Simple But Powerful Ways to Lower Your Lighting Bills
by adminSimple But Powerful Ways to Lower Your Lighting Bills
By Thomas Yoon
Everybody knows that lighting consumes electricity. Based on statistics, lighting is responsible for about 12% of the energy used in a typical American home. That s a huge chunk of your bills! Is there any way you can reduce your lighting bills?
Make no mistake about this, you cannot completely eliminate this need for lighting in the home at night, after all, what is life without light? You need to brighten up your nights with lights, perhaps to move around the house, doing your chores, guard against intruders, and enjoy some reading and so on. But let s try our best to reduce that energy use.
Nearly every home can benefit from improved lighting efficiency. No matter what the type of lighting in your home, there are opportunities to lower your monthly energy costs by reducing your electricity use. You can also improve the quality of light at the same time.
On the average, every home has nine lights left on for more than three hours every day. Any light bulb burning more than two hours per day on average is a good candidate to be replaced with a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL).
Below are some simple techniques to lower lighting costs and improve lighting quality. Most of them can be done with little or no skill and with low cost:
Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents
Compact Fluorescent Lamps, or CFLs, use one-third to one-quarter the energy of incandescent bulbs, and last up to ten times longer. They screw into standard light bulb sockets, and are available in many sizes and shapes to fit almost any fixture. They are more expensive to buy than incandescent bulbs, but save several times their purchase cost because of reduced electric use and longer life (less frequent replacement).
The packaging for a CFL usually indicates the equivalent wattage of the incandescent bulb it replaces. For example, a 20-watt CFL gives off about the same amount of light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb. Note that CFLs take up to a minute to reach full brightness.
Look for ENERGY STAR qualified models, which carry the ENERGY STAR logo on the product or the box. These models are among the most energy-efficient units sold.
For the purpose of calculating savings from a compact fluorescent bulb, here are some facts:
If you replace one 75-watt incandescent bulb (that costs 75
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