Wholesale Globes

Is electricity saved when flourecent light globes are switched off, or should they be left on?

At work today we had a discussion about fluorescent lighting. We would like to know if it is more energy efficient to turn off flourescent lights when not in use or is it better to leave them on.

Public Comments

1. it is better to put them off,as it will consume power wnen it is on.simple!!! although it requires at the starting,high voltage to start the emmision of electrons inside ,but it matters a little as the high voltage is generated by the choke(it sensed the changing current from 0A to full circuit current in a miliseconds,so emf is generated)
2. The difference with fluorescent lights and incandescent ones (energy-wise) is simply that fluorescent lights use less electricity. Take not: less. This means that it will be better to turn them off when not in use.
3. This is quite a complicated issue. If you could just turn fluorescent lamps on and off, as you can incandescent ones, it would be simple: obviously it would save energy to turn them off when not in use. But fluorescent lamps have two characteristics that make things less simple. One is that that they don't give their full light output straight away. They take time to warm up, particularly compact fluorescents ('energy-saving' bulbs). Because of this, if fluorescent lamps are to be used on a low duty cycle (off most of the time) you have to install more of them to get enough light – not very energy saving, particularly when the high energy cost of making them is taken into account. The second thing that makes life difficult is that every time you switch on a fluorescent tube, you have to initiate a new discharge. You need a small extra pulse of energy to do this, but it's pretty negligible. The real problem is that the electrodes at either end of the tube are damaged a little every time the tube strikes. So if you keep switching it off and on, you shorten its life. Again, you have to count the extra energy cost involved in replacing the lamp earlier than necessary. I've never seen anyone lay all this out clearly in an energy budget that demonstrates unequivocally whether it is better to keep fluorescent lamps on all the time or turn them off when not needed. It certainly used to be thought that 'always on' was better, but opinions seem to be changing – I'm not sure why. Anyone out there got reliable facts and figures?
4. The fluorescent lamp has a big inductor in series (which serves to start it light), therefore the current is very inductive (component). Since many other utilities have prevalent capacitor component current, when connected in parallel with fluorescent lamps their total (sum) current cancel each other. That means less current for the same voltage, therefore less energy consumption. Therefore, it is better to leave fluorescent lamps ON.