Our electricity use has been taxing me this week. It started with a need to replace the light in our ongoing bathroom project. Trying to find something we liked was tricky but to make it low wattage and bright enough felt impossible.
The bottom line on bulbs is essentially old tungsten bulbs used 60 - 100W per bulb, halogen bulbs use 50W, compact fluorescent bulbs(CFLs) used 7 - 20W and LEDs use 1 - 5W as far as I can see. It makes sense that new lights are as electricity efficient as possible. Finally we found a nice light that takes LED G9 bulbs. This means rather than using 200W to light the bathroom we will be using 10W. I like that.
This got me thinking about the CFL bulbs we use and would it be worth converting to LEDs? As bulbs blow definitely, if we changed them all today we could save up to 1/6th of our electicity use. This doesn't, unfortunately, but comes to 600kg of CO2 per year. So I think I will do a bit of both. Convert or upgrade light fittings progressively to allow LED bulb usage and upgrade to replace blown bulbs. I have also discovered I can change the transformers on some of our low voltage halogen lights. It is also possible to put PIR switches on lights that tend to get left on so they switch off automatically. So more to do.
The bottom line on bulbs is essentially old tungsten bulbs used 60 - 100W per bulb, halogen bulbs use 50W, compact fluorescent bulbs(CFLs) used 7 - 20W and LEDs use 1 - 5W as far as I can see. It makes sense that new lights are as electricity efficient as possible. Finally we found a nice light that takes LED G9 bulbs. This means rather than using 200W to light the bathroom we will be using 10W. I like that.
This got me thinking about the CFL bulbs we use and would it be worth converting to LEDs? As bulbs blow definitely, if we changed them all today we could save up to 1/6th of our electicity use. This doesn't, unfortunately, but comes to 600kg of CO2 per year. So I think I will do a bit of both. Convert or upgrade light fittings progressively to allow LED bulb usage and upgrade to replace blown bulbs. I have also discovered I can change the transformers on some of our low voltage halogen lights. It is also possible to put PIR switches on lights that tend to get left on so they switch off automatically. So more to do.
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