Jun 12 2010
Eco-Friendly Lighting Considered
When you make decisions about lighting up your home or business, my guess is that ideally, you would like to find a lighting solution that is effective, esthetically pleasant, clean, healthy, and energy-efficient all at the same time. How close to this ideal can you possibly get in real life with the options available today?
If you’re starting from scratch, you have the luxury of designing for maximum use of daylighting, so that swithching on artificial lighting will only be necessary at night and on gloomy days. Optimal daylighting relies on the size, aspect, and overall positioning of window openings in the context of the building and its surrounding environment. Another way to make the most of every lumen of daylight (and artificial light for that matter) is to paint the interior walls and ceilings white. This also gives the space a classic, timeless look that doesn’t grow stale like the latest fads and fashions inevitably do after a while. Depending on the function and orientation of the space, you may choose a pure brilliant white, a warm white with a hint of porcelain, or a cold white with a blueish to greenish tinge.
When it comes to choosing the best kind of light fixtures and bulbs for your purpose, a lot has been done to promote replacing incandescent bulfs with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). However, CFLs have their drawbacks too, and upon closer examination may or may not turn out to be the most environmentally friendly choice for you. For starters, each CFL contains a small amout of toxic mercury that will leak into your direct environment if the bulb breaks. Because of this, special care needs to be taken when disposing of CFLs at the end of their life cycle. Some retailers and municipalities offer recycling drop-off points for your dead bulbs.
Then there is also the question of how your body and brain react to the various types of lightbulbs. This has to do with the particular spectrum of light the bulb emits and the way the light subtly oscillates in some types of lighting. Nowadays all basic types of bulbs are available in a range of spectrum characteristics, from warm and reddish to cold and calm blue, and to daylight-imitating full spectrum lighting. The perception of these qualities varies very strongly from person to person, so in terms of health and esthetics the best thing to do before choosing a type of lighting for any situation is to have the user(s) of the space evaluate their personal comfort levels with different lightbulb technologies.
Some people love the warmth of standard incandescents, others say the glare of those puts a strain on their eyes and they’re more comfortable with a lght that tends toward the blue end of the spectrum. Personally, if I spend more than half an hour in a space lit by any kind of fluorescent light, I get a head and eye ache and start feeling nauseous and depressed. So far, I seem OK with LEDs and Halogen lamps. Some others may have just the opposite experience.
What is the space going to be used for? Clearly a bedroom, lounge, or restaurant will need an entirely different tone of light than a workshop or laboratory, and the demands for an office or store will be different again. Always consider the effect you want to achieve. Is the light mainly to read books by? Or to do some specific task? Or just to provide a friendly atmosphere?
In terms of energy efficiency, LED lamps now lead the way, followed fairly closely by CFLs. Then come halogen lights, which achieve about a 20% reduction in power use over the good old incandescent, which is currently at the bottom of this list. But technology is still marching on even in this field, and if we can put a stop to the trend towards totally banning the use of these bulbs, we’ll see incandescents come onto the market in the next few years that come very close to CFLs in efficiency. If this happens, they will become preferable, because they don’t contain toxic mercury and much less energy is used in manufacturing them.
Then there is the question of durability and price. In this field, the bulbs still come in in the same order as for energy efficiency. You get what you pay for in durability – LEDs are the most expensive to purchase, but are not fragile like other bulbs, and they may last as long as 25-30 years with normal use! At the other end of the range, conventional incandescent bulbs are cheap, but burn out after a relatively limited time in use.
Lighting is a big market, and the companies involved in each of these technologies are working hard at discovering new ways to improve their products in all these aspects – to use less energy both in manufacture and use, to pollute the environment less, and to emit light that is less hazardous to your health. In the meantime, you’ll get holistically optimal results by weighing all the above criteria against each other and putting them in the order of priority that reflects their importance to you. Then you will have a framework from which you can make the lighting decisions that are right for your project.
