When we moved into our prior house, I found that in order to have a spare bulb when one burned out I needed to stock 13 separate kinds of bulbs. That included the 48" fluorescents in the basement that turned out to be "old style" requiring frequent ballast replacements as well.

Within about the first year I managed to convert all but one of the screw socket fixtures to standard size. The one exception was a rather ornate "chandelier" in the dining room that was on (and needed) a dimmer.

As the older bulbs failed, all (except the dimmable ones) were replaced with compact fluorescents. The earliest of the CF bulbs showed rather poor life, but later ones did show significant improvement in both life and "color quality," although the life of the CF bulbs rarely exceeded what I expected for the filament bulbs they replaced by any noticeable amount.

Although I checked the bills carefully during the first few months of the conversion to CFs, I was unable to discern a significant change in consumption; but the modest decrease in lighting power was probably just swamped by the three computers, five printers, and a couple of scanners on 24/7 for business use.

We did find that replacing incandescants with "same light rated" CFs was not really satisfactory. For "equal eye strain" we generally found we wanted about a 30 to 50% increase in the "lux rating" due quite probably to the slight actual difference in "color quality" of the CF bulbs.

Turning off (permanently) the hot tub made a spectacular improvement in the electric bills, despite rather extensive use of some heavy power equipment to remove the thing. The former owners had installed the tub before enclosing the "porch," so I had to cut the $!%@#! thing into several pieces to get it out. It took about 3 years to get the last piece into the trash. (The fiberglass, 3" thick in some places, would remove all the teeth from an "industrial strength multipurpose DEMOLITION Sawzall blade in about a half hour - about long enough to make a 10" long cut and about long enough to get enough dust in the air that the breathing filter clogged up.)

Our current home has what I would call, generously, inadequate lighting, but improvement will probably be deferred for some time since a general re-wiring is badly needed. Capacity is marginal, but ok; but one outlet per room is far below the code even for the 50s when the house was built.

The former occupant dabbled in autos, so the garage has a reinforced rafter fully capable of supporting a 5T hoist, but he also had installed 12 ceiling lights with 100W floodlights in each. I immediately replaced each 100W incandescant with a "100W equivalent" 23W CF bulb. While it was obvious that the light quality was degraded, the surprise was that I've been replacing the CF bulbs regularly, with NONE lasting more than about 5 months, some as little as two.

Since I'm seldom in the garage for more than about 3 hours at a time (maybe once per month) but may have the lights on for 15 or 20 minutes once or twice per week, I must assume that the CF bulbs just have incredibly poor life when used in on/off mode. The one bulb that the prior owner had wired "always on" has lasted (with a CF) for about 9 months now, so I'm watching it to see if maybe I just need to leave them all on all the time. (But when I have the time, I'll probably replace his 12 flood fixtures with about 4 std "shop light" fluorescent fixtures with std 48" tubes, since my workspace layout is quite a bit different than what he apparently used. His lights are also at about 10.5 ft altitude, and I can put new diffused fixtures at about 8 ft where I need the light.)

The bottom line is that with about 10 years experience at replacing as many incandescants with CFs as possible, I'm not particularly impressed with any of the claims made for the "universal suitability" of CF lamps as replacement for all the glow bulbs.

I've also tried a few LEDs for a couple of places where there seemed to be an appropriate application, and have found them generally unfit for human use and NOT A GOOD ECONOMIC TRADOFF. In "household" applications, power consumption (measured) has been about 3x advertised rate, and LED element life about 1/10 - or less - of what they claim. Most LED units are multi-element, and apparently the sellers rate them as still alive if one of the original (17 to 30 in my case) lenses is still lit. I consider - by my observation - that the light is degraded if 5% of the elements are gone. Light quality, especially color, for the units I've tried has also been unacceptable for our use.

Waiting for the "miracle bulb," but it ain't here yet.

John