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I am a fan for sure but I'm not sure we will see such a drastic benefit. We are a 2 person household as well and thing like the TV, fish tank, computer, stove etc use a whole lot more energy than the lights we have on. At $4 a bulb or whatever it doesn't make sense to me to switch out every light bulb in the house. The bathrooms see maybe an hour a week off on time.
I'd buy a few and every time you lose an incandescent I'd replace it with LED.
Energy efficiency has many angles. We have been living in the same house for 22 years. Electricity is our only utility. Our electric bill is about the same as it was 22 years ago, even though the utility company has raised rates half a dozen times. When we started we had CRT TV sets, incandescent lights, single pane windows, and inadequate insulation. All of those things have been updated. We replaced a slider with Pella french doors with mini-blinds between the panes, and placed insulating honeycomb blinds on all the windows. LEDs are not that much more efficient that CFLs. The place they are really saving power is street lights, factory lights and signs, where they light up the whole great outdoors. I had a friend in the '70s who lived on a hill that was 5 miles outside the city limits of Salem, Oregon. You could easily read a newspaper by city lights, from 5 miles away. If you are going to waste energy, at least do it efficiently.
I am a fan for sure but I'm not sure we will see such a drastic benefit. We are a 2 person household as well and thing like the TV, fish tank, computer, stove etc use a whole lot more energy than the lights we have on. At $4 a bulb or whatever it doesn't make sense to me to switch out every light bulb in the house. The bathrooms see maybe an hour a week off on time.
we live in an apartment and there are rooms and halls i still will not change . they just are not used much .
being i still teach one day a week at an electrical wholesaler i get lamps at cost and even at cost it does not pay to replace some of them with led's .
i think i paid .25 cents for some incandescent bulbs last time i bought a bunch
I have a large home, with a wife and kid who can't seem to figure out how a light switch works. They think it only can be flipped on.
Having failed to teach my family how to properly work a light switch, I resorted to replacing all our bulbs with LED. The first month after the switch, our bill was about $60 less. There were no significant changes in the weather, so our AC use stayed pretty constant, so the majority of that $60 is related to the LED bulbs.
Our kitchen alone has 8 60 watt lights in the ceiling, and another 5 in the chandelier in the breakfast nook. So that's 13 bulbs (780w) in the kitchen alone that were staying on 10-12 hours a day. Switching to LED's, the wattage equivalent is 9 watts each, or 117w total. That's a huge decrease in energy.
Also switched out our old pool light, which was 300watts, with an LED, which is only 38w IIRC.
Very happy we switched. My parents can't understand why my electric bills are always lower than theirs even though I have a bigger home and more people in my home.
I changed a total of 69 lights over to LED and modeled my expected savings on an Excel spreadsheet. There are two types of savings; those based on using less electricity and those based on the expected longer life of a LED light.
For electricity savings I looked at:
- watts saved (difference between incandescent/halogen and LED)
- average hours the light is on
- cost per Kilowatt hour
That gave me an annual saving of $202
For longevity savings, I looked at:
- the price of an 'old' light
- the expected/rated life of an 'old' light
- the price of an LED
- the expected life of an LED
That gave me expected 'longevity' savings over a 20 year period of $4,200. Those savings would be greater if I was switching over today because LED lights are cheaper than they were.
I switched everything to LED bulbs in my house. I'm currently redoing the garage and I'm getting LED lights in there also. My electrical bill dropped by about $20 a month
I switched to CFLs in 2005 (or so) and our household energy use dropped about 10%. We did a remodel in 2006 which added four cans in every bedroom, plus ceiling fans with four bulbs each, plus 7 cans in the lr and 14 in the kitchen, and another 2 in every closet. With 7 people living here (at the time), and being CA (SCE), the bills were quite high (even back then) and would routinely hit $400-$500
In 2012 I made the switch to HO-LEDs including dimmable. Our electricity usage was averaging about 33kwh a day in 2012 and has now decreased to less than 20 kwhd/600kwhm. The best investment I ever made and has more than recovered the initial $1200 investment. Now they're ridiculously cheap with ACE Hardware selling 4 packs of 60w led bulbs for less than $10.
Our electric bill was $89 last month and we only used 504kwh. The average in our area is north of 800.
The next step for me is installing a 2800w grid tie solar system which will cut my reliance on SCE to less than 200kwh per month.
Thta solar system is gonna cost you, esp compared to whatever savings you'll get from them. Of course, they're better for the environment, which benefits everyone in the long run.
The next step for me is installing a 2800w grid tie solar system which will cut my reliance on SCE to less than 200kwh per month.
The sun offers near-infinite energy, but the problem is harnessing that energy. Harnessing this energy requires solar cells and solar cell production emits greenhouse gases that are much worse than carbon dioxide.
Energy scholar Ozzie Zehner explains that the solar cell manufacturing process is one of the largest emitters of hexafluoroethane, nitrogen trifluoride, and sulfur hexafluoride.
Zehner writes, "As a greenhouse gas hexafluoroethane is twelve thousand times more potent than carbon dioxide … nitrogen trifluoride is seventeen thousand times more virulent than carbon dioxide, and sulfur hexafluoride, the most treacherous greenhouse gas…is twenty-five thousand times more threatening (than carbon dioxide)."
I changed a total of 69 lights over to LED and modeled my expected savings on an Excel spreadsheet. There are two types of savings; those based on using less electricity and those based on the expected longer life of a LED light.
For electricity savings I looked at:
- watts saved (difference between incandescent/halogen and LED)
- average hours the light is on
- cost per Kilowatt hour
That gave me an annual saving of $202
For longevity savings, I looked at:
- the price of an 'old' light
- the expected/rated life of an 'old' light
- the price of an LED
- the expected life of an LED
That gave me expected 'longevity' savings over a 20 year period of $4,200. Those savings would be greater if I was switching over today because LED lights are cheaper than they were.
I don't think there are as many as 20 lights in this house; off the top of my head I come up with 12.
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