It used to be that lighting was a pretty simple affair–you had something to burn to create heat and light, or you didn’t. Early electronic lighting worked on this same principle. But now, there are nearly as many flavors of lighting as there are flavors of gum in the checkout aisle at your local supermarket. In the past, we’ve discussed the advantages of fluorescent lighting and LED lights, but we really haven’t taken the time to give a good overview of the differences between the various types of bulbs that you find in your local hardware or grocery store. So, we’ve taken the time to put together a primer on the common types of electric lighting that you’re likely to run into.
Incandescent Lighting
If you’re younger than 2o or so, incandescent bulbs may not ring much of a bell, but this is what the vast majority of people in the world grew up with. Incandescent lights are actually rather primitive-sounding when you describe how they work. Essentially, incandescent bulbs are nothing more than a wire with a great deal of electrical resistance, suspended in a vacuum. When a charge is sent through the wire, the wire heats up due to its resistance, but doesn’t burn, due to the lack of oxygen in the vacuum in which its suspended.
If generating light by heating up a wire sounds inefficient, then score yourself a point or two, because you’re absolutely right. Incandescent lighting eats up a massive amount of electricity, and only converts about 5% of the expended electricity into light. This is why it’s been largely phased out in favor of other lighting technologies, such as fluorescent and LED lighting. The other reason why incandescent lighting has become rare is because the material the bulb wire–or as it’s more accurately called, the filament–is made out of, a metal called tungsten, has become extremely rare and costly. Between the technology’s reliance on a rare and expensive metal and the inherent inefficiencies of the technology, the sale of incandescent light bulbs has been banned by many countries, including Canada and the United States.
Fluorescent Lights
Fluorescent lighting was once confined to kitchen and industrial applications; those long narrow tubes that sometimes buzz or flicker in an annoying fashion. However, the development of CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) which are essentially those same narrow tubes, wrapped up in a compact spiral shape, has made the technology ubiquitous in just about each and every room of homes and businesses all over the world.
Fluorescent lights, rather than relying on a piece of wire, produce light by passing electricity through a conductive gas, usually mercury vapor. When a charge is introduced to this gas, it fluoresces, or glows. While the vapor is toxic, creating a major challenge for disposing of the millions of fluorescent bulbs in use today, the technology is much more efficient than incandescent lighting, using only about 1/3 to 1/5 of the energy that incandescent lighting does.
LED Lights
LED lighting is a rather complex technology. Its complexity is reflected by the fact that the technology wasn’t developed until about a century after the first incandescent and fluorescent lighting was developed. We actually discussed LED lighting in a recent blog post on this site. In that post, we described how LED lighting works as follows:
LEDs produce light by passing electricity through a semiconductor–material that is less conductive than something like metal wire, but more conductive than insulators like glass or wood. Layers of semiconductor are sandwiched together, and when energy passes through these layers, electrons–the stuff that electricity is comprised of–get excited and release light
While LED technology is still quite expensive, with most retail bulbs running for anywhere between 5 and 25 dollars, they are incredibly energy efficient. They consume a tiny fraction of the energy that incandescent lights use, and are quite efficient, even compared to fluorescent technology.
All Lighting Technology Has Its Place
While incandescent lighting has mostly been supplanted by fluorescent lighting–in large part due to legislation in many countries that forced the issue–all of these technologies continue to exist alongside one another. Incandescent bulbs are used in specialized applications, such as photography and for exotic pets that require UV lighting like iguanas and bearded dragons. Fluorescent lighting has become the mainstay for the vast majority of applications. And LEDs, once confined to use as indicator lights on electronics and industrial machines, are beginning to supplant some of the many millions of fluorescent bulbs used around the world.
We hope that by understanding how these common lighting technologies work, that you’ll make sure to choose the most energy efficient sources of lighting that are available to you, and that you’ll back future initiatives that encourage the drive for improved efficiency, such as new lighting technologies and voluntary efficiency standards like Energy Star.
