Let there be Light

There are ghosts haunting Venture’s office. They’re about five feet tall and shrouded in a white crepe-like material. Sometimes they even glow.

The ghosts are our funky floor lamps, which, while aesthetically pleasing, are an environmental downer. Each funky floor lamp currently uses three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs. That’s a total of 40 incandescent bulbs gobbling up electricity when more efficient 7-watt compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) can do the job.

According to a Natural Resources Canada website, replacing one 60-watt standard bulb with a 15-watt CFL in each of Canada's 12 million households would save up to $73 million a year and reduce greenhouse emissions by approximately 397,000 tonnes. So why do we have all these incandescent bulbs in our office? We can only plead ignorance.

Jeremy Miles, an energy auditor with ATCO EnergySense, drove up from Calgary to give me a crash course on light bulbs (see my next blog for more energy-saving advice from Jeremy). He explained that not all CFLs are created equal. Some use a heat-producing magnetic coil, while others have electronic ballasts that produce more lumens (light) per watt (power).

“It boils down to one factor: you have x-number of watts going in, and x-number of lumens coming out,” Miles says. So look for a bulb that produces a high number of lumens for a low number of watts (this rating is referred to as lm/W or lumens per watt). If the lm/W ratio isn’t on the package, the bulb may not be particularly environmentally friendly; Miles recommends going to the company’s website.

We found a bulb that puts out 800 lumens for 13 watts of power and comes in three colours: warm white, soft white and cool white. That pleased the graphic designers, who had seen the CFLs of old and worried that current versions were equally ugly.

“CFLs have come a long way,” Miles says. “They can look as good as incandescents. If you really like the look of an incandescent, like when you’re displaying a product or artwork, there are custom CFLs that come in virtually every conceivable colour rendition.” (Basically, this means that the colour of light is determined by its wavelength and is measured on the Kelvin scale. A lamp with a low colour temperature – 2700K – will look “warm;” a lamp with a high colour temperature – 4,200K – will be “cool.”)

So let there be light. When we’re burning the emission-free midnight oil to produce the next issue of the magazine, we’ll need it.