This is a live-blog so perhaps not as elaborate or embellished as one might expect, but very informative.
Background: Today morning Seattle City Lights politely sent me a mail saying, “You’ve paid your light bill successfully. Thank you.” I rarely ever open those mails, but for some or the other reason, I clicked on it. The initial reaction was shock, and then panic. My bill was almost $900. After some careful analysis, I realized a large part of it had to be my stupid circuitry. The amount of load my wine heater was drawing from mains was… let’s just say, ambitious. (Cops, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome to inspect my home as many times as you wish. I have no meth lab going on here. If those white vans across the street are of surveillance teams, could you come in? I’ve been dying to join some awesome secret organization, but they never seem to want me in.)
After the initial jerk, I decided to go out and replace each and every one of the light bulbs in my house with CFL variants. I emptied out QFC and my bulbs won’t end. I never knew how much crap I had in the house. At last count, I have eight100-watt lights from the kitchen (replaced with 12-watt equivalents), and get this – eighteen 60-watt bulbs including the bathrooms and kitchen (I have some elaborate bathrooms with decorative light-strips like the ones found in movie-star dressing rooms.)
WHOA! So everytime I was in the kitchen, I was burning 800 watts. Every time I was brushing, I was burning nearly 600+ watts. My 65″ LCD TV runs at about 600 watts!
Forget the long-term savings, just replacing everything with an, on-average, 15-watt equivalent brings the consumption down to 400 watts overall for the entire freakin’ house if I’m extravagantly keeping every single light on. And that’s still less than what I was burning just while brushing.
More updates to come. I emptied the local QFC and replaced only about half my apartment. There’s still at least 15 or so 100-watt bulbs that could use replacing. Out I go…..
