I've had a delightfully long weekend thanks to my company's President's Day holiday, so I got some time to get to some long-ignored items on my "To Do" list around the house.
First up was replacing all the innards of the downstairs toilet, as it had started running constantly after it was flushed. I know I could have replaced just the flapper valve, but I figure that if the flapper's gone bad it probably isn't too long before other components start giving out, too. Also, there's a nice wooden shelf above the tank that I have to remove from the wall before I can take the tank lid off, and I didn't want to repeatedly hassle with that shelf, either. So, I bought a kit from OSH and replaced everything but the handle. I got the job done in a little over an hour (including taking the time to remove the silicone plug where the rear tank mounting bolt should have been) and fortunately had no leaks.
Of course, later that night the flush handle broke off. Yes, the only thing I didn't replace. [sigh] Another trip to OSH and now everything but the porcelain is new and working well.
Now on to lights. Over the past week or so I've noticed that several light bulbs around the house have gone out. It must be the colder, winter weather. With the crazy economic actions going on at both the Federal and state level, I'm convinced that not only will interest rates continue to climb, but all sorts of new taxes are going to sprout up to take even larger chunks of my already decimated paycheck. As a result, I re-evaluated where we have incandescent lights to see if I can replace them with some CFLs and save some money over the long haul.
Many of the lights in the house are halogen or specialty, small-base bulbs that don't have CFL equivalents. However, I identified seven lights that get frequent use and could benefit from the switch: The front porch light, a floor lamp in the great room, the hanging lamp over the dining room table, the living room table lamp, and the three in-ceiling floods above my desk in my office. This time I went to Home Depot to buy the bulbs, as they have a better selection than OSH. $50 dollars later and I'm set with CFLs for all those locations. The front porch can get by with an old Ikea CFL I found kicking around in the lightbulb box, but the rest are new bulbs, including a dimmable one for the dining room.
The expensive ones were the three R30-style in-ceiling ones above my home office desk: $12 each for the Philips Marathon Classic 65s. They're dimmable, and they can dim to my preferred lighting level without flickering or buzzing, but like the CFLs of old they take a few seconds to come up to full brilliance. They're pretty cold-colored, but I guess it compliments the cold cathode light from my LCD monitors.
The dimmable 90 watt CFL for the dining room was from ecosmart, who don't seem to have a website. I have no complaints so far—it actually lights to full brilliance almost immediately (<5s) and dims nicely without buzzing or flickering.
The last two bulbs are from n:vision. They're straight-forward, non-dimmable 100 watt equivalents. What I like about the n:vision products is that they offer them in three different color temperatures: soft, bright, and daylight. Of course, they neglect to tell you how many degrees K those names refer to, but at least you have some control over the general color range. I picked the "bright" color, as both the lamps they're installed in are used for reading lights. They're a touch slow to get to full brilliance, but they hit 90% or so right at the start, so I don't really miss that final 10%.
Now, if you believe all the marketing hype around these CFLs I should be saving $45.50 a year, which means it'll take 14 months before they pay for themselves. Let's hope they last that long!
Oh, and one last lighting tidbit: A couple months after we moved into the house Michelle turned on the halogen sconces in the living room, only to get a big "bang!" and have all the lights in that room and my office go out. It seems that one of the halogen bulbs decided to go out in style with an electrical short that popped the circuit breaker. Unfortunately, it also managed to fry my subwoofer (the only bit of electronics not on a surge protector) and the dimmer portion of the light switch. So, while I was at Home Depot picking up CFLs I also picked up a new dimmer switch.
The Lutron Skylark eco-dim dimmer switch was $3 less than the standard Skylark dimmer, so I went with it without really understanding the eco-dim feature. After I got home and installed it I noticed that the sconces didn't seem as bright as before, so I looked up the Lutron website to read more about eco-dim. Well, I think they named it well, as it's a pretty dim idea that only eco-weenies could love: it simply provides only 85% of the maximum current to the lights! Hell, I already have a dimmer, so can't I dim the lights by 15% myself if I feel like it? Fortunately there's a switch on the side of the dimmer to turn the silly feature off.