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]

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?