Yesterday we learned of the tragic death of Mike Bachner, long-time manager of the Wabash College bookstore. Mike was a great colleague, and I’ll miss him a lot.

A few weeks ago I was in the Bookstore, and Mike was extolling the virtues of compact fluorescent light bulbs to a group of students. “You should talk about those on your blog!” Mike said as soon as he saw me. I added it to the list of blog ideas, but hadn’t gotten around to posting yet. Today seems appropriate.

CF bulbs fit in regular light sockets, but use considerably less energy than conventional light bulbs. For example, a 13W CF bulb puts out the same light as a 60W incandescent light bulb, a 4x energy savings. According to the Energy Star web site, “If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”

CF bulbs also last up to ten times longer than incandescent bulbs and generate 70% less heat. We saw the effect of this a few years ago when campus services installed CF bulbs in the library computer lab, significantly reducing the temperature in that lab.

CF bulbs do cost more. At the Crawfordsville Wal-Mart, a 26W (100W-equivalent) GE compact fluorescent bulb is $2.53, while a 100W incandescent bulb is $0.26. However, if the light is on 6 hours/day, given a Crawfordsville energy rate of $.06218/kWhr, you would save over $10/year in energy costs with the CF bulb, and recover the extra bulb costs in less than three months. Over the life of the bulb, you would save over $36 in energy costs and avoid changing the light bulb ten times (note too that the single CF bulb is 7 cents cheaper than 10 regular bulbs).

Save money and help the environment at the same time? What could be better? I’m sure Mike would agree.