The Aim

There are many people who are generally in favor of saving energy to protect the environment, but who don't want to reduce their standard of living in any way. If that is your aim (or if you want to convince people who have such aims to save energy) then the below information should be useful.

Lights

The easiest first step is to use flourescent lights in your house. As a rough guide a flourescent light uses about 20% the electricity to provide the same amount of light and recently cheap flourescent lights have been available to work in sockets designed for incandescent globes. For example a 100W incandescent globe can be replaced by a 20W flourescent globe for an equivalent amount of light while saving 80% of the electricity. Also flourescent globes are expected to last for 5000 hours or more of use while incandescent globes are only expected to last for 1000 hours, so not only do you save on the cost of electricity but the inconvenience and expense of buying and installing new globes.

The reason that flourescent globes are so much more efficient is that about half the electrical energy that they consume is converted to light as opposed to about 5% for an incandescent globe. Another factor that leads from this is that the amount of waste heat produced. If you are live in a warm climate then heat produced by lights will need to be removed by an air-conditioner, which takes more energy (as well as often being noisey). Using more energy efficient lights reduces the heat production and therefore reduces the amount of effort and egergy spent on cooling your house.

After converting to flourescent lights I bought globes in a range of capacities, I have some 5W globes for the hottest part of summer (which don't provide as much light as I would like but provide enough benefits in terms of keeping my house cool to make it worth the trade-off) and some globes in the 10W to 20W range for winter.

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