Fifty one. That’s how many light bulbs I have in my house, I know because I counted them. Had someone asked me to guess prior to actually counting, I may have said 20 or maybe 25. Fifty one light bulbs, sitting in a big box on my countertop. A mixed assortment of halogens, compact fluorescents and incandescents, ranging between 18 to 100 watts each. And why, you are wondering, are all these light bulbs sitting in a box on my countertop? Let me explain...
A few years ago, being the Mr. Green Jeans that I am, I decided that I would do the right thing and replace as many incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents that I could. At the time, CFLs had really arrived—they were equivalent to just about any light bulb you wanted to replace, and much more energy efficient. I bought CFL floods, dimmable CFLs and garden-variety 60W incandescent equivalents. They were expensive, but I was committed to doing my part to conserve energy, and it was exciting! That excitement slowly morphed into something closer to tolerance as I learned to live with the CFLs that I installed. Their performance was spotty. At first, they seemed to work very well, but in time many of them started doing really annoying things like lagging for a few seconds when flipping the switch, or not really dimming but sort of just going from a lowish lighting level to a lower lighting level accompanied by a bug-zapper-sounding humming. Some simply just gave up and burned out long before the claimed lifespan. What was I to do?