Saving Money on Lighting the New House
Our final move into the new house is this weekend. We did a three phase, three week move. First week - anything small not nailed down. Second week, medium-sized stuff...basically everything except a week's food. Third week, all furniture. This has allowed me to keep working and 9-month pregnant Wife to be relatively relaxed about the whole process.
Aside: If you're moving to Portland, or want to rent a house, let me know! I'll put a Craigslist listing up soon.
The new house is larger to accommodate a family of four as well as a guest room for overseas relatives and my home office. The builder put in incandescent lights in all fixtures, which was a bummer. I spent a few hours last weekend replacing all the lights with Compact Fluorescent (CFL) Lights.
There are usually three kinds/colors of these lights...it all depends on what their view of "white" is. We got natural-light (more blue-colored) full spectrum compact fluorescent to minimize that "office look." These are very natural-colored and produce a clean, crisp white that isn't depressing.
The total bill to replace every single light in the house was $205 from Home Depot. I saved up a bunch of coupons and waited for a 2 for 1 sale on some of these lights. Why spend so much on new lighting? Here's why, using a custom spreadsheet with some formulas from this very good article on lighting:
This spreadsheet shows EVERY light in the house that was replaced (all of them). There's "can lighting" in the ceiling in many cases, as well as closet lights, etc. This spreadsheet was originally aggressive, assuming each light was on 8 hours a day (usually from about 4pm to about midnight) when more realistically less than one half of them is on. Ideally each light would have a separate "hours on" number, so I put that they were all on 4 hours a day, which is more representative when averaged across all lights, but you get the idea and you're welcome to mess with the numbers.
(Yes, I realize that this table doesn't wrap well...sorry)
| Location | # | LightHrs | OldW | Total | kW | Cost/Day | Cost/Mo | Cost/Year | NewW | Total | kW | Cost/Day | Cost/Mo | Cost/Year | Savings |
| Downstairs | 27 | 108 | 60 | 6480 | 6.48 | $ 0.97 | $29.16 | $349.92 | 13 | 1404 | 1.40 | $ 0.21 | $6.32 | $75.82 | $274.10 |
| Kitchen | 7 | 28 | 150 | 4200 | 4.2 | $ 0.63 | $18.90 | $226.80 | 23 | 644 | 0.64 | $ 0.10 | $2.90 | $34.78 | $192.02 |
| Office | 4 | 16 | 100 | 1600 | 1.6 | $ 0.24 | $7.20 | $86.40 | 16 | 256 | 0.26 | $ 0.04 | $1.15 | $13.82 | $72.58 |
| Upstairs | 18 | 72 | 60 | 4320 | 4.32 | $ 0.65 | $19.44 | $233.28 | 13 | 936 | 0.94 | $ 0.14 | $4.21 | $50.54 | $182.74 |
| Outside | 5 | 20 | 75 | 1500 | 1.5 | $ 0.23 | $6.75 | $81.00 | 16 | 320 | 0.32 | $ 0.05 | $1.44 | $17.28 | $63.72 |
| Misc | 6 | 24 | 60 | 1440 | 1.44 | $ 0.22 | $6.48 | $77.76 | 13 | 312 | 0.312 | $ 0.05 | $1.40 | $16.85 | $60.91 |
| Total | 67 | 268 | 505 | 19540 | 19.54 | $ 2.93 | $87.93 | $1,055.16 | 94 | 3872 | 3.87 | $ 0.58 | $17.42 | $209.09 | $846.07 |
It's not a very controversial spreadsheet. Certainly when you replace a 120W light bulb with a 23W one and start adding multipliers like hours*lights*etc, you will save money. The only question left is when will you break even on the initial capital expenditure?
For us, our outlay was $200 and we'll recoup that easily within a quarter to half-year. That will multiple again, as in my personal experience CFIs will last 3-6 years. After almost exactly 5 years we just had 3 of 6 CFL lights in our kitchen all die within a week of each other. That's a lifetime of about 10,000 hours for me compared to a 1,000 hours for a standard light. My outlay of $200 will last ~5 years and I avoid replacing every light in the house at least 5, if not 10, times in that 5 year period.
