vapour and then carefully clean up the broken glass using duct tape or other sticky tape to get small pieces. Broken or burned-out bulbs should be put in a plastic bag. The bag can be disposed off at your local hardware retailer if they have a hazardous materials disposal program, or through your municipal hazardous materials program.
There are still a few other options on the market and newer technologies in the works. halogen bulbs, for example, burn hot but are more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs and popular for track lighting and other specific installation. Even so, manufacturers are developing LED replacements for them along with those for mini floods, known as PAR (parabolic aluminized reflector lamps), which are also common in recessed and track lighting fixtures in bathrooms and kitchens.
In the next couple of years, as the incandescent importation ban takes effect, manufacturers are gearing up to meet the new energy standards —but don’t write off incandescent as defunct.
Philips Lighting last year introduced a high-efficiency incandescent halogen — the Halogena — which employs halogen gas and a better filament and sold for about $5, making them competitive with CFLs. They were only sold in the U.S. but there’s a new line on its way, the Ecovantage, which will replace the Halogena and will be available in Canada. They’re an energy-efficient incandescent and, while more costly than a standard incandescent, they’re cheaper than the Halogena, contain no mercury but have a shorter life cycle of about 1,000 hours.
You’ll also hear more about new technologies gaining traction, like ESL — electron stimulated luminescence — which will replace floodlights and pot lights.
Regardless of which type of lighting and what type of bulbs you choose for your home, energy efficient design is only part of the battle.
Replacing 60 watt bulbs with lower-rate bulbs where possible will cut down power usage, as will turning off the lights when they’re not needed.
“And use dimmer switches where ever you can to lower the lights,” says Forbes.