This is a post for Blog Action Day 2009, an effort to unite bloggers to discuss one topic for one day from many different perspectives. This year’s topic, chosen by a vote, is climate change.

Remember the big push for everyone to switch to compact fluorescent, or CFL, light bulbs? Many people advertised them as the easy solution to all of our energy problems. Ignoring the other impracticalities of this claim, there are still two problems with CFLs. First, the murcury in them is a potential household risk if a CFL ever breaks [PDF]. Second, unlesss they are properly recycled, that murcury ends up back the in the environment, where it damages ecosystems, eventually making its way up the foodchain to humans.

Luckily, there is a fairly new technology that solves both of these problems: LED light bulbs. LEDs have been around for a long time, but until recently LED light bulbs were expensive and dim. With LED ligth bulbs that are neither expensive (well, not too expensive) nor dim, let’s look at some of the benefits of LED light bulbs:

• Long lasting – The EvoLux LED light bulbs advertise a 50,000 hour lifetime compared to most incandescents that advertise lifetimes in the range of 4,000 hours. Practically speaking, that’s a 1 to 2 years compared to 10+ years.
• Sturdy – A lot of an LED bulb’s casing is made of plastic and LEDs are pretty hard to break in the first place, so your LED bulbs shouldn’t be breaking unless you’re really mistreating them.
• No mercury – Even if an LED bulb does breaks, there are usually no toxic chemicals to clean up.
• Even less energy usage than CFLs – The (advertised) equivalent of a 100W compact florescent CFL bulb usually sucks 20-30 watts, while (advertised) LED equivellents can be found in 12-13 watt range. (I haven’t actually checked with a light meter.)

The only significant problem with LED bulbs is the cost. As opposed to an incandescent or CFL which can be purchased for a few dollars, an LED bulb costs around $50. It does pay off in evergy savings, though.

I compared the approximate cost savings of an EvoLux LED bulb over a standard incandescent and found that the LED bulb would pay off in the fourth year.

Amount of money saved over time by using an LED bulb (Each mark on the X axis represents one year.)

So if you’ve been holding out on CFLs or are just looking for a way to save even more energy, try an LED bulb. I chose to try an EvoLux, but don’t limit yourself to that. Find the best deal you can and try it out.

Of course, you can also download the LED vs incandescent light cost savings spreadsheet. Plug in your energy cost and see what happens. (The graph is on sheet 2.)

Happy Blog Action Day!