Global Energy City

I have 2 kid who have rooms at the top of the stairs and one really likes night lights.  I also have a disabled wife who needs light when moving about the house.  The way our house is situated we don’t get a LOT of outside light and leaving lights on all the time is NOT a good idea.  So in addition to replacing bulbs I got a bunch of LED night lights with light sensors. My daughter had a nightlight she loves so and was able to find a replacement LED bulb.

I used LED bulbs instead of incandescent and florescent bulbs for energy savings.  While an LED bulb may cost about $2.00 more it lasts 10x as long and uses 1/10 the electricity.  By getting lights with light or motion sensors the lights are ONLY on when darkness prevails.  This is also helpful in some rooms where the compact florescent bulbs take a minute or two to warm up.  You still have a bit of light.  

So far things have been good.  We can still see and we are turning off  more lights but not losing the luxury of illumination.  A stubbed toe is NOT a good thing.

I think my next step with this is to see if  I can get some Solar cells and run some of these lights from solar cells that gather light from the sun and interior lights. Recycling some used light how cool would that be?

To give an idea of the savings I’ll describe what I WAS doing.    Starting awhile ago I was running 1 60W bulbs 12 hours a day in the bathroom ceiling fixture as a night light (this would be on when people would be in the bathroom and during sleeping hours this costs about $30 a year.  I replaced this with a 14W CF which saved about $23 yearly.  Finally I used a 2 watt LED nightlight with a light sensor so it’s ONLY on when its dark.  Running this way costs less than $1 a year TOTAL. 

Another example in the downstairs bathroom I placed another one of these night lights.  Before we would keep the 2 14W CF bulbs burning as they would take about 2 minutes to warm up in the winter and just kept the habit up throughout the year.  This cost almost $30 a year the 2W nightlight runs about $2 a year.  Granted we DO turn on the overhead lights still but now we are in the habit of turning them off during the day and at night when we are not in the bathroom.  The warmup period is also not that bad as we have the nightlight to compensate.