(image courtesy of http://www.ipaa.org/Blog/?p=301)
There’s a lot of kerfluffle around the Interwebs lately about the supposedly dangerous levels of mercury released if you break a CFL light bulb.
I believe the most widely spread story crazy Internet rumor is about a woman in Maine who broke a CFL bulb in a bedroom, was quoted $2,000 for cleanup, and a month later that bedroom is still closed off with tape and plastic.
I did a little research, being the sort of library-law nerd that I am. Before I spring my findings on you, a question: how many times in your life have you broken a light bulb?** Me? Never. Not one broken light bulb in 22 years of living on my own. How about you?
On with the myth busting: The story above about the woman in Maine is only sort of true and blown way out of proportion.
The Maine resident did break a CFL bulb in her bedroom. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection says they told the woman that one option was to hire a HazMat team (at great expense, no doubt). How about that room being taped off for a month after the breakage? The homeowner did that herself.
Read the full report on Snopes.com <here>, which also includes links to the federal Department of Environmental Protection’s guidelines on handling broken CFL bulbs. In addition . . .
**If you’re old like me, you might remember when most thermometers contained mercury too. My Mom broke one once. We scooped up the mercury blobs on a piece of cardboard paper, put them inside a plastic bag, wrapped the bag in paper towels and tossed it in the trash. It was kind of fun to see the little blobs rolling around the linoleum. I actually touched one. And I’m not <very> crazy. Yet.
True, you shouldn’t lie down and roll around in the stuff, but you don’t need to panic and succumb to crazy internet rumors either.
Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and a political junkie and a happy workaholic.
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Economics,
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It’s nice to know that one family can make a difference.
Last year my wife & I decided to make a conscious effort to do a better job of conserving energy around the house. We didn’t want to do any major home improvements, but we thought we could make an honest effort to do some good. I wrote a few posts as we identified our goals and built our strategy:
My Family’s attempt to conserve energy – and our challenge to you.
Our energy savings plan.
Energy use of household appliances.
We started the process in mid-November last year, so it’s been almost a year. I’ve reviewed our APS usage in 4 distinct categories: Total kWh used, Highest Peak kW usage, Percentage of off-peak usage, and Billable charges. Here are the results:
Total kWh Used.
This was the single most important goal. Time-shifting is important, and hopefully all our effort would lead to saving money, but the driving force behind the project was to use less energy.
Result: We used 15.4% less energy than the previous year, trouncing our goal of a 10% savings by more than 50%!
Highest Peak kW Usage.
In plain English, what was the most energy you needed at any one point in time, during peak hours, during the course of the month? Obviously the more appliances you have running at the same time, the more energy you’ll require at that moment. This is an important number, because APS uses it to calculate the largest percentage of your monthly bill. (this means that if you have one bad hour, with everything running and the doors open, you’re going to pay dearly at the end of the month!)
Result: Our average Highest Peak kW Usage was down by over 10%.
Percentage of off-peak Usage.
This matters for 2 reasons. A) We have a plan that charges us less for off-peak usage, and B) by shifting our usage off-peak, we’re reducing the aggregate demand for Highest Peak kW Usage, which means we’re helping to reduce the overall amount of energy needed for our city.
When we started this challenge, our average off-peak usage was 57%. We set our goal of raising that to 67%.
Result: We exceeded our goal by averaging 70% off-peak usage!
Billable Charges.
This one was disappointing. I had assumed that since we did such a great job of using less energy AND switching our usage to off-peak hours, we would have saved a fortune. Not so fast, my friend (to quote football analyst Lee Corso.)
Result: We saved a grand total of $124 over the course of 11 months. (granted, APS had a rate increase at about this time last year, so who knows what our bills would have been like if we didn’t reduce our usage. But still – I had hoped for better…)
Bottom Line – it feels good to know that we can have a significant impact on the environment without making significant changes in our lifestyles. If everyone reading this could reduce their usage by 10%… Talk about environmental impact!
Your doing his share Realtor,
Chris Butterworth
Chris Butterworth spends more time analyzing statistics and reading economic reports than is healthy. He's also a husband, father, writer, and amateur photographer. In his spare time he trained for and competed in his first triathlon.
