I went to Home Depot today to replace two burned out light bulbs in my kitchen, and for the first time, I bought a pair of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) that were shaped like floodlights.

For a few years, I’ve been gradually replacing burned out bulbs with these more efficient ones, even though they tend to cost up to 10 times as much as the good ol’ incandescent variety. Usually I’ve put these little coiled up bulbs in the garage, basement or closets. But this time these spotlights took center stage in the kitchen, and while they don’t look as good as the old style, they don’t look half bad, either.

Which led me to do a little more research on CFLs. According to Wikipedia.org, the energy savings of fluorescent are quite real. You can recover the additional cost of a bulb in about 500 hours (or about three months of typical use). But over the life of a bulb, you can easily save $36 or more.

Wikipedia led me to another interesting Web site dealing with CFLs. It’s called onebillionbulbs.com, and its slogan is “Changing the world, one bulb at a time.”

On the homepage is a map of the United States, and a color charting each state’s progress toward environmental responsibility. Wisconsin is pretty far from green, according to the site. Mind you, the stats come from its own users, so the data is pretty skewed, but the message is what matters.

Even better, check out this statement from the government’s Energy Star Web site:

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”

Good enough for me. Yeah, the bulbs do still look a little sucky, but considering the enormous positive impact they can have on the environment, I’ll keep adding new ones as my old bulbs burn out. I encourage you to buy CFLs, too.