Now I don’t use much gas, being a “cold” person I only put on the heating if someone is coming round to visit, or I’m going to be in for more than a few hours (being in bed doesn’t count).
However I do use a fair bit of electricity, due to the shower, my addiction to tea, and leaving the laptop on all the time.
Last week, nPower announced some price rises (I’m with nPower, by the way) so I started thinking about how I could reduce my energy consumption. I get a shower and drink most of my tea at work, and also shower at the gym, which cuts down those expenses. It is handy to have my laptop on all the time due to cron jobs … so I started working out how much power my lights use. I added all the wattages up, which came to 1136W!!
Holy crap, if I have all my lights on for 3 hours a day, thats about 65p a day, almost £20 a month, £234 a year! My main sitting room light pumps out 300W, which is about a fifth of the kettle!?
So anyway, I went on a bit of a mission, wrote down all the lightbulb fittings and wattages in my flat, and bought a shit-load of energy saving bulbs. £95 of bulbs, to be exact (although I bought £20 of bulbs by mistake which didn’t fit into one of the customised light fittings, so I had to get more that would fit).
Most of the bulbs were pretty cheap (i.e the standard bayonet/screw bulbs, and candle bulbs), the real cost came in when buying the little GU10 reflector bulbs which came in at a fiver each (I bought £60 of these!!).
So, do they work? All the standard replacements are pretty decent, give off good light and start up quickly. There is a delay of half a second before they start at 50% bright, rising to full brightness after a minute.
The GU10 reflectors are slower to start up, however once they are going, they are just as bright as the halogens. The ones I have in my kitchen are “cold white” (by ignorance) … most lights in this country are “warm white” (2700K) which look a bit nicer in my opinion. Something to bear in mind if you go down this route.
So anyway, adding up the wattages of the new lights … 184W, about a sixth of the original output. Sweet, I’m going to be less skint later this year!