I lean a bit towards the treehugger side, but especially so when it can save me a few bucks. So I found this bit of info from productdose interesting: they’ve thrown together a spreadsheet that will let you calculate what you can save (spreadsheet available at the end of the linked article) by swapping out your good ol’ wasteful incandescents with comparable compact fluorescent (CF) or the new LED light bulbs.
Some of their givens are a bit aggressive (for instance, $2.98 might get you a CF bulb, but it certainly isn’t going to be a particularly good CF bulb; $10 is probably a good base price for decent CFs, in my experience), but you can swap out their info for more reasonable numbers. And their 33 cents a KWh I hope to not see for quite some time! Also, I can’t imagine paying $55 for a single LED bulb, not matter it’s expected longevity – give them a few years in the market and I’m sure we’ll see a less painful upfront cost – so I just ignored that column altogether.
Throwing my guess at our usage info into the mix (20 bulbs/5 hours a day/6 cents a KWh and the more reasonable $10/bulb), looks like we could potentially save just over $100 a year – not bad for just a little extra investment initially. Might have to do a bit of shopping, see if I can find a good case price.
To top it all off, I’ll only have to risk my neck and get the ladder out to change that one bulb way above the staircase 1/7th as often… 
[tags]CF, compact fluorescent,energy,utilities,lightbulb[/tags]
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