Saved Over $400.00/Year in the Kitchen Alone By Switching to LED Lamps.

I suggest you read on!

First The Bulbs:

• Incandescent (Filamentary My Dear Watson)

  • Hot – Burn fingers and inflict pain.
  • Cheap to buy
  • Expensive to use.
  • Oldfangled
  • Becoming Unavailable

• CFL (Compact Fluorescent)

  • Fairly Efficient
  • Slow Warm Up
  • Won’t start at very low or high temperatures.
  • Contain bad stuff like Mercury
  • Not very durable. They break easily.

• LED (Light Emitting Diode)

  • Immediate Start (Instant On)
  • Low Heat Output
  • Most efficient of the three types.
  • DAMNED EXPENSIVE TO BUY
  • INEXPENSIVE TO USE

Not everyone has taken the time to learn something about the light bulb, you’re right, it does not make light reading. We have to thank Thomas Edison for inventing the least efficient form of light bulb. I thought I’d share a little bit of the math and mystic that I used, hopefully, to save on the charge we get when we use electricity.

Some Math:

What do you pay in your state?

Electricity Costs per kWh (Kilowatt Hour)

Click on the image at the left to see US energy costs by state in May of 2014. I’m glad I don’t live in Hawaii. Their charge per kWh is more than three times what ours is in Ohio. 38.08 Cents vs 12.4 Cents. Let’s look at the 100 Watt Incandescent light bulb and see what it costs us.

Download the USA EIA May 2014 Report (Only 220 Pages) PDF

US Energy Information Administration Website

OK Now that we have that frightening stuff behind us. Let’s use national average for residential service as our first number and that’s 12.31 Cents per kWh, and let’s use the 100 Watt (INCANDESCENT) Bulb as our starting point. Let’s use a cost of 12.31 Cents per kWh (The USA Average) The Results are:

• $4.49 Per Year for a 100 Watt Lamp for One Hour/Day
• $26.96 Per Year for a 100 Watt Lamp for Six Hours/Day
• $53.92 Per Year for a 100 Watt Lamp for Twelve Hours/Day
• $107.84 Per Year for a 100 Watt Lamp for Twenty Four Hours/Day

Lets look at my kitchen!

• We replaced four 100W Incandescent bulbs in four pot-lights with four LED lamps consuming 18 Watts each.
• We replaced nine 50W Halogen Lamps on our track lighting system with nine 5 Watt LED Bulbs.
• We now have similar or more brightness than we had before using close to 90% less power.

I will use this room, our kitchen to show savings in one room. The kitchen is probably the highest energy usage room so it’s a good example.

Here’s some math:

Assumptions:

• E = Energy in kWh
• P = Power Consumed in Watts
• t = Time in Hours
• E= ( P * t) /1000)

So If we have a 100 Watt Lamp on for 12 Hours it uses (100 * 12)/1000 =  1.2 kWh or 14.76 Cents for a 12 hour day.

This results in an annual cost of $53.87.

So my kitchen was consuming 900 Watts for about 12 Hours a day or $484.83 per year – HOLY COW!

By dropping the consumption to 117 Watts.

Annual Cost is (( 117 * 12) /1000) * 365 = 512.5 kWh / Year or $63.00 / Year (A Saving of $421.00) – Holy Double Cow!

Do some of your own Math!