The Masters House

In the summer our electricity bill would hover right around the $300 area. This is a pretty big pill to swallow when you are used to the $100 electric bills of a small apartment.

Giving fluorescent a try

As I started to install ceiling fans so when would not need to run the air conditioning as much I needed more light bulbs. More light bulbs means more $$$$ every month with them burning so I decided to buy florescent bulbs instead. The reason for this was that the average 50 watt bulb was replaced with a 14 watt equivalent that was actually brighter. This ended up equaling that I need less light bulbs.

We saw the difference in our bill between the new light bulbs and not using the air conditioner as much. Our bill dropped to $150 - nice.

Still one issue

The one issue that I had though was that my kids where still using standard bulbs in their night lights that used dimmers to reduce the amount of light. Also, my son would wake up in the middle of the night to come to our room when he would get scared. I therefore had a single light in the middle of the house with a fluorescent in it. I looked into the new LED light bulbs but at $30 a pop it wasn’t really worth it.

A simple solution

I was still trying to out how to reduce the electricity that was being used in my kids rooms when I stumbled upon the answer - in my own bathroom. A few months back I had bought a night light for our bathroom that looked like a palm tree because it matched the decor of the bathroom. It also happened to be a .5 watt LED (pictured above).

In my next trip to Walmart I picked up some similar LED lights that looked more normal and brought them home and set them up. Unfortunately they were not bright enough. For some reason the green palm tree LED is 10 times brighter then the “white” LED they had.

I went back to Walmart and got palm tree LEDs.

Now we have then in both of the kids rooms, the front entry way (used to be a regular night light), and the dinning room that used to have the florescent on all night. Not one regular bulb is running now.

Conclusion

I am expecting to see another drop in the electric bill now with the new LEDs. It may not drop that much this month because of the Christmas lights going at night but in January we should see a difference.

Oh, those Christmas lights will be replaced with LEDs next year too! 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Butler House, Projects . 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.