How to Green Your Lighting
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 11.21.06
What’s the Big Deal?
How we light up the places we live and work makes a big impact on how we feel. It also makes a big impact on the environment. The kind of bulbs, the kind of fixtures, the kind of power, and the habits we keep can all add up to a very significant greening. Start with the fact that a conventional incandescent bulb turns only around five to ten percent of its consumed energy into light, the rest goes out as heat. From there, there’s no limit to how green your lighting can be.Guide Navigation
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1. CFL: The better bulb
Compact florescent bulbs (CFLs) are those swirley little guys that look like soft-serve ice cream cones. Actually, they come in a myriad of different shapes, sizes, and colors of light. Economically speaking, they’re a great deal, too. CFLs cost a bit more than an incandescent, but use about a quarter as much energy and last many times longer (usually around 10,000 hours). It is estimated that a CFL pays for its higher price after about 500 hours of use. After that, it’s money in your pocket. Also, because CFLs release less heat, not only are they safer, but your cooling load is less in the summer. CFLs aren’t hard to find anymore, and many cities will give them away for free. Wal-Mart has plans to sell 100 million of them.
2. Get the LEDs out
LEDs are a definite TreeHugger favorite. LEDs, or light emitting diodes, are a technology that allows for extremely energy efficient and extremely long-lasting light bulbs. LEDs are just starting to hit the consumer market in a big (read affordable) way and still cost quite a bit more than even CFLs, but use even less energy and last even longer. An LED light bulb can reduce energy consumption by 80-90% and last around 100,000 hours. They even light up faster than regular bulbs (which could save your life it there are LEDs in the brake lights of your car). They are almost always more expensive presently, but we have seen the cost go down steadily. It’s no coincidence that the Millennium Technology Prize went to the inventor of the LED.
Most LED lamps on the market have the bulbs built into them, so you buy the whole unit. For screw-in bulbs, check out Ledtronics, Mule, and Enlux. For desk lamps, check out a few affordable ones from Sylvania and Koncept. For more designer models, look at LEDs from Herman Miller and Knoll. Vessel rechargeable accent lamps represent some of the interesting new things LEDs can do as well.
3. Materials
Light isn’t all about the bulbs, though. Having eco-friendly lamps and light fixtures is key to greening your lighting. When scouting for new gear, keep your eyes out for lamps made with natural, recycled, or reused materials. Lights made from recycled materials include metal, glass, or plastic, and natural materials can include felt, cloth or wood. Interesting lamps that use reclaimed materials include these made from traffic signal lenses, and these made from wine bottles. Also, don’t be shy about borrowing ideas for reuse in your own projects (see DIY).
4. Disposabulb
Fluorescents last a long time, but when they’re dead, they have to be properly disposed of. CFLs, like all florescent bulbs, do contain a small amount of mercury, which means they definitely can’t be thrown in the trash. Every city has different services for recycling, so you’ll need to see what’s offered in your area. LEDs, to our knowledge, do not contain mercury, but the jury may still be out on how to best recycle them.
5. Wall warts
Power adaptors, or “wall warts” as they’re affectionately called, are those clunky things you find on many electrical cords, including those attached to lamps and some light fixtures. You’ll notice that they stay warm even when their device is turned off. This is because they in fact draw energy from the wall all the time. One way to green your lighting is to unplug their wall warts when not in use, attached lights to a power strip and turn off the whole switch when not in use, or get your hands on a “smart” power strip that knows when the devise is off.
6. Daylighting
By far, the best source of light we know is (yes, you guessed it) the sun, which gives off free, full-spectrum light all day. Make the most of daylight by keeping your blinds open (sounds obvious but you might be surprised). If you want to go a little farther, put in some skylights, or, of you are designing a home or doing a renovation, put as many windows on the south-facing side of the house as possible (or north-facing if you live in the southern hemisphere). To take it even further, sunlight can be “piped” inside via fiber optics and other light channeling technologies. [for more on light piping, check out: 1, 2, 3, 4]
7. Good habits
As efficient as your lighting equipment might be, it doesn’t make sense to have lights on when no one’s around. Turn out lights in rooms or parts of the house where no one is. Teach your family and friends about it too and it will become second nature. If you want to get a little more exact, follow these rules:
Standard incandescent: turn off even if you leave the room for just seconds. Compact fluorescent: turn off if you leave the room for 3 minutes. Standard fluorescent: turn off if you leave the room for 15 minutes.
