8 weeks of clean living

After rearranging my entertainment center, I kept my Kill A Watt plugged in to discover what the resulting energy consumption looked like. Over the course of 215 hours, my new set up consumed only 1.49 kWh of electricity. This is in comparison to 7.3 kWh of electricity over 164 hours previously. The 215 hour period included watching several movies and playing lots of music through my speaker system. In between uses of my equipment, however, I used my power strip to turn off all the components and prevent idle energy use, which seems to have made a substantial difference (along with ditching the cable box).

I have a floor lamp that I have always thought might be an energy offender. Last night I plugged it into the Kill A Watt to see what I could find out. Astonishingly, over a 2 hour and 24 minute period, the lamp managed to use .75 kWh, or approximately half of the energy use of my entertainment system over the course of approximately 9 days. Upon further inspection, it turned out that this floor lamp draws over 300W when switched to its brightest setting (it has one other setting at which it draws over 180W). To put this in perspective, if I turned on every single CFL in my house (which essentially means every light in my house) I would still be drawing less electricity than if I had all the lights off and this single floor lamp on. By my calculations, I’ve already spent more than twice as much on electricity for this lamp than the lamp itself cost (it costs me approximately two dollars per month to run it, and I got it off of craigslist for $10). Needless to say, I’m going to be looking for an alternate floor lamp.

UPDATE: This short article gives some good everyday examples of how much energy a kilowatt-hour represents.

My roommate Marci told me about a series of lightbulb exchange events being hosted by the City of San Diego and SDGE. I was able to go to one yesterday and trade in five incandescent bulbs for five compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Check out the schedule for future trade-ins here (the events at Scripps seem pretty cool since one can also get a 2-for-1 pass to the aquarium at the same time).

CFLs have been covered to death as one of the easiest ways to save energy, as well as a little bit of money (Lighter Footstep has a good article about them here). Normally the savings on one’s electric bill far outweigh the higher upfront cost of CFLs (let’s say you pay $.10 per kWh and replace a 60W incandescent with a 13W CFL, over an 8,000 hour lifespan one would save around $35). When you can trade in incandescents you already have for free CFLs, however, it’s all profit.

CFLs do have a couple drawbacks compared to incandescents. They take about half a second to actually turn on, and then another 30 seconds to reach their full brightness. During this warmup, they use approximately as much energy as an incandescent, so it’s not really worth putting a CFL in a closet or somewhere where one doesn’t use the light for more than a few seconds. In the majority of use cases, though, they are preferable and indistinguishable from their incandescent counterparts.

I switched over most of my lightbulbs to CFLs back when I moved in, and now every fixture in the house has a CFL, except for the one in my closet and one out on my porch whose devious enclosure I haven’t been able to penetrate…