"Glow like an incandescent wire..."
There have been more than a few articles about compact fluorescent lights recently. Today jmaynard and I went over the lights in the house and we wound up replacing a good many of the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights.
The first place to get the treatment was the office as those lights get the most use. Other rooms, such the kitchen, the machine room, and with some effort the bathrooms got changed next. Later, after another trip to the store (we cleaned Hy-Vee out of their inexpensive 60 Watt compact fluorescent lights) the various closets, part of the basement, and a hallway light fixture were converted. That last one could use another CF light, but one will do for now.
There are a few incandescent lights left in the house. The attic lights which don't see much use are unchanged, as are the lights in the track lighting of part of the basement. There are a few lamps that don't see too much use so changing them over can wait indefinitely. The spiral design (and the now hard to find design with the multiple U shaped tubes) don't look right in the exposed setup the dining room fixture uses. While there are compact fluorescent lights that look more like regular bulbs, those are still rather pricey and the fixture needs four of them. A fixture at the top of the stairs probably can't be changed without changing the fixture itself. It's quite certainly original with the house, built in 1949.
Things are generally much brighter now, even as each fixture with swapped lights consumes less energy. The office had four 40 Watt incandescent bulbs, for a total of 160 Watts. Now it has four 60 Watt equivalent bulbs, so we get the light of 240 Watts incandescent - but each light only uses 13 Watts, so we're only using 52 Watts total for office light now.
The downstairs bathroom is much brighter though that is mainly because the tubular bulbs (not 1949 -- made in Taiwan) had such huge dark deposits on the inside of the envelope that they reminded me of a vacuum tube "getter." The lights still burned, but were so dim we figured they were 15 Watt bulbs.
We now have a drawer full of incandescent bulbs. One did get put to use, replacing a bad bulb in the garage door opener. We've got spares to last a while.