Shining a light on the availability of energy efficiency

[brin_bellway]

[arguably cw: apocalypse]


(this has been percolating for a while, but the final impetus was maryellencarter mentioning that their (American) apartment came with incandescents)


I'm curious: how readily available are different kinds of lightbulb where you live (LED, incandescent, fluorescent, write-in answers), and how do their prices compare with each other? Particularly curious about answers from Americans.

I saw a post going around a while back that used "switching from incandescent to LED lightbulbs" as an example of an individual-level climate action that is nice but supererogatory and you shouldn't beat yourself up if you can't afford it, and I was like ???.

'Who...who can't afford LED lightbulbs?' I thought. 'Like, I get the general point about supererogation and bailing-a-boat-with-a-teaspoon and from-each-according-to-their-ability and all that, but *LED lightbulbs*? Is this some kind of, like, Extreme Vimes Boot Theory? You know LED bulbs cost about three bucks a pop and pay for themselves in 2 - 6 months from reduced electric bills, right? They...*do* cost ~three bucks a pop and pay for themselves within months where you live, right? Right??'

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Math:

Say electricity costs 8.2 cents/kWh (a worst-case scenario, in terms of how worthwhile LEDs are). Say an LED lightbulb costs $3.25 (again, a worst case: I'm using the full price even though they're on sale right now), while an incandescent costs...okay, apparently the reason I can only find weirdly-shaped niche incandescents in the store catalogue is because Canada banned the normal ones in 2015, and presumably I did not really notice because why would I buy incandescents in the Year of Our Lord 2015 anyway. Fuck it, let's say they're free: LEDs would *still* be worth it under that assumption.

An incandescent ~800-lumen bulb would require 60 watts. An LED 800-lumen bulb requires 8.5 watts. The savings is 51.5 watts, which can also be expressed as 0.0515 kilowatts, which in turn can be expressed as 0.0515 kWh/hour.

[0.0515 kWh/hour * 8.2 cents/kwH] = a savings of 0.4223 cents/hour. We need to save 325 cents' worth of electricity, which takes [325 cents / 0.4223 cents/hour] = ~770 hours of run-time. That's about 64 days at 12 hours/day, 128 days at 6 hours/day, 193 days at 4 hours/day.

That's *before* getting into the longer life expectancy of LEDs.

[thedarlingone]

This led me to go squint at my electric bill again, but I still can't figure out my actual cost per kilowatt-hour. I appear to pay a $10 base fee for the privilege of having electricity, $10.18 per kilowatt for the first seven "on-peak" kilowatts (of which I appear to be charged for 1.64 kW this month), about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour "delivery charge" (I have 236 kilowatt-hours on this bill), a separate "Power Supply Charge - Winter" of about 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, a $3 "Renewable Energy Standard Tariff", and then a bunch of dribs and drabs like sales tax and City Franchise Fee and State Transportation Authority Tax. Total bill for April, $55.

(I have not been much exercised about reducing my power bill since becoming work at home, because I have to have plenty of light and obviously be running my workstation, on-peak hours or not.)

On the other hand, I was able to pick up a four-pack of LED "daylight" bulbs at Walmart for $6, 100-watt equivalent (uses 14 watts), non-dimmable. If I was willing to go for 60-watt equivalent (uses 9 watts) and "soft white", I could get a 4-pack for $5. Individually, these would run $3 for the 9-watt or $5 for the 14-watt, but who buys a single lightbulb?

*checks your link to make sure you were quoting the divided price for a 4-pack in case Canada specializes in supplying single lightbulbs*

I guess if I divide this month's total bill by this month's kilowatt-hours, it comes out to something like 23 cents per kilowatt-hour, but that definitely doesn't scale. I'm deeply unsure how the on-peak kilowatts relate to the kilowatt-hours, too...

[brin_bellway]

>>If I was willing to go for 60-watt equivalent (uses 9 watts) and "soft white", I could get a 4-pack for $5.

Nice. American dollars are larger than Canadian dollars, but that's still a lot cheaper. Maybe I'll pick up a pack or two of lightbulbs next time I'm in New York.

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>>I have to have plenty of light and obviously be running my workstation, on-peak hours or not.

Because of the big rise in work-from-home, Ontario recently instituted a policy where households can choose between time-of-use billing and tiered billing (X cents/kWh for the first Y kWh each month, Z cents/kWh thereafter).

