By Robert Plunkett

With high energy costs driving up electricity bills and lighting choices expanding – how do you find the best and cheapest solution? With the wide array of lighting choices available, it can be hard to pick the best — and cheapest.

The first light bulbs – incandescent bulbs – still follow Thomas Edison’s original design: an electrical current runs through a filament in a glass bulb. The filament then heats up, emitting light, as well as a lot of heat. Incandescent bulbs seem like the cheapest option: a four-pack costs somewhere between $2 and $3. But the cost goes up once you use them – 20 and 100 watts per hour, or about 2-12 kilowatts per month. And they don’t last too long: maybe 750 to 1,000 hours, or six to eight months. They are also the most convenient option. They can be used with dimmer switches, and after 100 years of use, most of the bugs have been worked out. And, when they burn out, simply throw them away.

But to save electricity, new, more energy-efficient lighting options are being phased in and incandescents are being phased out. The current light bulb leaders, developed in the early 1980’s, are compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). CFLs cost around $2 a bulb (four times as much as incandescent bulbs) but they last a four to seven times longer – 6,000 and 10,000 hours. And they use a lot less electricity: a 26-watt compact fluorescent puts out as much light as a 100-watt incandescent, with only a quarter of the electricity.

CFLs have their downside: they can flicker, most can’t be used with a dimmer, some have a weird greenish color and, since they contain mercury, you shouldn’t just throw them out with the trash. But as the curlicue bulbs grow more popular, more and more stores are offering on-site recycling.

The brightest option is light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs. A nine-watt LED bulb puts out as much light as a 40-watt incandescent, but will last for 25,000 hours. Depending upon usage, that can be up to 23 years. They also don’t present the same mercury hazard as CFLs, which makes them easier to throw away. Then again, with 23 years of life, chances are slim you will ever throw one away.

Unfortunately, LEDs are prohibitively expensive. They run about $40 apiece; most LED bulb makers are small companies with limited production runs. On the bright side (pun intended), GE and Sylvania are starting to put out LED bulbs so keep an eye out for lower prices in the future.

So right now the basic choice is still between incandescents and CFLs. Over the course of seven years, a CFL bulb will use about $25 worth of energy. By comparison, an incandescent bulb will use about $96 worth of electricity in the same period and will need to be replaced about eight times, leading to an overall cost of more than $100 dollars.