Thursday, November 7, 2013

Compact florescents or LED light bulbs?

My husband works in energy efficiency programs for a local power company.  He mentioned the other day that some municipalities are seeing their per household electricity usage drop quicker than projected by energy efficiency experts.  Their numbers are fairly clean, so the addition of solar power so does not account for the discrepancy.

The power companies build in an expectation of how quickly households will move to more efficient products and methods; for example how quickly we'll move from compact florescent light bulbs to LED's  (or in previous years how quickly folks would adopt compact florescent bulbs over old fashioned incandescent light bulbs).

In some municipalities, households have moved more quickly, even by a number of years, to LED bulbs; many doing so for the whole dwelling, not just as bulbs need replacing.



We have moved to a few LED's and they are better suited to lights on dimmers.  Back in the day, we converted our whole house from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents.  This allowed us to accurately gauge the impact on our power bill.  We noticed a 25% reduction in our electricity usage (this was well before we got solar power).  But...our electricity usage is pretty low as it is. We have gas heat, hot water, cooking and clothes drying. Electricity powers our lights, fans, washing machine and electronics.

Have you started moving to LED bulbs ?  The whole house, or "as you go"?  A lot of people don't like the clod harsh light of some compact florescent bulbs.  Are you finding LED's preferable?

Oh, a few years ago, we did pick up LED lights for our Christmas tree. We liked the quality of the light, and the efficiency as they'd be left on for hours at a time.

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