To save on the electricity bill, something fundamental is to have efficient devices. There can be a very big difference between different models of refrigerators, air conditioners and also light bulbs. In this article we are going to focus on the latter. When can we save if we change the light bulbs in our house? We are going to show an assumption so you can see how much you could save on the bill.
Savings on the electricity bill by changing the light bulbs
Not all light bulbs consume the same, far from it. Basically we can say that there are incandescent bulbs (although they are already a thing of the past in many houses, they are still used), halogen (also outdated, but still in many houses) of low consumption or fluorescent and LED. The latter are the ones that are going to spend less electricity and are the ones that we should use if we want to save as much as possible.
We are going to consider a situation in which all the light bulbs in a house are the same. For example, we may have a second home where we only go on vacation or a few months a year in the summer and still have incandescent or halogen bulbs. We may also have low-consumption light bulbs, but we want to save even more and install all LED types. Let’s see how much we could save in these cases.
The first thing is to calculate how many bulbs we are going to have. This will logically depend on the size of the house and also on how many light bulbs we have in each room. But let’s take a simple example in which there are simply 2 light bulbs in each room and we have a total of 7, including bathroom, kitchen and dining room. We also have another one at the entrance door and another 5 distributed between the patio and the garage. In total 20 bulbs that we want to change.
If we go to the most extreme assumption, we are going to imagine that we have 20 of the old bulbs and they are 800 lumens, something in between. These bulbs are going to have a power of 60 W. The next piece of information will be knowing how many hours we use them, for which we can put as an example an average of 2 hours each. In this way we could already know the total consumption of each of them, which would be multiplying the power (60 W) by the time (2 hours) and divided by 100. This gives us 0.12 kWh. If we multiply it by 20, which is the number of light bulbs in our fictitious home, it gives us a total consumption of 2.4 kWh. We will have to multiply that by the corresponding price according to the rate. If we give an example of €0.16/kWh, it gives us €0.38 of consumption per day or €11.52 per month.
The next thing would be to calculate it in case of having low consumption light bulbs. If we take into account the same previous characteristics, in this case we would use 15 W bulbs and the final calculation would give us €0.096 of consumption per day or €2.88 per month. We certainly see a big difference.
Finally, what we want is to change all the light bulbs in the house and use the most efficient ones, which would be LEDs. Following the same characteristics as the other types, this time the power will be 10 W, we would spend €0.064 per day or €1.92 per month.
Therefore, as you can see, savings can be important if you still have old light bulbs, but also if you have low consumption light bulbs (something more normal) and you start using LEDs. In this same example, you could save €115.20 and €11.52, respectively. This with the example that we have given of 20 bulbs and 2 hours of use each on average. The more you have and the more time you use it, the greater the savings.