8. Do-It-Yourself
We’re always encouraging people to take matters into their own hands. So much great eco-innovation comes when people create the things they can’t find elsewhere. Lighting is an especially accessible and rewarding thing to tackle. For some inspiration, check out the Cholesterol lamp made from cast-off plastic egg cartons, and the recycled Tube Light. Strawbale building pioneer Glen Hunter made some LED fixtures when he couldn’t find any he liked on the market. Eurolite, the company from which he bought the lighting components, liked his designs so much they decided to sell them.
9. Dimmers and motion sensors
Motion sensors can be a good way to keep lights turned off when they’re not needed, and dimmers can give you just the right amount of life, and timers can be set to turn things on and off when needed.
10. Get green power
A great way to green your lighting is to buy green power. More and more electric utilities are offering customers a green power option on their bill. Signing up for green power usually means paying a few more dollars a month to support energy in the grid that comes from renewable sources like wind, solar, or biogas. For some more info on how to get green juice, look here, and for the greenest grids in the States, look here. More info is also available in How to Green Your Electricity.
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Daylight pays
From hockey rinks schools, to Wal-Mart, to euro office buildings, natural lighting is being used to do better business, make people happier, and save energy and dollars. The presence of daylighting often shows increased worker satisfaction and productivity in offices, better test scores in schools, increased sales in retail settings, and, of course, lower energy bills.
Working with the sun
Planning your day around the planet’s great source of free, full-spectrum light is good for the brain and body, and will mean less burning of the midnight oil. Optimization theory takes advantage of the daylight cycle. It’s not just for energy savings and bringing more natural light in your life, but that’s definitely part of it.
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1. According to a report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power. According to Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst with the IEA and one of the report's authors, "19% of global electricity generation is taken for lighting— that's more than is produced by hydro or nuclear stations, and about the same that's produced from natural gas."
2. Studies by the Heschong Mahone Group found that sales increased 40% in stores with good natural light.
3. Through the use of daylighting in design, builders can meet 25 to 33 percent of the necessary requirements to achieve a Silver LEED rating.
4. According to the federal Energy Star program: “If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”
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Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are a big deal and we’ll be seeing them pop up in more and more places. Read more about what they are and how they work on Wikipedia’s excellent page.
A heliodon is a devise that allows architects, builders, and engineers to simulate the effects of sunlight on the lighting needs of building designs.
Color temperature is measured in kelvins, and brightness is measured in lumens and footcandles, and the effect of light on colored surfaces in measured in the Color Rendering Index.
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Bringing sunlight indoors can be done in many ways. TreeHugger has covered the Sunpipe, the work of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developments coming out of Queensland University of Technology, FluoroSolar, and the Suntracker. The Univserity of Notingham has also integrated daylight into its new Creative Energy Homes.
For more lighting products, inventions, concepts, news, and activism, dive into TreeHugger's Lighting category.
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Description of a Killowatt-Hour
The U.S. Green Building Council
Heschong and Mahone Group has done a variety of studies on the effects of daylighting and productivity in buildings.
"if you are designing a home or doing a renovation, put as many windows on the south-facing side of the house as possible"
Or north-facing if you live in the southern hemisphere.
Bear in mind though that such windows also gather more heat and if you live in a warm region, such steps could drive up air-conditioning consumption.
LEDs can be comparably efficient as CFLs, but I haven't seen one yet that is noticeably more efficient than the best CFLs. I see some 69 lumens/watt white LEDs coming out, but this is barely better than the 67 lumens I'm seeing with CFLs.
You get no argument from me about the lifespan however!
Energy Efficient Lighting
Green building offers great ways to illuminate your home while reducing consumption of electricity. Solar Tubes and Sky Lights harness the sun’s rays to naturally light the room.
