Thursday, September 28, 2006

National Change A Light Day

Some Interesting News...



To help conserve energy, everyone is encouraged to replace one traditional light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb on October 4 (next Wednesday), National Change A Light Day. If you feel motivated, you can even take the pledge.

I've been replacing our old-style light bulbs for a while. I think I've done all the lights in the house except those in the ceiling fixtures in the bedrooms.

The price of compact fluorescent bulbs makes it difficult to make the switch all at once. At Sam's Club, the bulbs are the cheapest I've seen -- about $13 for a pack of eight fluorescent bulbs with glass spirals (not the pear-shaped fluorescent bulbs.)

I can't say that I've seen a lot of reduction in our electric bill since I've been putting in fluorescent bulbs, but I hope it helps the nation's energy situation. Kentucky Living, the magazine we receive from our electric company, offers the following statistics in the September 2006 issue (print edition):

Organizers note that if every American household replaced one traditional light with an Energy Star-qualified compact fluorescent bulb, it would save enough energy to light 7 million homes, save $600 million in utility bills, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1 million cars.

One last point of interest that's somewhat related: did you know that the German word for lightbulb --glühbirne -- means literally "glowing pear?"

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

If Las Vegas turned off their lights for a week it would probably power Hopkinsville for a year. :)

Genevieve Netz said...

That's the truth!

During the energy crisis of 1973, there was a lot of emphasis on turning off the lights to save electricity. We don't get nearly as much encouragement from the government to do that nowadays.

Sarabeth said...

We have almost all the CFLs in our house now. What I notice is that I don't have to change lightbulbs much at all now. I recently had to buy new CFL for our bedroom lamps. I last changed those lightbulbs 6 years ago. That' pretty amazing.

I noticed a change on our energy bill, but it was small. However, putting the big investment in new heat pumps for the house reduced my monthly energy bills by half!

N said...

Here is another way to save electricity without any investment.

In summer keep the AC at temperature above 72 F and in winters keep the heater's at temperature of 68F or below. Our body can easily adjust to this temperature. But this will save a considerable amount of energy used for maintaining the the temperature inside the room. The reason for this is that the rate in which the temperature inside the room escapes is proportional to TxTxTxT ( ie temperature difference with outside to the power of 4.) So imagine how much the rate will increase with the increase in temperature inside by 1F.

Genevieve Netz said...

I'm glad you stopped by, Nabin. We usually keep the thermostat at 76 - 78° in the summer. In the winter, we use a woodstove in addition to our propane heat, so we're able to stay nice and warm for a reasonable cost.

We just got a new woodstove last year, and it has new technology that combusts most of the smoke that just went up the chimney in the old stoves. It doesn't have a catalytic converter, but it is comparable in efficiency.

Last year we used only 100 gallons of propane. If we were heating only with propane, we'd probably be thinking about switching to electric heat because propane is expensive!

Genevieve Netz said...

I tried to leave a comment on your blog about your nice photos, Nabin, but they bounced back in my e-mail. The problem seems to be that, "Sender address rejected: This gmail.com mail
didn't really arrive via a gmail.com mail server." Maybe you know what that means!?

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