OTOH, my entire house is fluorescent and LED. My monthly electricity bill is $65. For a house! I never have to replace burnt out bulbs. At $13 I'd guess the LED is actually about at break-even over the life of the bulb vs incandescent unless you're buying incandescent in the big packs of 30 bulbs for $10.
The only gas in my house is my central heating, and my old water heater. I plan to replace that with point-of-use electric tankless units. No more waiting 2 minutes for hot water at the kitchen sink! With a $3,000 grid-connected solar kit I'm pretty sure I can get to near $0/month on electricity, even with the electric water heaters and the Nissan Leaf I just bought last night. ;-)
It's the future brother. Stuff lasts longer, provides a better experience and is cheaper. It's win/win/win. The environmental wins might not be all that dramatic with the impact of production factored in, but if you're in it for the long haul I figure you can still feel OK about it if you were up to replace a bulb/water-heater/car/etc anyways when you make the switch.
PS: Have you seen the price on POU tankless water heaters? Once you have the panel/breaker/wiring in place, they're dirt cheap compared to traditional water heaters.
Where do you live, and what's the square footage of the house? My monthly bill is hundreds per month, but the significant majority of that is AC - I live in Arizona, and cooling in the summer here takes a crazy amount of juice.
Lighting is all CFL, though - the bulbs are about $1.40 apiece and consume 13w of juice, which works out to around $11/year to run 24/7. A 60w incandescent would cost around $52/year to run 24/7. We obviously don't run them constantly, but even if the incandescents were free, the CFLs are a better deal over the bulb's lifetime.
Dallas. ~2400sqft maybe? I forget. It's pretty easy to lock in ~9c rates here. I think I actually pay 9.6c per kwh because I chose the "100% Windpower" option.
Wow, that's impressive. How old are your AC units? Newer ones are apparently crazy more efficient - I'm wondering if it might be worth the upgrade cost now.
We just bought the house a year ago, so I have no idea. I know it was on the market for two years and got all new kitchen appliances. The condenser certainly looks new though, and bigger than I'm used to in a single story home, so it's my guess it also saw an upgrade.
> I plan to replace that with point-of-use electric tankless units.
So what is your gas bill right now? It costs around five times as much to heat with electricity.
If you wanted to be smart about it, add an electric heater with a sensor. Best of both worlds that way. Hot water is instant but after two minutes you are using cheap gas-heated water.
Gas is typically more than my electricity bill and I only have the gas water heater and central air. Dryer, cooktop, etc is all electric.
You're right of course, but given my cheap electric rates, the fact that "some day" I could produce electricity on my roof, and I won't be throwing 2 gallons of water down the kitchen sink waiting for it to warm up, that it'll be a win overall.
I'm not going to be drilling for gas in my back yard anytime soon after all. :-)
Plus, I'd find it hard to believe that generally speaking my electricity isn't far better for the environment considering it's 100% wind. It's probably easier to ask what weeks has there not been some mishap in Texas City than not. That's not normally a primary driver for me, but all things being equal it's a plus.
Lighting is a small fraction of your overall electricity usage. HVAC alone uses many times as much. While using efficient lighting is a good idea far too many people get hung up on it when there are better places to conserve.
It depends on how many people are in your family and how frequently they forget to turn off the lights. Plus, having 400W of incandescent bulbs on is 400 more watts that the A/C system has to cool.
Yes and No? I mean, my bill only goes up $20 in the summer to cool the house, and that's in a 35 year old home in Dallas. That's over 90 straight days of 110F temperatures last year.
It's a new, pretty efficient HVAC unit though. Thankfully. First home I've had that didn't struggle to maintain 76F indoors during the hottest part of the day.
Still, there's not a ton you can do around the house as cheap as replacing the bulbs in the high-traffic areas. Anybody can do that. Replacing your HVAC for something more efficient is going to be a challenge for most.
Then there's high-R-value windows to install. Foam insulation on exterior walls (brick, so that's a lot of dry-wall work). Radiant barriers in the attic space. More ceiling insulation. Tankless water heaters.
Outside of maintaining your weather stripping, I can't think of anything that pays off as much, for as little, than replacing your light bulbs. Maybe getting a Nest thermostat? We've got recessed lighting in the Living Room, which had four big 90W halogen bulbs when we moved in, and are almost always on if somebody's home. Replaced 'em with 17W LED bulbs (http://www.usa.philips.com/c/led-light-bulbs/ambientled-17w-...).
That comes out to about $7/month in savings. (360w vs 68w @ $0.0912 per kw/hr). In the year since I installed them they've paid for themselves. They'll last 22 years according to Phillips. The ROI on LED (for your highest-traffic rooms at least) is stupid cool, and I'll effectively never have to bust out the 8' ladder to replace them. I might be off base, but I think I've typically replaced halogens every couple years or so. So even over 5 years the old bulbs probably would've cost me 10X more.
For our situation at least, that's a no brainer. If I can spend $50 today and avoid paying $5/month indefinitely, that's a big win in my book. I may not be able to afford to buy a car cash, and have to pay the financing penalty, but at least I can break out of the "financing" cycle with my home lighting. ;-)
To each his own. I'm comfortable at 76, which is good, because my family will complain about being cold. (They're happy at 70 in the winter, though... go figure.)
I live in a new construction condo in the Pacific Northwest. A couple of times per year I have to turn on a single heater.
My $35 power bill is my desktop computer, refrigerator, hot water heater, and the 7 lights that end up turned on just to light up a 500 or so sqft living space. (Recessed lighting is evil.)
One of the most interesting parts of lighting energy efficiency to me is that once lighting uses so little power, you can use battery backup for power outages.
I'm surprised there isn't a push for low voltage LED lighting. Running low voltage cabling and electrical boxes is a lot easier and the LEDs run off of low voltage anyway. Outside of appliances, who needs 120VAC in most of their rooms?
I was going to do this in the house that I am building, but the building department has very strict codes for how often you need 120VAC outlets (quite often to prevent daisy chained power strips and similar unsafe behavior). The relevant code is from the International Building Code:
"Receptacles shall be installed so that no point measured horizontally along the floor line of any wall space is more than 6 feet (1829 mm), from a receptacle outlet." [1]
Yeah, that is a common building code requirement in most states. It's going to be more annoying when everything starts having USB plug adapters and charges off 5v.
My biggest problem with either fluorescent or LED is that the brightness is not there at the top end, once you get into 150W-equivalent and higher. I'm sure we'll get there though.
The only gas in my house is my central heating, and my old water heater. I plan to replace that with point-of-use electric tankless units. No more waiting 2 minutes for hot water at the kitchen sink! With a $3,000 grid-connected solar kit I'm pretty sure I can get to near $0/month on electricity, even with the electric water heaters and the Nissan Leaf I just bought last night. ;-)
It's the future brother. Stuff lasts longer, provides a better experience and is cheaper. It's win/win/win. The environmental wins might not be all that dramatic with the impact of production factored in, but if you're in it for the long haul I figure you can still feel OK about it if you were up to replace a bulb/water-heater/car/etc anyways when you make the switch.
PS: Have you seen the price on POU tankless water heaters? Once you have the panel/breaker/wiring in place, they're dirt cheap compared to traditional water heaters.