100 Ways to Save Money in 100 Days-5: Switch to CFL’s or LED’s
Posted By Mr. Imperfect on June 27, 2008
Welcome! This is our 100 ways in 100 days series on saving money by reducing your expenses. If you are new here, consider subscribing to our RSS feed to get post as soon as they are available. Not sure about RSS feeds? For a description, and a brief tutorial, check our RSS Page.
This one (as with many of the other tips that we have shared) has been preached all over the internet. We are simply trying to place all of these ideas into a single location, while picking the ones that we feel are the most relevant and the ones that we have tried.
When it come to electricity, I would say that this step was easily the third biggest energy saving tip that we tried. We have covered one already, and we will cover another in the near future. The price has come down considerably in the last year, and you can now get a quality CFL (compact fluorescent light) for around a dollar.
We have tried several brands, and most have worked fairly well as far a light output compared to incandescent bulbs. There is a difference to be noted though. For example, a sixty watt incandescent bulb was comfortable for us to read by; that was not the case with the CFL, and I hear that the LED’s are even a little fainter than the CFL’s. That was the bad news. The good news is that we now get the equivalent of a 100w incandescent bulb, and only use 23w with our CFL!! Now that may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but lets do a little math pertaining to our situation.
We have 37 light fixtures in and around our house. Some of these almost burn continuously, while others-such as in closets-rarely if ever get used. After doing about a half a month of collecting data, we discovered that we averaged around three hours a day per bulb. Now, that is 37(bulbs)X100(watts)X3(hours)=11100w per day average. That equals 11.1 kilowatts per day (1 kilowatt=1000 watts). In our area we only have one municipality electric system to get service from, and they charge an extortionate (compared to other companies just a few miles north of us) rate of a little over ten cents per kilowatt hour. That equates to roughly $1.10 per day just for lighting. The same figure with our replacement CFL’s [37(bulbs)X100(watts)X3(hours)=2550w or 2.55kw per day]? That would come to 26 cents per day! A savings of $25.20 per month!!
Action point: We highly recommend trying to change as many of these bulbs as soon as possible. Congress has already passed a bill that will do away with the incadescent buld by 2012 if I remember correctly. Only replace what you can afford to, but even if it is just one buld every couple weeks in a high use area, you should see the difference fairly quickly. Thank you for reading our articles, and have a great day!
For an interesting book on creating you own electricity, and even selling some back to the electric company Click Here!
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