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O SOLAR PIONEERS living off the grid—almost

LIGHTING THE SEASON WITH LESS ENERGY

Until the availability of the CFL, or compact fluorescent light bulb, off-the-grid lighting was mired down in smelly (though beautiful) kerosene lamps or candles, with an occasional hissing, glaring propane lamp. That’s because popular incandescent lights give off far more heat than light and will take too much solar power from your solar batteries at night. Not only do the CFL bulbs last 10 times longer than your regular light bulb, they also use one-fourth the electricity for the same brilliance, or lumens. So they’re ideal, even essential for solar-powered homes.

Engineer Ed Hammer invented CFLs in the oil-scares of l976, but GE sat on his idea. Recently Al Gore promoted CFLs as an easy way every household can reduce the national consumption of fossil fuels. And, the sharply rising costs of electricity may also cause many to unscrew their incandescent light bulbs for something more efficient.

Ten years ago I assumed that the “new” compact fluorescent lights, in which the base of the bulb screws into a regular lamp socket, would have a cold glare that couldn’t compare to the inviting warmth of incandescents. I soon found that if I put a CFL under a silk lampshade, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference. Now almost all CFLs are labeled “soft” on the package, and that means a warm glow. They come in several shapes — round, bullet, and ice-cream swirls, for example. In most the finger-sized light tube is exposed and cleverly bent. Some are covered with a glass casing. They all have a small ballast cylinder at the bottom that adds to their length. Because of the ballast, they may not fit in every desk-, ceiling-, or wall-lamp design.

The ballasts are getting smaller and smaller, though, and thus more adaptable. Some cities and towns, looking at energy costs and green concerns, have actually banned incandescent light bulbs in favor of the energy-efficient CFLs. These same cities likely have a recycling place, if you ask, for the used bulbs, because the tiny amount of mercury vapor in CFLs must not go into the air or ground. And if you break one — well, check www.epa.gov/mercury/spills/index.htm#fluorescent for clean-up safety.

With a solar powered home, you have to be aware of your light usage at night, even with CFLs. You still have to turn out the lights when leaving a room. When selecting lights for a certain area, you install the ones with CFL watts down to what you absolutely need; otherwise, on the night of your extravagant holiday dinner party, the solar power computer monitor might plunge you into complete darkness (what a shock that is), saving the batteries from a damaging drain.

One of the shapes I didn’t find in a CFL was a Christmas tree light. No doubt the ballast made the bulb impossible to shrink to that size. At the same time, other seemingly new lights called Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, rose in availability. Invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak as a red light and mostly used commercially, the LED has been expanded recently by other scientists such as Shuji Nakamura, to white, blue, and green. These colors need not be from painted plastic or glass casings, as with incandescents; the LED light is itself an actual color. And LEDs do not have filaments inside that can burn out and take out your entire string of bulbs. Rather, the movement of electrons in a semi-conductor material illuminates them.

Now for Christmas you can choose LED ropes, garlands, minis, traditional strawberry shapes, round, big, little, and more. They’re cool to the touch so you can interweave them with juniper branches or wind them around the bottom of Chanukah menorahs. They can even twinkle, chase, flash, or slow-fade, if you like that holiday insanity.

More importantly, LEDs use 90 percent less energy than traditional incandescents, and will emit bright light 50,000 to 300,000 hours before giving out, perhaps between 10 and 20 years. Just like CFLs, they’re perfect for solar-powered home systems in many situations.

A string of LED Christmas lights will cost from $15 to $30, depending on color, for about 70 lights 1 ¼” in size on a 24-ft. string. Blue and purple are the more expensive to manufacture. They are tough to break, and they’re guaranteed for three years or more. The electricity usage should be negligible–unless you go solstice wild and decorate your whole yard with a panorama and leave them on day and night!

In the past Larry and I aspired to save energy at Christmas by setting up real luminarias—the wax candles, the paper bags, the sand. You don’t have to have a solar set-up to want to do this, and you too may have thought about saving energy and observing the holidays with this traditional, softly glowing way. What you do need is a big family or neighbors with time. It was a lot of work outlining the driveway with lit candles in bags of sand by ourselves; forget the top of the porch or adobe wall. The hardest part was quenching them one by one about midnight every night for a week. I always thought the visiting kids would be enthusiastic to do it. We’ve accomplished a short stretch of authentic luminarias at Christmas two years in the past 10. It was easier and more enjoyable to visit the fairyland of hand-lit luminarias in Mesilla. This year some of the children and grandchildren will be here on Christmas Eve. We now have a lighting choice — the same as yours, if you care about saving energy: Shall we construct real candle luminarias or string white or colored LED lights? Or both! I like that choice.

The Underwood A.C. solar electric system for their 1800-sq. ft. house six miles north of Las Cruces has 10 60-watt and two 120-watt PV modules, 12 lead acid batteries, a charge controller, an inverter, a power switch, a combiner and three disconnect boxes.

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