107 Lightbulbs

I bought a house last summer, and after moving in on October 1st, one of my first priorities was to replace all of the old (mostly incandescent) light bulbs with efficient LED bulbs. This turned into a five month saga.

Growing up, I thought that light bulbs were generally interchangeable. OK, there were fluorescent tube bulbs; but aside from that, while bulbs came in 40W, 60W, and 100W varieties, they were all the same size and screwed into the same sockets. Well, maybe that was the norm in the late 70s, but the house I bought was built in the late 90s and things definitely changed; there turned out to be no less than 14 different types of bulbs needing replacement:

If you're wondering what a house worth of assorted light bulbs looks like, here you go:

In total, replacing these bulbs cost $856.80 — but the power consumption (if I hypothetically had all the lights turned on at once) dropped from 5.8 kW down to 800 W. Based on an average 3 hours/day of usage (the Internet gives me estimates ranging from 1.5 hours/day up to 5 hours/day), the bulbs will pay for themselves in just one year — quite apart from the fact that the LED bulbs should last much longer than the incandescent bulbs they replaced.

Posted at 2021-03-04 03:20 | Permanent link | Comments
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