http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... /29/199228
Now, at Menards or Home Depot you can get a 4 - 5 pack of these bulbs for $15 - $20. (75w equiv). I bought a pack for my Grandmother, who is still remarkably frugal, having grown up in the depression (she saves aluminum foil!) and you'd have thought I bought her a new car."if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."
I've been feeling an increasing urge lately to tone down my power consumption. According to the math above if you assume that replacing a 60w bulb saves you about 50w that's a savings of 5,500,000 Kwh. Even if that's just a drop in the bucket of our total usage, its still a fair amount. I tend to use 75w bulbs in my house, so I'd save more like 60w per bulb. I can think of 8 bulbs I could easily change. That's at least 80Kwh per month. It looks like I pay 8.5 cents/kwh so it would save something like $6.80 per month.
Two comments: I haven't seen dimmable versions of these. That automatically excludes them from a couple of my most often used light sockets. Also, since when do we use oil to produce electricity?