make a smaller ecological footprint

Tell your friends and family about this one. It’s so easy, saves you money, and reduces a crazy amount of energy. There was some stat floating around out there that if every person just converted one of their light bulbs it would save a ridiculous amount of energy (i forget the exact amount :-) )

ok, so i converted 90% of all of my light bulbs at the house from the standard bulbs and change them to CFLs (compact fluorescent lighting).

As expected, there is a huge savings in wattage. Totaling up all of the wattage for the old bulbs, put me at the 975w mark. With the new CFLs, I’m at 226w – that’s over 431% savings in wattage.

As for the remaining 10% of the bulbs that I didn’t switch: I need to use a 15 foot ladder but I’ll get to them soon.

As a side note, these bulbs will last 5 to 7 years (and some companies claim even longer). Keep your receipts because if they don’t, you can ship them back and the company will issue brand new ones to you. The bulbs can be bought at Home Depot or Lowe’s and can be bought in packs of 4. A pack of “40w” (which are really 9w) cost $7.97 and the same for a pack of “60w” (which are really 14w). It’s funny, they actually seem brighter too.

They also make the “100w” and “75w” versions too.

I’m curious to see what will happen on my next electric bill. Since these lights produce far less heat, there should be a slight savings on ACing cost too.

This weekend I’m replacing all of my light bulbs with CFLs (compact fluorescents) which fit in normal light bulb sockets but can typically use less than 1/4th of the energy and produce the same amount of light. They can also last up to 10 times longer than a normal bulb.

Since a normal light bulb actually wastes most of it’s energy (about 80 – 90 percent of energy in a normal bulb is heat, not light) this forces your AC to work harder. Switching bulbs can help fix that too.

Also, I just helped in starting up a recycling program at work (in a small but significant way). For the past 2 years I’ve been there, we have never recycled. Just like any business, we produce sooooo much recyclable waste (plasitic driink containers, paper, etc).

I asked our HR person why we still aren’t recycling. Her response was that she had checked into this before but it was so expensive for a company to do this so that’s why we hadn’t. My questioning prompted her to check the latest pricing and found that it had come down to a nominal and reasonable fee.

So although I didn’t necessarily make the phone calls to make this happen, I prompted the individual that did – which counts for something i think! :)