Making up for lost daylight

The sun is setting earlier in the northern hemisphere and for most Americans, clocks rolled back on November 2, stealing another hour of natural light.

Less time to both play outdoors and work window-side means more time for electric powered lights.

This is no small matter. A fourth of all electricity consumed in the United States goes toward lighting, and 20 percent of that is spent air conditioning waste heat from inefficient light bulbs. Plus, as my colleague Cher Seruto notes, the more artificial light used at night, the less stargazing for us all.

Lighting technologies have come a long way since the incandescent bulb, which wastes more than 90 percent of its energy as heat. Here are a few lighting tips to make the extra hour of dark in our evenings a moot point:

Smart Use First

Use lighting only when and where you need it. Lighting a whole room so you can see what you're doing is similar to refrigerating a whole house to preserve perishable food. Try using task lights instead. And if you can't remember to turn off lights, install occupancy sensors to do it for you when you enter or leave a room.

Efficient Lighting

Replace your halogen torchieres! Ever wonder why they create fire hazards? These lamps operate at 970 degrees Fahrenheit. Compact fluorescent (CFL) versions can save each year the carbon dioxide equivalent of driving a medium-sized car 743 miles. You'll also avoid $36 a year on your electricity bills.

If you haven't switched out your incandescents for CFLs, don't wait another minute. CFLs save you money in two ways:

1. They last longer than incandescent bulbs (between 8500 hours and 11,250 hours depending on how well you use them), and
2. They use less electricity to provide the same amount of light -- only 25 percent as much.

Specifically, each CFL you install saves $50 in electricity costs over the lifetime of the bulb. If you replaced five 75-watt bulbs with CFLs, you could save more than $250 over eight years! See the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy's chart for details.

You could accrue even more money by switching out incandescent fixtures for CFL fixtures. If all households in the United States replaced five 100-watt fixtures with 23-watt CFL fixtures, enough electricity would be saved to power three cities the size of New York day in and day out.

Want to do more? Try purchasing some cutting-edge light emitting diodes (LEDs). These lights last ten times longer than CFLs. Decorative LED lights -- like those used to drape across Christmas trees -- use less than a dollar of electricity to operate over the holiday season and large strings of light can save up to $75.

And when your lightbulbs do burn out, don't forget to recycle them. The Home Depot and IKEA collect CFLs. Check out the EPA or Earth911.org to find your nearest recycling location.

Adding Natural Light

Beyond electric lighting, plenty of opportunities exist to add more sunlight. Daylighting lowers electricity use and cooling loads, and enhances our visibility, health, and productivity. Try these simple fixes:

• To reflect more light around your rooms, paint a wall white and switch out darker carpeting for lighter versions.
• Install a solar tube to funnel light into spaces with few windows like dark hallways, bathrooms, and kitchens. These fixtures are the low-cost alternative to skylights and are available for under $400.
• Mount a lightshelf. Lightshelves are flat surfaces attached to the exteriors of buildings that bounce natural light through windows and deep into the building while also reducing glare.