So you have created your fabulous interior design scheme with carefully chosen wall coverings, selected furniture and those most elegant lighting fixtures. Now you do not want to go and ruin it all by adding some ugly light bubs. There are certainly some most awful looking energy saving light bulbs on the market for instance the linear design CFL’s which have the straight fluorescent tubes which go up vertically and then simply loop back. These light bulbs are just perfect if they are hidden away in the depths of some lighting fixture and never to be seen by the naked eye, but to have them visible in any room apart from a garage or a work area has got to be forbidden.
Now the situation is still further complicated because there are different types of energy saving light bulbs , namely , CFL, Halogen Bulbs and LED Bulbs , each of which have different efficiency levels and different levels of environmental friendliness. So if the environment is on the agenda for your design scheme then the decision is far from simple.
So what are the choices?
Halogen Light Bulbs
Halogen Bulbs are the baseline for energy saving light bulbs offering a 30% saving in energy efficiency over the traditional incandescent filament bulb and very similar aesthetics. So if you need a light bulb of small proportions to fit into that elegant ceiling light then choose a halogen golf ball which will complement it. Or alternatively if you have spot lamps then a halogen spot is a good looking bulb with clean crisp lines.
CFL
The compact fluorescent lamp or CFL has far higher energy efficiency offering a 80% saving in energy over the traditional filament bulb. However the aesthetics and design looks can be questionable! The linear CFL is definitely ugly and has been improved by the full sprial bulb, which is an improvement but still not right where aesthetics are of key importance. The answer here is to go for the Globe Bulb which has an energy saving spiral inside and an aesthetic glass globe on the outside. This way you get the energy saving benefits of the CFL and will only lose a small amount of efficiency by light absorption in the glass globe. Then from an aesthetic perspective pick a light bulb with a nice big spherical shaped globe and you are onto a winner.
LED Bulbs
LED bulbs do offer the ultimate in energy savings, saving a massive 90% over the traditional incandescent filament light bulb and the aethetics can be quite good. The LED bulb does look more high tech, but this might be a good thing as long as you build it into your design theme. Here we will just look at spotlights which are the MR16 and GU10 specification light bulbs which fit ino a multitude of downlighters and directional spotlights. There are 2 different types of these LED Bulbs either with multiple LED’s typically 80 for a 3w bulb or ones with high powered LED’s typically 3 single 1w LED’s. The choice is largely an aesthetic one with the multiple LED lamps looking very futuristic and the high powered 3x1w LED’s giving a nice clean simplistic appearance.
This detail is very complete and it tackles a broad range of ideas. You don’t see that many good blogs anymore? Anyway I love this blog, I actually came across it looking for interior design help (and it did help anyway!) and it led me to Saving Light Bulbs! This is a great site, I would tell you how I benefited about it but you don’t need to be a genius to see the benefits for yourself! This comment is to show my gratitude to this site and the money it saved me, thanks ;).
A helpful blog post, I just given this onto a friend who was doing a little research on that, he designs modern houses and he wants people to save money on electricity using energy Saving Light Bulbs! Anyway, I didn’t comment to gossip so thanks for the post,, keep up the well written work!:)
The only problem I’d say about halogen lightbulbs is that they can get much too hot. I’d rather go with LED as they don’t get as hot and last a lot longer.