They’re boring, but by crikey they’re bright…

On the one hand I have a sort of genetically coded miserliness, passed down to me from my famously frugal grandmother, while on the other hand my wife – well, let’s just say that I once saw her try to buy something by haggling the salesman up.

Surprisingly though, we’re both on the same page when it comes to the lights we just installed. Now, I mentioned this in the last e-newsletter, so I’m sorry to bang on about it again (I promise I’m not being paid by the lighting companies or anything), it’s just my inner skin-flint has gotten really excited about LEDs.

Get this: we can now run every single light in the downstairs of our house – kitchen, living room, dining room; 15 lights in total, in all their sparkling glory – at the same power cost of one and a half of our old bulbs!

I find this incredible, and have now turned into a total power-saving bore. “Oh look!” I’ll announce to my long-suffering wife. “The bedside lamp is on.” *Peers theatrically into lamp* “Oh, and it’s running one of the old 40-watt bulbs. Why don’t we switch it off and run eight LEDs for the same power use!”

The poor woman has developed RSI from all the eye-rolling (RS-eye, perhaps?), but at least there’s a plus from her point of view: we’ve finally gotten rid of the hateful, awful halogen lights we had before.

Do you know the kind I mean? One seemed to burn out every week. And they reached such thermonuclear temperatures the metal clips holding them in place would get so soft the whole unit – these are those cheap, recessed down-lights – would drop out of the ceiling and dangle by its wires. Our living room started to look like an aircraft cabin in emergency mode, with oxygen masks swinging above our heads.

Thankfully though, LED bulbs heat up much less than halogens or incandescent lights and last for years and years, so our home’s dimly-lit crashing-aircraft theme is now just a bad memory.

It cost us $225 to make the change (we bought 15 x 5-watt Orbit-brand bulbs from Mitre 10 for $15 each), they installed in exactly the same way as the old bulbs (you don’t need any special wiring) – plus it feels good to know we’re reducing CO₂ emissions by cutting our power consumption, and we’ll likely make our money back in savings within a year.

That’s made my inner scrooge a very happy man. I just pity my poor family, who now feel like they’re living inside one of those government power saving commercials, minus the handsome presenter.

Greg Roughan
 Editor, Green Ideas magazine

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