Reflections on light bulbs

Funny thing. I never used to spend much time thinking about light bulbs. Every so often, I’d pick some up of various sizes when I was at the grocery or hardware store. A light bulb was a light bulb, or so I thought. When I had my first apartments as a young adult, first in Baltimore and then in Manhattan, I’m not even sure that I kept light bulbs in my apartment. If a bulb burned out, I was just as likely to do with out or to “borrow” one from another light fixture until I got around to getting a package of bulbs.

In those days, I could by one package of light bulbs and they would last a long time. When I was living in Manhattan, I might have had a lamp on my desk. Since I was a college student, it would have been the intelligent thing to do. Other than that, it was ceiling fixtures, one in the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom. And they might have been bare bulbs.

So, almost thirty years later, my lighting needs are much more complex. And we are living in different times. All of a sudden what type of light bulb I use can make a difference. After spending $10 per spiral light bulb in the supermarket, I found myself in the light bulb isle of Home Depot. And listening to the ribbing my partner was giving me for making a trip to Home Depot to buy light bulbs.

And I learned about lumens in the light bulb. Lumens are the measure of the output of a light. Don’t be impressed, I only learned about lumens because I asked one of the people in the orange aprons about why some of the spirals I had seemed to produce less light than expected.

I learned that the 3–way spiral from GE had more lumens than the 3–way spiral that Home Depot sold. The other spirals sold by Home Depot had comparable lumens to the GE spiral light bulbs and the CVS spiral light bulbs. So, I’ll stick with the more expensive GE 3–way spirals for now, except I have not been able to find any. Oh, and 3–way spirals do not come in the compact size. They are larger because more spirals are needed in the higher watt spirals.

I have put the spirals in almost all the lighting on my list. Some of the lighting that gets lower use will not get spirals. Nor will some of our 3–way lamps because the spirals don’t fit. And I have not yet seen any spirals that will fit the chandelier in my dining room.

I am glad that I have finally dealt with getting spirals. It is a small way that I can help counter global warming.