Lighting Design:

A well designed lighting scheme creates a welcoming atmosphere and plays an important role in establishing the style of a home. There's more to lighting than meets the eye, a well-planned design should be both practical and decorative. Examples of different types of lighting include hanging ceiling lights, recessed or semi-recessed lights, dimmers, task lighting, and table lamps.

Controlling lights with a dimmer system is a great way to save energy and great different moods. While task lighting is designed to give more of a concentrated light over a small area. With pictures, keep in mind they are often lit from above to flood the painting with light but leave the walls around it in shadow. While a table lamp with a wide based shade will throw a pool of light onto the surface below it and is an attractive way to light small accessories or framed photographs.

CFLs:

The average CFL will save you about $30 over its lifetime and last ten times longer than regular bulbs. What makes them so effective is the way CFLs produce light. With an incandescent light bulb, an electric current runs through a wire filament and heats it until it starts to glow. In a CFL, an electric current is driven through a small tube containing argon and a small amount of mercury. This generates invisible ultraviolet light that excites a fluorescent coating on the tube, which then emits visible light. When CFLs are first turned on they need a little more energy to get going, but once the electricity starts moving, they use about 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs.

The one downside to compact florescent lighting is the mercury necessary to create the light. The reason mercury is used in CFLs is that it allows the bulbs to be an efficient light source. No mercury is released when the bulbs are intact or in use and CFLs contain only a very small amount of mercury - an average of 4 milligrams in each bulb. Because CFLs contain trace amounts of mercury, it is important to know how to properly recycle and dispose of them. Learn what you should do if a CFL breaks in your home PDF (27KB), and get the EPA's recommendations for recycling and responsibly disposing of CFLs.

Fun Fact: If every home in the U.S. replaced just one incandescent light bulb with a CFL, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes and prevent greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 800,000 cars.

Resource: EnergyStar.gov

LEDs:

The average LED can last 50 times longer than an incandescent bulb. A building's carbon footprint from lighting can be reduced by 68% by exchanging all incandescent bulbs for new LEDs. Because LEDs are non-toxic, containing no mercury or other harmful chemicals, they are the best alternative to incandescent or CFL bulbs. Light emitting diodes can also be a cost effective option for lighting because of their long lifetimes, even though they have a much higher initial purchase price.

LED lights are more damage-resistant than CFLs and incandescent bulbs and they never flicker. They are also very heat sensitive so excessive heat or inappropriate use can dramatically reduce both light output and the product's lifetime. Some uses for LEDs include; task and reading lamps, lighting strips, recessed lighting, outdoor lighting, night lights, pendants and overhead lighting, and retrofit bulbs for lamps.

The government is requiring all light bulbs to be more efficient in the next few years. Learn more about how the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will affect the sale of light bulbs.

Great resource: EcoLEDs is a manufacturer of mercury-free, energy-efficient LED lighting products using breakthrough technology to deliver the most environmetally-friendly lighting products in the world. These LED lights, which replace regular light bulbs in homes and offices worldwide, greatly reduce CO2 emissions, save money on electricity and contain no mercury like compact fluorescent light bulbs do. EcoLEDs offers products adhering to strict RoHS guidelines. That's the new European standard called Reduction of Hazardous Substances. It means our products contain no mercury, cadmium lead or other toxic chemicals or heavy metals. As far as I know, we are currently the only consumer products company in the United States that has gone to the trouble (and expense) of manufacturing and selling RoHS-certified products.

Other resources: ToolBase.org, NaturalNews.com, ElectronicsWeekly.com, Wikipedia.org