Let there be Light

I am not a great fan of CFL lights. The cheap ones seem to take forever to "warm up" to optimum light output and I consider them ugly anyway. Some people also do refer to the danger of their mercury content; a problem which deserves close attention.

Standard incandescent lights give off considerable heat; albeit wasted for luminescent effect, but OK in our northern colder Canadian environment for most of the year. Indoors, the light they give is fine and the heat, as mentioned, usually is not wasted. The thermostats in our houses compensate by cutting down the furnace/wall-bar output when the bulb heat output is too much. Of course, very soon, these bulbs will be off the shelves altogether. Anyway as a gardener, I love them...... I use the old christmas incandescent light strings to over-winter my delicate plants.
However, I do really like halogen lights. These are more efficient and give out less heat as a result; without the annoying warm-up time of CFLs. They can be made small to fit where you want them and they are fairly equivalent in cost
This being said, we must not leave out LED's. These are great for Christmas lights and flash lights....cool and cheap to run. Bulbs are even available for indoor regular lighting applications too. Mutiple sets of the little units are packed into each single bulb....improvement in design is on-going.
Alas, many “green initiatives”, concerning power use, are sadly political in their conception.
I am strongly in favour of the “Green Thing” but let us not succumb to the, all too common, “B S”.
For those of you who foster a streak of "Conspiracy Theory", have you ever thought that the real reason for our electical power company's promotion of the "green" bulb use (and other similar initiatives) is to create a reserve of power to sell south at a future inflated price? This is a trend which is all too familiar regarding so many of our resources. Because of our trade agreements, this inflated price merely bounces back on our shoulders for the future.