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Health & Fitness

A Bright Idea for Earth Day

Earth Day 2013 is the perfect time to try a new LED light bulb.

 

I celebrated Earth Day 2013 by going to Costco and buying a 17-watt LED flood light. I bought several of them about a year ago, and I’ve been very happy with them.

In my home, CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs don’t seem to last any longer than regular incandescent bulbs, so I stopped buying them, and I wanted to give the LED lights a try. However, most of the LED bulbs I looked at (1) were very expensive, and (2) didn’t give out very much light. So when Costco had these LED flood lights on sale last year, I bought 3 of them and installed them in our kitchen. I’m pleased to report that none of them has burned out yet.

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These flood lights are the large BR40 size that are used primarily in recessed “down lights”. They don’t have that long, slow warm up time that the old CFLs had, and they put out LOTS of light. As you can see from the photo, they’re rated at 1,065 lumens which is the equivalent of a 90 – 100 watt incandescent bulb.

Costco has several LED bulbs, and this is the one with the highest number of lumens; they’re currently on sale for $14.99. Why would you want to pay $14.99 for a light bulb? Well, let’s do the math. Let’s say that you’re currently using a 90 watt recessed flood light in your home, and you keep it on an average of 5 hours/day. If we assume that you’re home 350 days/year, that one flood light will consume 157.5 kWh of electricity in a year. At 15 cents per kWh, it will cost you $23.63 per year to use that light bulb.

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Now let’s assume that you replace your old flood light with the 17 watt LED light bulb that we’re talking about. Using the same assumptions as we did above, that LED bulb will consume 29.75 kWh of electricity in a year, which (at 15 cents per kWh) will cost you only $4.46 per year. In other words, the LED bulb will pay for itself in less than a year, and after that it will save you $19.16 per year. If you have 5 bulbs you’ll save nearly $100/year!

Happy Earth Day 2013!

Len

Leonard “Len” Dunikoski, GRI

REALTOR® Associate

Diane Turton Realtors – Rumson Office

8 West River Road

Rumson, NJ 07760

(732) 239-0739  (cell)    (732) 530-6686 (office)

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