The Masters House

My wife really like it during December because we had the Christmas lights on during the evening and that gave a little more light outside around the house. After I took them down she requested that I turn on the regular outside lights because it just made here feel safer to have the lights on and it made the house look nicer.

I was hesitant at first to do this because there are three light fixtures outside that are all connected to the same switch – 2 on the porch and one near the garage. The two light fixtures on the porch had 2 60 watt bulbs each and the one by the garage had one. Together this was 300 watts that would be burning all night. The other thing was that we would forget to turn the Christmas lights off before going to bed sometimes so they would stay on all night. On time they stayed on all night and the next day. That is not good for the electric bill.

It was time for a trip to Home Depot.

At Home Depot I found 6 – 40 watt equivalent fluorescent bulbs for $10. These bulbs only burn at 9 watts a piece even though they look like 40 watts. I was going to purchase the dusk adapters that go in between the lamp and bulb that automatically turn on at dusk and off at dawn but they were $10 each and I would need 3 of them minimum.

Instead of the individual adapters I got a timer that replaces the light switch in the wall. It has a built in clock and once you enter in all the information such as date, time, time zone, and other items it automatically knows when dusk and dawn are and turns the switch on and off (you can alos program custom times). The cost for this was $20 so I saved $10 over the individual adapters.

I took my goodies home and replaced the 4 – 60 watt bulbs on the porch with 2 – 40 watt bulbs and the one 60 watt by the garage with the 40 watt. I then installed the programable wall switch. It actually toook longer to program it then it did to install it.

The finally tally was $30 and change at Home Depot and we went from burning 300 watts down to 27 for the lights outside. We are now using 11% of the electricity that we where before for the outside lights. Oh, in case you were wondering the 40 watt florescent bulbs seen to be as bright as a single 60 watt so there is plenty of light on the porch.

Technorati: Electricity Bill, Outdoor Lights, Spiral CFL, Fluoresscent Bulbs, Programmable Wall Switch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Butler House, Upgrades . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.