I have been working to convert my apartment to use as much fluourescents as possible. Where are sodium based lights consumed?

Eric

While I have been steadily converting our house to compact fluorescents, the floodlight variety that we put in the recessed "cans" has proved to last less than or the same as incandescent floods, regardless of brand. This is dissapointing as the compact fl. are ~2x the cost. The "bulb" replacements seem to live up to the "guarantee".

That's a nice study, but what really matters (to me, as someone who works under hellish flourescents all day) is which bulbs give the "best" quality light?

Worker productivity goes up with good lighting. Remember the scene in Joe Vs The Volcano where Tom Hanks turns on his little hula lamp? Yeah, it's just like that in reality... or maybe not. But, my co-workers who have the choice to leave their overheads off and use floor lamps instead, all do. Which means my employer is paying for the energy suck of incandescents and the maintenance costs of flourescents (which are higher since you have to send a maintenance crew around with a ladder to replace burned out bulbs).

Did the IEA report make any qualitative judgements on the different bulb's output? 'Cause I could draw a line above all the others labeled 'dark' and prove (mathematically even!) that darkness consumes less energy than any lighting solution tested. ;-)

To Eric: Sodium lights are often used in parking lots with 220 volt feeds. They give off a yellow light that makes people look sickly green/grey. Probably not the best solution for your apartment (Did I mention that they get incredibly hot, have a high up front cost, will burn your retinas if not filtered properly, and often have ballasts that hum due to heat damage? But they _are_ energy efficient.).

The world is about to experience radical changes in lighting. Companies are developing superbright LEDs. LEDs are 30-50 TIMES, not percent, more energy efficient than incandescent. It's taking some time to tackle the engineering issues but but finally companies like philips, which have invested a tremendous amount on R&D, are finally announcing product.

I've read before that if the US replaced all lighting with LED, we could cut our electricity consumption by 25% across the board. Not lighting electricity consumption. Total electricity consumption. It will happen soon enough.

Malthus is dead.