The Bay Area's heat-induced "Flex Your Power" alert has been called off, but while it was still going strong earlier this week, a friend reported that his company had been asked to keep their fluorescents off for the duration.
We thought that was interesting in light of the fact that our friend and most of his co-workers are software engineers. They sit in front of glowing monitors all day long. Why do they need overhead fluorescents at all, we asked. Our friend explained that they do sometimes have to look at paper. To which we had a two-word reply: task lamps.
Fluorescents are unpleasant. They're blinky bright and headache-inducing. And wth most office workers spending much of their day staring into the glow of their computer monitors (as you may well be doing right now), they are increasingly a vestige of a long-gone era in office design.
Think about the power we'd save (and all the office romances that might be kindled) in office buildings all over the Bay Area if someone flipped the off switch on the overheads and installed soothing, flattering task lamps instead.
Model this energy-saving decor shift in your office by bringing in a task lamp and lobbying your cube mates for a break from the overheads. (One lamp we like is the homegrown Io Lamp, by SF's own Pablo Pardo.)
I feel like such a nay-sayer this week... while I hate fluorescent overheads with a frothing passion, switching to incandescent or halogen task lighting won't save energy unless most of the new lamps are left off most of the time.
Fluorescent lights use 75-85% less energy than incandescent lights.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cbecs/lit-type.html
And fluorescent lights use at least 50% less energy than halogen lights, as well as running much cooler (less burden on the AC).
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/tips/lighting.html
So for switching to task lighting to save energy, you'd need to go down to having only 20% of the light used with fluorescent overheads. Plus an open-plan office really needs overheads anyway so people can find their way through the rat maze of cubicles.
I'm still all for using task lighting on quality-of-life grounds!
An LED task light, such as this one from Adesso would be the way to go for energy savings.
http://www.allmodernfurniture.com/Adesso-5150-22-Beam-Desk-Lamp-9829AE1295.html
And for sheer oddity, Reluct showed a rather unique "clamp light":
http://www.reluct.com/home/2006/07/clamp-light-system.html