Leaving fluorescent lights switched on at home…

My entire flat has GU10 Halogen bulbs, about 36 in total, and I would never recommend them. They seem to be being fitted in every new build at the moment and my speculation is that they'll all be being removed in a few years time after everyone is thoroughly sick of them. At 50w each and 4-6 bulbs in a room they are phenomenally expensive after a few hours of use.

As mentioned earlier in this thread - although I'm not sure about the green propaganda comment - the heat given off is a real problem, it may be beneficial in winter if you happen to like heating your ceiling, but it isn't really very useful during the height of summer. The shadowing, expense of buying and running them together with the heat, does make me wonder who exactly thought this was a good idea in the first place.

I've started replacing the halogens with the energy efficient flourescent and LED varieties, which initially is very expensive thing to do but they are rated at 50 000 - 70 000 hours it should just about be cheaper in the end. The cost is shocking though, the ones I use are £8-10 each, the cheapest I've found, so £288 - £360 if I want to fit the whole flat, eek.

On a more general point, and forgive me if it alteady exists and i'm not aware of it, it would be nice to see a dedicated 'green money saving board' as comsuming less and the moneysaving ethos seem to me to naturally coincide.

I've used the board quite a bit and have benefited from the posts on discounted consumer durables, 0% credit cards and energy supply costs, all of which have resulted in a healthier bank balance and for which I'm extremely grateful to the members who post notices and the existence of the site. However by far and away my largest household bill after tax is electricity, which I regularly check using Uswitch etc. What I'd really like to do and what I'm wondering if anyone can offer advise on, is install home micro-electricity generators running from solar and wind. At present as I don't own my own flat I'm not able to do this, but I'm planning to buy later in the year and would like as near to a £0 energy bill as I'm able to have, with the possibility of feeding back into the grid during the night time.

I'm actually quite shocked at how bad in terms of energy efficicent newly built houses are. My current accommodation is about 3 years old, everything is electric - don't get me started on the underfloor ceiling and floor heating - and the energy bill is enormous, the first year just under 1K. It's gone down since I became more aware of the cost, but is still more than seems reasonable. Yet the building has a large roof area and lots of scope for green generation or improvements -it's simply that as the whole block was built to let, so it's a 'machine for making the land pay' and consequently there's no interest or incentive to install anything of this nature.

While I wouldn't consider myself a green fundamentalist, it seems irrational not to build dwellings that use as little energy as possible if technology enables you to do so. I recognise installing a turbine of solar panels will cost me a few thousand, but if they add to the property value, decrease my energy bills and have a reasonable longevity (irrespective of the environmental benefits) surely this is the logical long term choice, rather than being at the whim of energy generators' tarrifs or shelling out my part of the several billion £ in taxation that will otherwise be spent on new power stations?

I'd love to know if anyone has ventured down this path and tried to make their home as zero emission friendly as possible? Oh and in the meantime a cheap reliable supplier of Energy efficient GU10 bulbs would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks