CFLs, Incandescents, and Thermostats

As we were heading up to bed the other night, Fred commented that it was awfully chilly in the house, even though the thermostat in our foyer read “75.”  And for once, I got to tell HIM something I’d already discovered in the innerworkings of our HVAC: incandescent bulbs can trick your thermostat into turning off.

Since incandescents generate a lot of heat (I read somewhere that it’s 90% heat to 10% light, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate, so don’t quote me on Jeopardy), when we leave our foyer lights on for any length of time, our foyer heats up and our heat turns off.  Our thermostat – unfortunately located on the wall beneath one of these light fixtures - ”thinks” it’s done its job and kicks back in its robe and slippers with a good book while the rest of us are left to shiver in our respective rooms.

Our light fixtures in the foyer are old and ugly dated, so we don’t plan to keep them for long.  When we tackle that area, we’re going to replace them with recessed lights with CFLs, like we did in our kitchen.  Meanwhile our current fixtures are an awkward shape, and though I haven’t tested them, they don’t look like they’ll take CFLs.  So for now I just make sure we only turn those lights on when we need them and that we definitely never go to bed with the foyer lights on.

I suppose one could argue that we’re saving energy by not running the heat.  But we’d rather do that the old-fashioned way and just turn the thermostat down when we want to.  And in the aftermath of the lights being on, while the thermostat is playing catch-up, we occasionally end up finding the emergency heat has kicked on.  Blowing any savings we might have accumulated anyway.

Another win for the CFLs!

by: Kim | December 4, 2008 | filed in: General
Related Tags: cfl, compact flourescent lights, incandescent bulbs, thermostat

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