Review: N:vision Energy Saving Lightbulbs

This is Earth month, and everywhere you go you see sales on all sorts of products to help save the Earth. From all natural cleaners to energy saving light bulbs, there are a plethora of products on the market. We have used energy saving fluorescent style light bulbs in our livingroom lamps for years, but they have always been very expensive. When I browsed through the Home Depot sales ad in our Sunday paper, one product really stood out. They were selling N:vision energy saving light bulbs at huge discounts. Other brands of energy saving bulbs were running as much as $11 each at other stores, yet Home Depot had boxes of four 60 watt n:vision bulbs for $5.88!! I bought 7 boxes and promptly replaced most of the incandescent bulbs in our home.

Description

These bulbs are about the same length as a normal light bulb, but the light is made up of a narrow glass spiral, because these are fluorescent light bulbs. The energy savings is impressive too! One light bulb will give you 60 watts of light, but it only used 14 watts of energy!! They are very bright as well, each bulb puts out 900 lumens. A standard 60 watt bulb has 800 lumens. They savings don’t stop there, these have a lifetime of 10,000 hours!

Thoughts

The n:vision website has a page that you can visit that will show you how much money you will save by switching to “Equivalent CFL” light bulbs, and it is an eye opener. I punched in the proper numbers for our home, and my “total cost of ownership” savings was just over $1000!! The good news doesn’t stop there, I will also be saving 13224 pounds of CO2!

One of the downfalls of using the CFL bulbs is that they cannot be used with dimmer switches, and if the bulb is going to show, they just don’t look nearly as attractive as the old fashioned light bulb. You can use them in 3 way switches, but they will only light up on one setting, the middle one. They should also not be used in any recessed lighting fixtures.

These energy saving bulbs use 2/3 less energy and last up to 10 times longer!! The main downfall that I see in using these energy saving CFL bulbs, is that they contain mercury, a known toxin. You don’t want to break one of these bulbs! The back of the box clearly states this contains mercury. So far, manufacturers have not found a way to produce these bulbs without using mercury, but they have greatly reduced the amount they do use. Each bulb contains about 5 milligrams, the equivalent to the tip of a ball point pen.

These bulbs, made by n:vision, are endorsed with the “energy star” label, meaning they automatically come with a two-year warranty.

If every household switched their lighting to energy star, energy saving light bulbs, this would make a huge impact on our environment, and would help each family save money at the same time. This is a win win situation! I encourage you to check these out.