Saturday, July 27, 2013

Doing it cheaper - lighting and ceiling fans

About 5 years ago, my husband and I started discussing LED lighting.  At the time, LED light bulbs were very, very, expensive.  They're also more energy efficient than CFLs, and they don't contain Mercury (I'm not even going to go there).  We've watched, we've waited, the price has come down quite a bit.  So this spring we decided it was time to replace a couple of insanely ugly light fixtures with ceiling fans.  Ceiling fans are awesome when it comes to keeping the heating and cooling bills down.  We looked at a good number of fans, but we leaned hard toward those with LED light kits.

Does this new ceiling fan with LED lights produce as much light as the monstrous 20+ light bulb chandelier it replaced?  No, but I wasn't expecting it to (honestly was praying it wouldn't, that thing was bright, it was easier to stare at the Sun than that chandelier fully lit).  It does produce ample light for the space though.  And it's a ceiling fan, so it keeps me cooler than the chandelier.  And, even with the lights on and the fan on full, it still draws no more power than the monstrosity.  If I'm using it just as a light, it draws less than a 1/10th what the chandelier was drawing for power.  Lighting is an admitted small percentage of our overall electric usage, but if I'm saving $25 a year on my power bill because of a couple of LED lighting, I'm good with that.  The energy draw of the fan is less than the energy draw for those last few degrees of heating and cooling I'm not needing to achieve, which should trivially save me $100 a year (and quite probably a good bit more).

It's been a particularly temperate (read cold and rainy) summer here thus far.  While I've been running the A/C in the baby's room (set to 78 degrees), and in the office to prevent computer overheating (set to full blast as soon as my husband boots his computer because that thing can jack the ambient room temp by 5 degrees in about 15 minutes), I haven't yet run the A/C in my bedroom.  Even on the dozen or so nights where the temperature was above 85 degrees hours after sundown, I haven't really needed the A/C to be comfortable.  There was 1 night, just one, where I seriously thought about it.  I decided against it because the problem was more the greater than 60% humidity than it was the heat, and I was betting on it to rain overnight.  It didn't.  It was a rough night.  I had to wash the sheets the next day, and before I could get them out to line dry them, it was pouring.

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