So the previous owner of my apartment had some nice spotlights and dimmable halogens installed. I never paid much attention to them. Recently I've been more conscious about my spending, so just for the heck of it, I decided to calculate how much power these lights were using.
There are 20x 35W spotlights, and 3x 60W halogen bulbs. That's a whopping 880 Watts for just three rooms (hallway, bathroom, and dining area)!
Our average price for electricity is 0.15€ per kWh and on a yearly average I estimate that we maybe have all the lights on 6 hours a day (I live in the north so the winters are very dark). That's a total of 289€ yearly, just for lighting three rooms in a small apartment! And we've been living here for 6 years. I almost cried. Well almost, instead I decided to do something about it.
Got on eBay and bought myself a 20 pack of MR16 LEDs at 4W each. Total price 36.50€ shipped. Then I got three dimmable screw bulbs locally at 8.5W each, total price 14.97€ picked up. Total investment 51.47€.
Now to the fun part. How much electricity will I be saving? Well instead of 880 Watts, they now consume 105.5 Watts. Now that still sounds a lot, but bear in mind it's 3 rooms and many lights. They look great and I'm not about to do a whole renovation here, this was just a super simple thing to do that took less than an hour of my time. And it's a whopping 88% reduction in power consumtion!
Finally, the best part: annual savings. In stead of paying 289€ yearly, I now pay only 35€ yearly. That's a mind blowing 254€ ($300) yearly savings! And by nothing else than changing a few bulbs.
Taking into account the initial cost of the new bulbs, first years savings will be "only" 202€ ($240). But that's pretty damn good too.
Just wanted to rant a bit, and maybe remind people to not sit on old energy hogs at home.
One more thing, since I'm interested in long term saving as well as investing. As a fun little math exercise, with an average compounding interest of 7% (average of the stock market return) Just changing these bulbs could save me 4144€ ($4900) over 10 years. Pretty solid return for a 52€ investment don't you think?
December 04, 2017 at 08:16AM
