Thursday, July 14, 2011

Fancy lighting can be very ineffecient

I blogged yesterday about the amount of electricity I might need to make myself a cup of coffee in the morning. In these bright summer mornings there is normally enough natural light to allow me to see what I am doing. However, in the winter I expect that a considerable amount of electricity would go towards providing lights in the house so today I decided to measure the power consumption of my lights.

My kitchen is fairly large and so I need two bulbs to provide adequate light. However, since these lights are used a lot I was sure to ensure that I installed CFL bulbs in these lights. I was pleasantly surprised to measure that both lights beking switched on only consumed 30 watts (i.e. 15 watts each).

As well as the main lights, I also have a strip light under the presses. This light does not really provide enough light to do any work in the kitchen and its real purpose is to provide a nice ambiance in the kitchen while eating a romantic dinner. Therefore I was shocked to measure that it consumed 50 watts which is more than the two main lights.

In most of the rooms I have CFL bulbs which consume less than 20 watts each. In fact their power consumption was so low that it was hard for me to measure accurately. I was also pleasantly suprised to see that the two incandescent bulbs I had were consuming less power than they are supposed to. A 75w bulb which I have in a small utility room was only consuming about 60 watts and a 40w bulb in a Hot-press was actually only consuming 30 watts.

In the upstairs bathroom we have Halogen light fittings mainly because the female members of my family assure me that they look very stylish. I always knew that they were not very efficient, but I was shocked when I measured that they consumed 260 watts (i.e. more than 8 times as much energy as the kitchen lights which light a much larger room).

I suppose the lesson to learn is that it is expensive to be stylish!

1 comment:

  1. I can't believe how much of this I just wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I'm truly grateful and really impressed.
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