I ran a little off-the-cuff calculation and it looks to me like general lighting is less than 25% of my electric bill. And that's being extremely generous and assuming the wife left every light in the house on all night. In truth I would be surprised if our average lighting usage averaged 500 watts an hour in any 24 hour period (even if it were all incandescent, which some of it isn't) and I imagine it's significantly less than that.
The last electric bill was for 1588 kW used in 29 days. An average daily use of 12 kW just for lighting is 21.9% of that. The other ~78% goes to air conditioning, heating, other major appliance usage, TVs, fans, and the half-dozen computers I have running 24/7.
I simply don't think that installing CFLs is going to drop my usage all that much. Sure, you get 60 watts equivalent out of a 13W CFL, which is about 25%. But I'm also apt to leave the CFL on longer because it takes them so long to warm up.
If we switched all of that average 500W/hr load to CFLs, and assume that we'd use a quarter of the power for general lighting as before, that would drop our general lighting usage 75%, to 3kW/day -- but it would have lowered our bill for last month only 16.5%. Maybe. Because I'd be leaving some of those CFLs on all day.
In this day and age, 16.5% is nothing to sneeze at, but in the final analysis, it would have cut a whopping $18 off that electric bill -- just enough for the two of us to have breakfast one Sunday a month at Hotcakes Emporium, but I'd have to find more in my pocket for the tip.
The bottom line is that CFLs aren't going to drop your electric bill for squat, and you're probably going to lose that savings on the difference in price between a simple incandescent and an expensive CFL -- and apparently the CFLs are not even close to living up to the longevity hype, either.
So when does this stupid, invasive, predatory law get repealed?
In the meantime, I've got a stockpile.
I SHOULD ADD: We probably did more to lower our electric bills back in May when we installed the new high-efficiency furnace and 13 SEER air conditioner than replacing CFLs would ever do. In fact, the rebate I got from Citizens Gas for installing the furnace and a new thermostat was $4 more than 12 months of the $18/month savings I noted above...
