Friday, January 19, 2007

Lighting

Lighting measurements are fairly straight forward. Most lightbulbs have a wattage rating on them, and typically they use around that amount of electricity. So I won't be measuring a lot of lighting and posting them here. However, I'd like to point out that one of the quickest and easiest ways to save energy around the house is to replace your incandescent bulbs with fluorescents. Granted they cost more up front but most places they pay back from between 6 months to 1.5 years which is way faster than just about anything else "environmental" (other than just using less). Also keep in mind that they can't be used with dimmers. But you can get the same light output (yes they do make really high brightness bulbs) at less than 1/5th the energy usage.

There is another hidden advantage to fluorescents, that saves money, they put out less heat.

According to this article over at cnet, 22 percent of the electricity consumed in the US goes towards lighting. They also note that incandescent bulbs are about 5% efficient (ie 95% of the electrricity gets used gets turned in to heat, with only 5% becoming light), so I believe the dept of energy number is actually bigger, given that many people use air conditioning in the summer, they are having to cool their lighting.

1 comment:

Skye Forbes said...

Maybe that's why NC is so hot in the summer... too many lightbulbs!