If you are trying to save money in this economy, you may have considered monitoring your electricity usage. You have probably heard someone say in the past that turning off your lights will help you save some extra money on your electricity bill. Surprisingly, it turns out that doing this does not actually have the big money savings we previously thought.
Nowadays, many of us use LED lighting compared to traditional incandescent lighting. This is the main reason the old habit of turning lights off doesn’t help us save. LEDs are very efficient and have serious energy savings. Thus turning a light off is not going to help you see a big reduction in your electricity bill.
In the past, turning lights off when you left a room made sense as the lighting was not efficient. For example, the total wattage of incandescent lights in a large room would easily exceed the wattage of a desktop computer. Today, LED lights only use a small percentage of energy compared to the traditional bulb. LEDs use such a small fraction that you can potentially power between half a dozen and a dozen LED bulbs with the power that is needed for a single incandescent bulb.
To put it all in perspective, let’s take a look at some numbers to see the lack of savings there is today for keeping our lights off. Let’s assume you like to use lighting 5 hours each evening. If you are using ten traditional 60w incandescent bulbs, you can assume you are consuming 600w per hour or .6 kWh. To determine your cost for utilities, you must multiply your usage per hour by the utility charge for kWh. In this scenario, we will use the national average of $0.12 per kWh. With this in mind, it would cost you $0.36 for ten bulbs each evening. Per month this would be $10.96 or $131.49 per year. If you were to reduce your energy usage for this scenario, then you would definitely save some money.
Now let’s see what the numbers would be if you were using ten 60w-equivalent LED bulbs for five hours. A majority of 60w-equivalent bulbs use 8.5w on average. With this in mind, you are no longer using 600w per hour, but are using only 85w. This means it would cost you $0.05 per day for 5 hours of bulbs running. In other words, you would be charged $1.55 per month or $18.62 per year. Compared to the traditional bulb, turning your lights off with LEDs isn’t the best way to save extra money.
This means that you can have your lights on guilt-free and not worry about how keeping lights on will create an expensive electricity bill. However, you are still encouraged not to be wasteful with your energy usage and turn lights off when not needed and understand by doing so, you won’t be saving a lot of money.
https://www.howtogeek.com/832047/you-can-stop-turning-your-lights-off-to-save-money/amp/
