Archived from the Tools In Action forum (Around The House). This thread is read-only.
so I’m not the smartest guy on the block, but I do know that you might be able to save money on electricity with LED lights all around the house……our house is just under 2100sq with 5 bedrooms finished basement and roughly 65 light sockets, yes you read that right 65 they are everywhere………now I have replaced every bulb with new 11W led lights no more 60W and 100W even so the old saying ya got every light in the house on is drawing a lot less power than before way less but my bill doesn’t seem to show this. I know for the past while our Ontario gov. has put smart meters in so you pay more for peak times versus off peak times but still, do laundry after 7pm instead of 2 in the afternoon…….in winter months its dark around 5-6pm and peak runs until 7pm so lights are going to cost more I’m beginning to wonder if it is worth it……they had a $5 off coupon any LED light so I got each one for around $3 instead of $8 you add that up it is still around $200+ with tax guess I’m gonna save that over 15 years or so…..
They also last a lot longer than cfl bulbs and incandescent lights. The other nice thing is led bulbs if you get good ones have decent color temperature some cfl’s are horrible plus they can have an annoying flicker. The other nasty thing about CFL bulbs is they have mercury in them not really enough to worry about but they should be disposed of properly and you do have to clean them up differently if the bulb breaks. We just go E meters but we don’t have any sort of peak pricing yet during the day like you have Comp56. Michigan does pay some of the highest electrical rates in the great lakes region which sucks. Out air conditioning bill is freaking insane in the summer 400 too 600 dollars at the peak per month.
I hate those bulbs that have to warm up before they come on. It’s really annoying.
I am slowly replacing all my lights with LEDs so I have not seen any significant changes in electric bill. Do you have any bills form the previous years to see if your usage is comparable month to month? Make sure to compare kWh and not price.
If you get the a few of the Philips Hue and spread them out for one every room you can program your lighting the possibilities are virtually endless I have a friend who has one who is an electrical engineer the lights in his house can be any color just being controlled by his phone they also flicker when he gets a text and he keeps adding to the stuff there capable of they all connect through WiFi but at 45-80 bucks each there pricey and not worth it unless you know how to run coding.
Some people r so fascinated with that stuff and just don’t care how much they spend on that stuff. Me my money is better spent on tools.
I swap them out as the older ones go bad. I get my led bulbs from costco. I can usually get them very cheap, around $3 a bulb. Doesnt make sense to me to buy them all at once and throw out good working bulbs. As far as cheaper electric bills? I havent seen any noticeable difference yet.
Yep, I was talking about the bulbs that cost $10-$15 for 1 bulb. I think that’s crazy.
A customer at work is building a new house. Total inside and out they have right around 200 can lights. They decided to spend the money right away and put LED trims in all of them right away. Not bad when they are over $35 a piece ( over $7,000 in just the finished light trims).
The way some people like lights now a days, 65 isn’t to bad for the whole house
200 can lights is insane
chadlanthier wrote:
I hate those bulbs that have to warm up before they come on. It’s really annoying.
Last week a bulb burned out in my garage so I got some outdoor CFL lights for my garage. They where dull for 2-3 minutes before brighting up and it was not real cold (only 40 degrees) imagine how long they will be dull and flicker when it is colder. ANNOYING! I took them back and got a couple Led bulbs from Home Depot. My Home Depot has some 800 lumen Phillips Led bulbs on sale. I first got two of these bulbs in the Daylight version for $4.97 each but while bright, the color (5000k) was too blue. I went back and got two more of these bulbs in the soft white version for $3.97 and a couple double bulb adapters for $2.47. The combination of the two color bulbs gave a nice bright 1600 lumen glow for only $11.41. Now the garage is much brighter than with the two 100 watt bulbs I had before. I went from 200 watts to 40 watts with the Leds, now lets see if my electric bill shows a savings.
Yeah that is the first thing that you should do to save a little money, change out all of your bulbs.
I guess I will have to look into those. I thought it was led, but maybe I was thinking of the cfls