CFL's (Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs) Review

Using CFL's (Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs) may be the easiest thing you can do to help Mother Earth.  Although initially more expensive to purchase than regular incandescent bulbs, they can make up for it in extended life and lower energy bills.  Use these in the lamps that you use most frequently, and you'll help your budget and the environment at the same time.  CFL's use less electricity, which means that less coal is burned to produce the electricity (as the majority of American electricity comes from coal-burning power plants), and that means less air pollution and global climate change emissions.

A couple of "cons" that I can think of:  I haven't yet found CFL's that function in 3-way light switches, where you can choose from lower to mid to higher light levels.  But as these bulbs grow in popularity, I'll bet someone will figure that out and 3-way CFL's may show up commonly on store shelves.  As another reviewer noted, they don't work well with dimmer switches (again, I think that's just a matter of time).  Also, not all light fixtures are made to accept them (some CFL's are too  large to fit in).  That is usually remedied by looking for the smaller size of CFL, which is now more readily available than even just one year ago.  Another complaint is that most CFL's have a slight delay in turning on and reaching their full brightness.  This, too, is becoming less of an issue as time passes, as I have noticed some newer CFL packages advertising "instant on" capabilities.  

Be cautious about disposal of these bulbs.  They do contain small amounts of mercury, so you don't want to just throw them into the trash where they may break and eventually release theat mercury into the landfills.  Many hardware stores now offer collection bins for properly recycling these bulbs.  If one breaks in your household, remember to ventilate the room (open windows) and sweep the broken bulb's debris into a zip-lock plastic bag before taking it to a hardware store for proper disposal.  Again, I think as time goes on, there will be more and more places offering collection bins for proper disposal of these better bulbs.