We've kept the old bulbs and will either give them to relatives or save them for a rainy day. Unfortunately this builder wouldn't omit the bulbs which seemed a silly thoughtless thing to me.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Robz
Congrats on HanselKinder #2, I don't remember reading about that announcement. Boy/Girl/IUnknown?
We haven't replaced them all though because there are lights in the house that are used so little (less than a hour a week average I'd guess) that it just didn't make sense to jump from the $60 or we spent on bulbs to $200 on bulbs. yes, they might end up lasting a lifetime but I've got standard incandescents in our 11 year old house I haven't replaced yet either. ;)
BTW, for the CF newbies, the only CF downfall you'll find is that while they come on immediately, they do take 30-60 seconds to reach full brightness. Scott describes perfectly the color spectrum available and that these don't look like "office" lights. In fact, I like the light color from our CFs better than most incandescents now. But, the 30 second warmup can be a bother when fumbling for a glass of water in the middle of the night.
It would be much harder to calculate, but I bet it would be as significant a savings in reduced cooling bill.
(congrats on baby #2!)
John
What brand of light bulbs did you end up getting for your house?
The time of year we need our lights on most is the winter, and in the winter the extra energy from the incandecent lights is heat. I really have no idea how big of effect this is on our heating bill, but I would be really interested if John puts together a spreadsheet.
The place I still use them is in the porch light, but I'm working on replacing the ones in the house with the GE reveal incandecent lights. Oh, and I can throw those in the garbage when they burn out rather than saving them to be recycled since they don't have mercury in them like CFLs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for swapping out for CFL and have done it with some of the lights in my home. But the payback seems to me to be more on the order of two years. Maybe part of it is that our electricity is cheaper than yours. I think we are paying 8cents a kilowatt hour and your spreadsheet is based on 15.
Actually I have some empirical (albeit non-scientific) data to back that up. We are running about 60-70% incandescents still in our house. Our electric bill for December/January/February averaged $55/month. I picked those months because there is no A/C to skew the data and those months require double the lighting needs than the summer months (sunset at 5pm instead of 9pm). Of course included in that $55 is also the cost to run the refrigerator, 5 computers that are always on, TVs(not on that much), furnace blower, electric stove, etc. I wish I could break it out more, but I would guess that our lighting costs for 3000 square feet of finished space are way below the estimates for your house above.
Thanks for the post. Great food for thought.
Also congrats on the new mini Hanselman!
I didn't know you could get full spectrum bulbs from Home Depot. Last I checked in the Washington, D.C. Home Depot, they only had the standard mid-to-low end compact florescents. I wouldn't be surprised if Home Depot is more progressive in the pacific northwest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp
Klaus
A downside to CFL is the inability to use dimmers. In my family/media room there are times I want full light and when watching movies I want dim lights, no can do with CFL so am using incandescent here.
It has always amused me that lights are measured in power consumption (Watts) rather than lumens (light output). You could crank up the burners on your stove to create lots of power consumption but the light output would be relatively low. Most U.S. packaging does list the lumens in the small print.
I'm looking forward to diode lights, they are currently expensive, but they will last forever (or nearly so).
@Hank - There's some kind of informal conversions out there. I use Lumens rather than watts, so a 150W regular light is about 23W as a CFI, etc.
@Rick - Only if they keep 50+ lights running for 8 hours a day in their house. The spreadsheet uses some constants that should probably be toned down.
[)amien
I use 40W power with 9W CFL equivalent for the outside. They are on all night and those 9W are the lowest wattage I found. Looking forward to the LED lights when they become more ubiquitous.
If you are lighting you house, you should consult with your local retailer or lighting shop for what is the best method, and frequently re visit these places to stay up with the current trends and technology.
Also as a side note, LED seem to be the better style of light only when the price becomes more practical for the average home owner.
On CFL's...Scott above is correct about not cycling them on and off...can take years off of their life. You are better off to turn them on and then leave them on for a few hours than turn them on/off, on/off all day.
I will say that most of the reading and research I've done says that CFL's are just a stop-gap solution. The real solution may be LED's or a technology that hasn't been invented yet.
As long as they are disposed of correctly, I am all for CFL's. Great work!
http://tinyurl.com/2h3cjg
When I last looked at dimmable CFLs and supported dimmers, it was too expensive initially to justify the investment. Maybe that's changed though, I'll have to look into it.
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