Over Christmas we augmented the lighting in our house with fluorescent lights. Not those wimpy little curly-Q bulbs -- we went with the big, whomping 48-inch manly bulbs. Our kitchen used to be lit by eight 60-watt incandescent bulbs embedded in the ceiling. Even though we were burning plenty of electricity, it seemed like we were living by candlelight. Once they outlawed those 500-watt halogen lamps, we might as well have been living in a cave. Fortunately, there was some space on top of the kitchen cabinets, so I installed four banks of four 32-watt fluorescent tubes.
Let there be light!
Now with about the same energy expenditure, we have what seems like 10 times as much light. I can once again read nutrition labels (even when some idiot package designer puts small black print on a red background).
Our house looks a little different from the outside, too. Instead of the warm, incandescent glow that comes from every other house on the block, our house looks like something out of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", but by gosh we have light.
By the way, my wife loves it. She use to hate fluorescent lights. The old ones, with magnetic ballast, would pulsate at 60 Hz, giving her terrible headaches. The new ones, with electronic ballast, don't have that effect, and with the "daylight" high-temperature bulbs, they cast a light of similar quality to those expensive Ott reading lamps.
She used to complain all the time how dark it was in the house. No more.
I also replaced the lights in the laundry room. Where we once had two 60 watt bulbs lighting a 10x12 room, we now have a bank of four 32-watt, four-foot fluorescent bulbs. You practically need sunglasses.