11 Comments

  1. Well done Darren. You will notice the difference in just a week I reckon. If you are as crazy as I am with my energy monitoring, you will see a massive reduction in consumption. Best of luck.

    Gav

    • @Gav: I read the meter every morning as I leave for work, keeping a little notepad and pen in the meter box for convenience. Is that the kind of crazy you mean? 🙂 It’s been especially exciting lately having the extra set of figures to record – the solar power generated on the previous day. I’ll post back when I get some results to share.

  2. Darren, I’d changed my home’s lighting system from the fluorescent lamps into LEDs lights since 5 years ago! Honestly, it helped me saved up more than $80 per month and I’m glad that I made up the right decision!

    • @Wilson: Yep, LEDs are the way of the future. If I was renovating a house now, there’s so much I’d do differently.

  3. Glad to hear you found Cosmo Lighting so helpful Darren, they are really fantastic and very supportive of green options, which a lot of other lighting places aren’t around here.

    Isn’t it criminal that halogen down lights were even allowed onto the market in their conventional state… as you say, hopefully the LED’s will come down in price and fit into different fittings soon.

    Thanks for providing such a good summary of the different options available now for replacing standard halogens – I’ll definately be referring any enquires about that to your site!

    Hope you notice a good decrease on your energy bill.

    Cheers,

    Ally
    http://www.happyearth.com.au

    • Hi Ally! Cosmo are very knowledgeable, and have a pretty good range of eco options in stock. They have a good demo room out the back, too, where you can see for yourself just how bright the various lights are compared with each other. I like how honest they are, too – where packaging exaggerates claims, they’ll set you straight. For example, some products claim to be as bright as a 50W halogen, but that’s only true because they use a narrower beam angle which doesn’t make them equivalent.

      Cosmo will be exhibiting some eco lighting options at the Kiama FutureCare launch on Friday this week, too. We’re very grateful for their support.

      Our energy use seems to have come down significantly – I’ll have to check the meter a few more times and get some real figures to share.

  4. All Things Eco Blog Carnival Volume Fifty Three…

    Welcome to the June 1st, 2009 edition of All Things Eco.

    Be sure to Stumble the posts you like, or submit them to other social bookmarking services. Let’s promote each other, as well as this blog carnival.
    It’s June already! Hard to believe…
    Siam…

    • @GU10: Yes, but with the current cost of LED bulbs, you wouldn’t actually be saving money overall. CFLs are cheap to purchase, and will reduce your power bill by more than their purchase cost within a relatively short timeframe.

  5. Roger Palmer

    I have exactly 100 LV Downlights in my large home. I want to replace at least 30 of the high used rooms with an LED or energy efficient replacement lights but am confused as to the real opportunity to replacement benifits. Looks like each light will cost over $20.00 – buy lots of light electricity for that cost. PS. i have a minum of 4 lights in each room and 12 in the rumpus room.
    HELP–

    • @Roger: That’s a lot of low voltage downlights! You’re right to start with the most used lights/rooms. Just working with rough numbers – a 50W LV downlight will typically draw about 60W (the transformer wastes some as heat). If that light is on for 4 hours per day, it’ll use 0.06 x 4 x 365 = 87 kWh/year. At 20c/kWh, that’s about $17.50 per year.

      There are 3 standard alternatives to the 50W halogen:

      35W IR halogen – drop in replacement bulb, not very expensive to buy, same light levels as normal 50W halogen, energy savings around 30% ($5/year on above scenario).

      15W CFL – requires new light fitting (electricians aren’t cheap!), slightly lower light levels than 50W halogen, bulb should last longer than halogen, energy savings around 75% ($13/year on above scenario).

      7W LED – drop in replacement bulb (usually – older halogen transformers may need replacing), expensive to buy, 30% lower light levels than 50W halogen, much longer bulb life (5-10x longer!), energy savings around 88% ($15/year on above scenario).

      Given the costs of some of the above options, another thing worth considering is to bite the bullet and redo your lighting completely with pendants. A room with 4x 50W halogen downlights can typically be suitably lit with 2x 25W CFLs, giving around 75% energy savings. It will cost money to have an electrician do this, but if you have lots of downlights the savings could be significant. Every house is different, so it’s hard to know whether this would suit your situation.

      It’s probably worth visiting a good lighting shop and asking their advice. Yes, they’ll be trying to sell you their stuff, but they still might come up with some options that make sense. It can’t hurt. Good luck!

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