When I heard that, I got out the electric bills from 2020. I did the math, and we'd have saved about $40 if we'd been on tiered pricing for 2020 (well, 2020 usage but current rates, in an effort to model the future), despite our best efforts at load-shifting.

But I kind of like that our incentives are aligned with the people trying not to have to fire up the backup natural-gas-powered plants (base load is mostly hydro and some nuclear around here, pretty low-carbon), and I expect more load-shifting opportunities in the future as we (probably) electrify our heating and dryer and maybe even our car. I'm thinking I won't bring tiered pricing up with my family.

[brin_bellway]

Also:

Somebody a couple years ago, not sure of the context now (might have been an argument about whether distributed protein-folding simulations are worthwhile?): "So if we assume that a computer consumes 200W..."

Me: *looks at per-appliance energy-usage spreadsheet from that time we borrowed a home energy monitor*

Laptop (reading articles): 15W

Laptop (watching videos): 22W

Me: ????

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A couple months ago, I used a carbon-footprint calculator aimed at Ontarians. I fed it a year's worth of fuel-consumption data from our electric and natural-gas bills, and it estimated our home-related emissions at 63% of the average four-person household.

The thing is, I was really expecting our home emissions to be significantly *above* average.

* Our home is...not *as* poorly insulated as it used to be, but still not very good.

* The central heating and cooling were retrofitted and can't reach all areas of the house very well, so we have to supplement with three space heaters in the winter and a window air-conditioning unit in the summer.

* Said window unit is ~20 years old. The refrigerator is ~14 (and I hear they've made a lot of efficiency improvements to refrigerators in the last decade). The secondary freezer and the furnace are both ~28. I don't even *know* how old the tertiary freezer is: we got it at least third-hand.

* (Also we *have* secondary and tertiary freezers consuming electricity, though one of them is in the basement (a relatively cool area) and one of them is in an unheated part of the house.)

* We can't turn the heat (or cooling) down when nobody's home, because there is almost always somebody home (and this is not a new thing for 2020: it's been the case for years).

* The furnace, water-heater, and dryer are all gas-heated.

And yet, despite everything we have going against us, apparently we are way below average?

Am...am I living in some kind of parallel universe?

[thedarlingone]

Honestly, everything you say about your household expenses leads me to believe you're living in *some* kind of a parallel universe, I just always assumed it was called Canada. Perhaps not?

[brin_bellway]

And it was specifically comparing us to other four-person households (*checks* even more specifically, other four-adult zero-child households), so my other default assumption of "bulk discounts" (and other such efficiency benefits) *also* doesn't apply here.

Maybe the effects of spending so long living primarily off of dwindling savings run deeper than one can perceive. Maybe our usage patterns bear a hundred subtle fingerprints of "the sort of usage patterns you develop when every dollar you spend is a dollar you are never getting back, so you had *better* use it wisely".

(...we *have* caught glimpses of this sometimes, I think, while visiting friends' houses. Houses full of lights in the middle of the day, televisions playing videos that nobody was watching.)

((Although in fairness to the main family I am thinking of, *they* were the ones who taught us to price-match our groceries, and we are eternally grateful.))

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(FTR, our other emissions categories were "transportation = nearly three times average (duh, Dad's a delivery driver)", "travel = zero, therefore necessarily way below average", "food = slightly below average", "waste = slightly above average". Everything roughly cancels out and leaves us slightly below average at 25.2 tons/year (vs 25.5). We would have been above average, but apparently we saved four tons a year by switching Dad's car to a hybrid.

It'll be interesting to see the updated results after we get more insulation and maybe replace the central heating.)

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P.S. ...wait, hang on, am I reading this fine print right? They're not actually directly comparing us to other four-adult households, they're just taking the figures for one adult and multiplying by four?

That's...that's not how households work. I guess there *are* bulk discounts involved, then, although I do still think there's something to the hundred-subtle-fingerprints idea as well.

(Actually, I guess taking per-person emissions and extrapolating *does* make some sense *given the goals* of a carbon-footprint calculator. They want you to know your number because it will help you lower it, and they want you to know the average to help spark competition (they also give emissions data from the lowest-emission 30% of people for this reason): calculating the average per-person correctly rewards people for moving in together.)

[brin_bellway]

Wait, wait, hang on, I just looked at the per-appliance-energy-usage spreadsheet again and my brother's desktop *does* use about 200W, what the fuck.

Maybe it's something to do with the kind of equipment you need for gaming specs?