Create Your Healthy Home Blog

No one who saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth can question the energy savings from switching frequently used incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent light bulbs. Do you remember the scene with the incandescent light bulb and the pile of coal behind it? This country would cut its carbon footprint significantly if everyone switched to CF light bulbs.

Unfortunately, there are some concerns with CF bulbs:

• These bulbs give off radiofrequency radiation. Could there be any adverse health effects due to long-term exposure to electrostress?
  
• These bulbs contain mercury. A friend told this story: Someone she knows dropped a CF bulb. Knowing that she shouldn't handle mercury, she called in an environmental clean up company to clean up the mercury. Price tag: $2000.

What's the answer? The answer is LED (light emitting diode) technology. LEDs don't have mercury, don't give off RF radiation, and use even less energy than CF bulbs. Only one problem: they are not yet available to screw into a socket. A technical problem still has to be solved before they can be used with household electricity.

So, for the time being, I'll use CF bulbs, but not where I spend a lot of time. There, I still have incandescent, but I keep the incandescent light off as much as possible. My desk is by a window, so I have natural daylight for office work. At night, I have a battery-operated LED camp light (from the camping department at KMart) to read in bed.

Faced with a choice between higher energy incandenscent light bulbs and compact fluorescents, I'll pass. I try to avoid using light bulbs at all, at least until LEDs come along. And LEDs are improving. I bought quite a wonderful 3-watt LED flashlight recently at Lowe's. There's enough light from this flashlight for me to inspect a crawlspace with it. I use rechargeable batteries from Radio Shack, and I'm fine.