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.

[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: ????

---

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?