Steadfast Finances

I’ve finally decided to exchange all of my standard light bulbs for Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs.

I realize I’m a few years late in joining the Going Green energy movement, but after spending the last two weeks reading about everyone’s retirement accounts being in the crapper (Moolanomy and No Debt Plan have two of the best), and the dozen emails I’ve received from friends suffering from “quarterly statement shock”, I finally decided that October is the perfect time to implement a few longer term cost cutting methodologies that I’ve passed over for any number of reasons.

The first is switching to eco-friendly CFL Bulbs.

My motivation for finally going green would be two fold:

1. Saving money (big shocker!).  As it turns out, when the stock market tanks, it affects my disposable income.
2. My slow and steady conversion into a reluctant tree hugger.

I must admit, this is a project I’ve been waiting for several months to execute.  Primarily, because I wanted to wait until the weather has become more tolerant (summers in the southeastern U.S. can be miserable) in the hopes of detecting a noticeable difference in energy usage and balance on my monthly electric bill.

I’m not sure if this will be possible considering the small amounts of energy in this experiment, and that I’m the type of person to always flip the off switch after leaving a room.  However, it’s a simple experiment to try and takes little to no work to calculate.

According to Energy Star, a CFL bulb uses ~75% less energy and produces ~75% less heat than the standard bulb.  This is appealing because it appeases my inner tree hugger mentality since I am attempting to reduce my carbon footprint.

However, my main goal is to save money by reducing my electricty usage.

Energy Star claims that 1 CFL bulb can save $30 in electricity costs over the lifetime of each bulb.  I required 24 CFL bulbs to make the full switch costing me approximately $42, so there is a potential to save as much as $1260 over a period of several years.

I will follow up with the results by the end of 2008.

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