Build Green Inc - NY, CT: Residential building & renovation. Environmentally responsible homes.
www.buildgreeninc.com
Recessed Ceiling Retrofits are the most common use of CFLs. In this application, there are two issues heat and efficiency. The fixture efficiency unless you buy a special recessed fixture designed for CFL lamps is on an average of 50%. Also, the average ambient temperature rises 10 degrees in the recessed housing, which effects the mercury vapor pressure, which lowers the output, shortens the life and is leading to premature ballast failure ie lamp loss. The National Lighting Product Information Program through the Lighting Research Center has a wealth of useful information for free. On an average the rated efficiency on the labratory table of a CFL of roughly 70 lumens/watt dips into the mid twenties in this application. Also, there is an issue with color constancy with CFLs, which makes them difficult to use in groups without noticeable color differences. Add to that the mercury which needs special incineration to dispose of but which normally isn't, and the fact that they don't like frequent switching. CFLs, despite everyone pushing them, are not the answer for general lighting. They are mearly a stepping stone for solid state when it becomes accepted in general lighting.
I have sinned, and I still feel bad about it. Here's my confession: When I decided to replace my big, honking, energy-zapping computer monitor and CPU, with a laptop, I threw it all in the trash. Next, when I decided to replace my thermostat with a digital one, I just threw the old mercury-filled one in the trash. Then, I replaced all the lightbulbs in my house with the "environmentally-friendly" CFLs. When we moved to another house, I decided to take them all with me, but most of them broke in the box - and yup, I threw them away.
I wonder how much damage I did? I drive a hybrid vehicle, recycle cans, and do lots of treehugging, but since there was no easy, obvious way for me to get rid of my mercury, I just tossed it. I especially feel bad, because I am a fisherman, and I've seen all eating advisories due to mercury contamination. What should I have done?
I was trying to find white leds and I don't know what certain words are? Does anyone know how lumens and mcd correspond to each other? Like, if I want a bright light, should I look for a light that has more lumens or mcd? And, also how does watts play into the picture?
Thanks,
Jake
CFL's may save energy, but the mercury is a big problem. It's hard enough to get people to recycle with roadside pickup - do we really thing the average American is going to go out of their way to deal with the special recycling needed for CFLs?
Interesting, albeit somewhat slanted article on the topic:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=aa7796aa-e4a5-4c06-be84-b62dee548fda
Brian Houston,
Here is the best explanation I've found so far: http://led.linear1.org/how-do-i-convert-between-candelas-and-lumens/
Essentially, lumens is a measure of how much light a source produces overall. mcd (or micro candela) is a measure of how intense that light is; i.e. how much light produced by the source falls on some surface some distance away.
You can get more information about energy-saving CFL light bulbs, buy CFLs, and also support environmental organizations at www.greenlightsusa.com .
Check out our cost and environmental savings calculator! (=
Eddie Chu
Founder, GreenLights
www.greenlightsusa.com
I just buy solar-charged LED lamps that are sold for outdoor use on sale (only if
This is great information for going green with lighting. Check out ETS Energy Store for some of the eco friendly lighting.
All the best to all.
www.etsenergy.com
for anyone counting on LEDs solving all your problems, hate to break it to you but they won't. for LEDs to generate the kind of output you would need for general ambient lighting, it'll require a massive heat sink or a board dotted with several LEDs- which will still burn hot and thus lower the life span of the LEDs. LED's are meant for high contrast lighting, and you will find the more you try to force them to be an ambient light, the more their efficiency will plummet.
About daylighting: just putting windows in is not the only, nor even the best practice. Look in to insulated translucent panels, which can have far greater insulation factors than triple-pane glazing, and the diffuse light brightens whole spaces better than direct specular light. Interspersed smartly with regular windows, translucent panels can give you far more effective daylighting than clear windows alone, and keep your energy costs (both heating and cooling) lower. Add to this, safer materials: less likely to break - and if they do break, there are no dangerous shards. And finally, at night a clear window becomes a black hole, a translucent panels help keep the light inside.
Jake,
Re: LEDs
Lumens and MCD are about the brightness levels but a simple way to look at it is: The higher wattage, the brighter.
The main idea about LED is that it is highly efficient (light output per watt), and uses direct current, which means that one can power it with a battery directly, unlike the other induction lamps (CFL, etc).
The implications is that you can hook up your solar panels or other mechanical sources to charge battery pack then to LED lights... I'm blabbering now, so I'll stop here. Hope that helps!
