Ban the bulb

A box marked fragile arrived in the post this morning. The kids were quick to open it up. 'Oh what are these?' they asked, pulling out six energy saving light bulbs, kindly sent by the man who did our WarmFront assessment. 'New lightbulbs to help us save the planet,' I explained. My eldest boy looked at me a little bemused before scolding me, 'If you want to save the planet you need to turn the lights off Dad.' He's right of course. Turning the lights off will make a bigger difference, but since we're not ready to live in the dark just yet I decided to install the bulbs anyway.

I've never really given bulbs a great deal of thought, except when they blow and I spend hours staring at dozens of different types, fittings and ratings in the hardware store, trying to work out exactly which one I need, and cursing myself for not remembering to bring the blown bulb with me. For some reason our house seems to have been fitted with one of every conceivable type of light fitting which makes bulb shopping a treacherous affair. You could characterise my relationship with bulbs as being occassional and frustrating; until today I considered them as little more than benign utilitarian servants to be changed with an oven glove.

Now that's quite a different view to Dr Matt Prescott of Ban the Bulb who in a recent column for BBC News proposed making incandescent bulbs illegal, on the grounds that these evil bulbs are highly inefficient and given their wide usage, taken together on a global scale, are responsible for millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions. Apparently if everyone in the US replaced just three incandescent bulbs with three energy saving ones, it could reduce emissions by 23million tonnes and put 23 coal fired power stations out of business.

Well I don't think we're going to put anyone out of business by adding six energy saving light bulbs to the three I've had burning dimly for the last six years, but every little counts. And it makes me want to take a closer look at all our light bulbs and see whether energy efficient alternatives can be fitted, and if not whether I can change the fittings so we can rid ourselves of more of our evil incandescent luminaires.

My carbon calculator tells me that just changing these six bulbs will reduce my emissions by 0.35kg CO2 per day or 125kg CO2 per year while shaving about £30 off by power bill. Now that's what I call a win-win. In fact it's enough to make me go climb a chair and scorch my fingers removing those incandescent devils once and for all.

What's more, if that simple action lops 125kg off our household annual CO2 emissions, and last weeks calculations about reduction targets were correct, then we could achieve five months of emissions savings in one evening. Now that's the kind of news the washingqueen will welcome. It might even be enough to persuade her to burn her fingers for me.