Many people may look at a light bulb created by Thomas Edison and think it doesn’t look all that different from light bulbs used today. We have grown so accustomed to being able to just flipping on a switch and instantly bathing a darkened room in light that the light bulb has become one of those every day things that has grown invisible due to its sheer ubiquity.
But if you take a closer look, you will notice how greatly light bulbs have changed. As Bloomberg reports, an old-style fluorescent light tube consumes about 58 watts of power. Just one year ago, LED bulbs would need about 25 to 27 watts of power. LED bulbs today use only 22 watts. The technology is improving each and every year and light bulbs are becoming more and more efficient.
Because light bulbs are typically used in bulk, switching out all of them to more energy-efficient styles increases the electricity and financial savings exponentially. It can be costly for a company to replace all of its bulbs, but the savings in electricity bills will easily make up for the one time cost of replacing the bulbs and any additional costs associated with replacing blown bulbs afterwards.
Between 2000 and 2012 in the U.S., the relative quarterly shipments of halogen, incandescent, CFL, and LED bulbs were all hovering around the same numbers, especially in late 2011 and early 2012, when all four bulb types were experiencing equal sales. Since then, halogen and LED bulbs have skyrocketed and broken away from the pack with almost ten times as many shipments.
In places such as the U.K., where cutbacks in U.K. subsidies to solar that have reduced the amount households can make selling extra electricity back to power companies by about two-thirds, switching out light bulbs is probably going to grow in popularity.
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