Energy efficiency is becoming a definite priority for our lives. It is more than just saving energy though, it is about changing the way we deal with life. Treating people respectfully, giving back what you take, eating better, and becoming more aware of why we are really here. We are here for so many more reasons than than what our US society has taught us.
That being said, I understand that Wal Mart is in business to make money like the rest of us, they are making many decisions to become more energy efficient, but they are not becoming more efficient to save the earth. I know this post is a little out dated but I dont think that Wal Mart really fits in to a post about energy efficiency and how it saves the earth. It is obvious treehugger is in it for the money too.
Sustainable lighting has as much to do with the overall design of the lighing within a space as the technology used. For example, a simple linear fluorescent cove can illuminate a space comfortably at much lower power concumption than recessed downlights can. This is because of the apparent brightness created by lighting the ceiling. Thus lighting surfaces can create the feeling of more light, in this case reducing the need for cruddy looking "cans" in the ceiling and reducing energy. Add on a dimming ballast and a daylight sensor, and that cove will dim according to the amount of daylight in the space!
There is a new lighting manufacturer which is making recessed can retrofits that use LED lights instead of CFL (which contain mercury). The manufacturer is LLF Lighting and the easy to install retrofit kit fits into most 6" cans producing 650 lumens with only 12watts of nominal input power.
I hear all the talk on Mercury and how these CFLs contain Mercury so how can they be good.
One average incandescent light bulb produces something like 7.2 MG of Mercury in the air to light that bulb.
One CFL contains something like 3.5 MG of Mercury. 1.9 in the bulb itself which never gets released into the air, And 1.6 into the air from power plants used to light the bulb.
That means CFLs actually put 5.6 times less Mercury into the air than a standard incandescent.
Multiply that by the millions of bulbs out there, and that is a lot less Mercury polluting our air by using CFLs.
There are a lot of companies jumping into the CFL market. GE, Philips, Sylvania and many others. Did you know that most of their CFL light bulbs are manufactured by the same company? That company is TCP. They just happen to make The Home Depot's house brand, n:vision, as well.
They have a lot of great information about Mercury in these CFLs on their product web site. Those of you who are worried should educate yourself on this Mercury issue before you decide not to buy CFLs.
Get educated at http://www.nvisioncfl.com/mercury.aspx
Which president hopeful will have the guts and ask our citizens to make the switch from conventional lighting to progressive? Why has a simple yet crucial issue like this one not come to the forefront during the endless bore of debates? Whichever candidate were to bring it up would have a single, powerful differentiator at his fingertips.
Solatubes are a great way to naturally brighten spaces during the day. We installed them throughout our home and are using no lights during the day. I am lucky enought to work out of my home - home office so its a great energy saver for me.
We can close our blinds and still have light...great for hiding from our nosey neighbors. Also good. Kids dont leave the lights on now.
I highly recommend them. We live in Danville and got Sola Brite in Pleasanton to install them.
i have to say. this being tree hugger and all i would have def thought that you guys would have been more informed than to put cfls on the top of the list. yes they save energy and all but what about the FIVE GRAMS of mercury that is found in them? and do you know how big of a problem it is when you break one? especially in a childs room or a room with no windows? $2000 worth of a problem. that is how much it costs for hazmat to come in and clean up a broken cfl. bc you all do know that you cannot touch them, vacuum them, or even throw them away. and all this about "recycling" cfls... YOU CANT. no person or company in the world have figured out how to recycle cfls safely and dispose of the mercury. it just cant happen. so why are all of us environmentalists still pushing for cfls?!?! it is a total disaster waiting to happen. so i encourage all of you to stop buying them and educate yourselves on better products that are REALLY eco friendly such as LEDs. if they arent in your area them push for them at your local store. and tree hugger... please make sure that you always recommend the best AND SAFEST products. not the ones that are the most popular. people really look to you for valuable information. EVERYONE PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ON THE DANGERS OF THE MERCURY IN CFLS!!!!! peace love namaste
I am looking for good information on replacing a variety of incandescent and cfl with LEDs for residential usage. The standard wattage requirements are from 10-200watts using standard screw mounts.
I would like to know costs of LEDs and availability in the Baltimore MD area.