Energy Efficiency – LED

With rising energy prices back in the picture recently, I’ve been keen to reduce the amounts of watts that I use in my home, my target? Lighting!

Lighting, I’ve always had a facination with it (when I found out about Litecraft I wet my pants), I’m drawn to the lighting section in every DIY store like a moth. But I began to wonder just how much my “lust for light” was adding to the overall amount of energy that I use and what I could do about it. Due in part at least to a new round of oil price spikes and subsequent inflation feeding into energy companies raising the price of electricity.

Incandesant bulbs are now history in Europe!

While much of Europe was facing the last sales and rush to buy the last of the incandesant bulbs, I found myself installing LED spotlights, powering down my 50W hallogens to 35W, swapping out my incandesant 25W and 40W bulbs with warmish CFL’s around 5W to 11W each and swapping out my old fairy lights for LED versions which use a lot less energy. In fact my “tree of light” (a series of twigs from the local park entwined with lights) now has 150 bulbs (tripple the amount) and ONLY uses 5W of power as each bulb takes 0.0075 watts of power.

Efficient Lighting isn’t Boring

This is my treet of light, now spills over to the “pot plant of light” all powered by LED bulbs (150 of them) it lights up the room using only 5W of power! My “Cold Cathode TV” is being threatened with an exchange to an LED version.

Energy efficiency to me is sexy! I properly have a love affair with Light Emitting Diodes that goes way back to puberty.

While in school I had an interest in circuits, PCB’s, transistors, resistors and capacitors, I had overcome a fear of the soldering iron and my point here is that this is when I found out what a Light Emitting Diode was! Soon after I was stringing together coloured LED’s “in series” using speaker wire and making chains of fairy lights. If I had enough LED’s I would have shoved em all in the holes of my “Lego Technic” bricks and made displays worthy of installiation at the now defunct (and LED-less) Walsall Illuminations. So LED fairy lights, I called em first in 1995 ;)

LED is now in favour for Christmas lighting too and we are begining to see the first LED street lamps coming in, I for one am salivating over the possibility of reducing demand on our power stations while having the possibilty of reducing light pollution and seeing the stars again!

Could LED street lighting allow us to see the stars, even in our cities? It’s a compeling question!

LED lighting is reducing power consumption of TV’s
Even my bedroom TV was replaced with an LED version around Christmas which only uses 40W of power! It’s truely amazing, I’m glad to see prices of LED TV’s coming down to the feasible range. My current main TV uses a staggering 180 watts of power due to the way it is lit from the back, the equivalent “LED-LCD TV” would use 50W of power.

My entire living room lighting now comes in at under 60W total!! That’s just one light bulb in old money.

So if you’re ever thinking I have a lot of lighting, I actually know that roughly speaking it’s only the same as having one or two old style bulbs burning away and that’s what energy efficiency is, it’s reducing the amount of energy used to do roughly the same thing and it should be fun to see how much better you can make it. Fancy lamps don’t need to burn a lot of energy.

Watt’s the point?
Electricty units which are still mostly produced by steam power (the man’s work lives on) are rated in “watts”, named after one of my role models, James Watt (the man). The less watts something uses the more energy efficent it is, bills are calculated in watt hours, the less watts something uses the cheaper it will be to have it switched on and also the less drain it will put on the National Grid.

The issue really is that electricity prices are going to continue to rise and the amount of energy at which we can generate will eventually fall back due to a variety of issues. Renewable energy produces less watts to consume when compared with fossil fuels, so the first part of solving our energy crisis is to start reducing the demand of which the things we plug in make on the Grid.

Energy Efficiency is a way of increasing the “MPG of your home”.

Watt else have I done?

• Wash at 30C
• Tumble dryer runs on a night, not in the day.
• Kettle is not often filled by more than two cups.
• Looked at the next round of killing watts.
• Mobile phone chargers are on a timer to charge at night.
• A lot of sockets are on remote switches to turn them off easily.

So lots can be done, but to end on a slightly downbeat note, the increases in pricing means that it roughly cancles out some of these efforts. In a simile of what’s going on everywhere at the moment, we’re “running faster and harder just to stand still”. Population growth AND dwindling energy production plus rising prices mean that we’re just running a battle to stay where we are, but we’ll be better off for it once the Windmills and Solar Panels become the way we get our electricty and the cheaper energy we currently enjoy (or used to) starts to run low.

With Birmingham City Council looking at a trial of LED street lighting I can only conclude ……..

The future’s bright, the future’s LED!

Posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011