Jan 24 2008
It’s Getting Easier Being Green
So, we hit a milestone, albeit a minor one, over this past weekend: we’ve gone fully CFL in our home. That’s Compact Flourescent Lighting for those of you living under a rock of late. I replaced the last of the incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents and am feeling pretty good about it. Yah yah, it cost us some coin up front to replace them, but they use roughly 1/4 the power of incandescents so our carbon footprint is now that much less. I did a little calculation, thanks to this handy spreadsheet, and I come up with the following estimated savings for our household:
Approximately 45 bulbs, 60w equivalent, used for an average of 4 hours daily, with a .10/kw hour cost of electricity nets us:
~ $500 savings per year based on our average usage
~ 3500 Kw hours of electricity saved
On top of that, we recently signed up to use only “clean” energy to power our house with our local power company, Ameren. We pay more per KWhr, I think it’s ~$.02cents more and Ameren increasese its intake of power from clean, renewable sources like wind and hydro.
That’s pretty sweet. Now to put solar panels all over our roof, reclaim all rainwater, buy an airpowered car and wear nothing but hempen cloth. Oh, and convince 30 or 40 million of our neighbors to do the same.
very cool! i’m slowly switching us out here.
i don’t think i’ll go over completely, though. cfl’s lack the natural warmth of incandescents.
just remember to put the “stimulus tax break” into paying bills, not buying more stuff! ^_^
Actually, the color spectrum of CFL is now pretty warm. You can get them that match the standard “Soft white” almost anywhere these days. Just look for something in the 2600K range.