Nagel Family Website

One of the things that drives me nuts is when the kids leave the lights on all around the house. You’d think I love wasting energy, what with my extravagant Christmas lights display and all. But really, my electric bill went up only $5 in December and January from that show - heck… thanks to all the blinking, each light was only on about 1/6 of the time the show was running.

I just began replacing some lights in the house with LED lights. Think about shoving 24 Christmas lights into a “bulb” and screwing it into a standard fixture. The result? Instead of using 40-100 Watts of energy, it only uses 1.5 Watts. They last about 30,000 to 100,000 hours (up to 10 years) and because they use so little energy, you can run it for twelve hours a day for a whole year at a cost of about 80 cents.

The light output isn’t as bright as a standard bulb - only about 55 lumens (a 60 Watt GE “reveal” gives off 660 lumens) but again - the energy savings is the key here.

I got mine on eBay from ledwholesalers_inc, because they’re a lot cheaper there than anywhere else online. I bought the 24 LED version, because I wanted something brighter than the 18 LED or less bulbs. They cost about $8 each (I bought a 9-pack) and came from California to me in Buffalo in just 3 days - amazing! The package came today, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I wasn’t expecting them for a few more days.

I started by replacing the 3 bulbs above the bathroom sink (200 Watts) with 3 LED bulbs - saving 195.5 Watts there. I also replaced my desk light - saving another 58.5 Watts). The true test comes tonight, when we don’t have the natural light to assist them. I’ll post an update, once we’re used to them.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Energy, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.