I have been steadily converting the lighting in my house to greener products. This started with compact fluorescent lights (CFL) in areas that were left on for long periods of time. Unfortunately, for places where we are turning the lights on and off fairly often the CFL bulbs are not the most optimal choice. They take several minutes to warm up to full brightness and my husband claims that many of them appear to flicker.

When we did some kitchen work, we found some very nice LED (light emitting diode) counter lighting that mounts on the bottom of the cabinets. We installed four of these bars, each of which uses about 8 Watts. They do an excellent job of lighting the counter work area and because they use so little power (32 Watts for the whole kitchen), we tend to leave them on in the evening after dinner.

Recently we found some LED light bulbs that are designed to replace 100 Watt bulbs. These use 13 Watts each and are supposed to last for 50,000 hours of use (this is over 20 years for 6 hours of use per day). These come in two colors: cool white and warm white, and came in a normal and a short height configuration. We found that the normal (to the right) was able to
	replace the light in a table lamp, while the short (too the left) did a good job in a ceiling fixture. The short was not very good in the table lamp as it tended to be too directional (up). Both colors are very nice, with the warm white looking very much like an incandescent bulb. When turned on, they are immediately at full power and do not appear to flicker like some of the CFL units. While these bulbs are still fairly expensive, we anticipate switching many of the lights in our house to these as the price drops.
One area in which we have not had much luck is dimmable bulbs. There are currently some dimmable LED bulbs available, but the selection is fairly limited and they are quite expensive. We have not tried one yet. However, there is a fairly large selection of dimmable CFL bulbs now available. The dimmable CFL replacement for the dimmable LED above is quite a bit less expensive, and only about a factor two more expensive than a comparable R20 incandescent bulb. We recently purchased an Ecosmart dimmable CFL bulb from Homedepot. Unfortunately, we were quite disappointed by its performance. The minimum light output appeared to be about one half the maximum. In our mind, it was not dimmable in any useable sense of the word, and we would not reccomend these.

The last bulb that we have been working on is the 3-way bulbs in some of our lamps, (we use 50-100-150 Watt incandescent). We have found some 3-way CFL bulbs that will replace these (the CFL uses 13/20/25 Watts).

While the lifetime of a CFL bulb is supposed to by 6000 to 15000 hours, we have noted that if they are turned on and off very very often, they will burn out in a very short time. We encountered this with our garage door opener that if the door is unable to close, the lights on the unit blink on and off very quickly until the problem is resolved. Further reading on the issue seems to suggest that if the lights are turned on, they should remain on for at least 20 minutes. While we have no evidence of this, we have found that none of the other CFL bulbs we installed have burned out and several of them are approaching two years old.