A simple and affordable way to improve your house’s lighting system would be to upgrade from incandescent bulbs to Ceiling Fan Lights in your existing lighting fixtures. One compact fluorescent light (CFL) will pay for itself in the first 6 months, and then manage to let you keep around $30 in electrical costs over its lifetime. CFLs need 75 percent less power than a filament-dependent bulb, and will keep working about 10 times longer.

CFLs need far less energy as a result of the way they produce light. Incandescent bulbs incorporate a current that travels across a wire filament and heats the filament until it begins to glow. That golden filament glow is what makes incandescent light. By contrast, a CFL shoots an electric current through a tube that holds argon and mercury vapor. The power heats the gas, which then heats a fluorescent coating inside the tube. That very excited surface is what created the white fluorescent glow. CFLs require somewhat more energy when they are first turned on, so fluorescent bulbs have a ballast to kick start the CFL and then control the power level to keep light on.

The mercury mixture inside a compact fluorescent bulb is necessary for it to function, but mercury is a dangerous material which you should not let contaminate a building or the landfill. How do we effectively answer this conundrum? Well, to begin with, CFLs contain only around 4 miligrams of mercury per bulb, and the mercury won’t be discharged from the bulb if they are whole or activated. Actually, the single time that mercury could be discharged from the fluorescent tube is if the bulb gets broken, before or during the disposal process, that’s why you need quality Ceiling Light Fixtures.

So long as consumers are using recommended cleanup and disposal procedures when handling CFLs, the amount of energy saved substantially outweighs any theoretical harm to the water table. The one issue of consuming less energy means that employing CFLs can reduce the amount of mercury which is discharged by power plants. Believe it or not, if every American home replaced only one old fashioned bulb with a CFL, the resultant electricity conserved might be adequate to illuminate 3 million homes.

Used CFLs should be disposed of using existing municipal recycling options. If your municipal landfill does not have a recycling option for fluorescent bulbs, then broken or exhausted bulbs should be wrapped in two plastic layers and put in an exterior trash can to await pickup.

The starting investment in a Ceiling Fan Light Fixtures is considerably higher than the cost of an incandescent bulb, but the long service life and the projected energy savings easily justify the extra expense. CFLs contain mercury, which could be damaging to the groundwater, but if stored and thrown away correctly, the environmental impact of the mercury is insignificant when you consider the energy conservation potential. By and large, the benefits of using CFLs far outweigh the conceivable problems, so why not switch to CFLs? Right now?