I would guess that Jevon's paradox doesn't exist for many domestic applications. Most people have all the lights, washing machines, etc that they need. Making lights more efficient won't make people buy more of them.
Every light in our house is LED and I still teach my kids about not wasting energy and turning things off when not in use.
Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs, but I can’t stand the thought of random lights being left on for no good reason, even if it costs 40 cents a year to keep lit.
EDIT- ADDITIONAL THOUGHT
I was going to add that it’s not like I went around my house adding lights that didn’t exist, but as I think about it... The house I grew up in was built in the early 70’s and every room had a single ceiling light that had two bulbs in it. The hallways had 1 or two ceiling lights.
My current house, built two years ago has 8 can lights in the living room, 6 cans in the kitchen and 3 pendants over the island, 8 in the dining room, etc... So maybe you’re on to something with the thought of putting in a lot more lights than we used to.
It is soooo that. When I bought my house 8 years ago I immediately had to replace some incandescent bulbs that shared a circuit with the microwave because the power consumption was tripping the breaker. And then I had to do the math to figure out when it was cost-effective to replace everything with LEDs. So I've become extremely cognizant of what things consume, and exactly what that costs...
Now I've got everything automated with LEDs and presence detection and schedules to turn things off when people aren't around or shouldn't be awake. Yet, lights needlessly being left on still bothers me.
There were less lights in poor homes. The more affluent homes had suspended lights with multiple bulbs. (I am not sure how it is called in English). I recall that a lot of homes got more light bulbs and ornaments through the century, as they become more affordable and more hype.
The increase in count came with a decrease in power. The typical 100-150W bulb got replaced by multiple 30-50W bulbs, they do not consume significantly more in aggregate.
I think these are called chandeliers. The etymology of chandelier is French.
Are you certain that it's wasting energy, though? You have to account for the time spent actually turning the light off, as well as for the psychic cost of having to think about whether to turn it off or on.
I'm reminded of one of my old offices, where some office busybody turned off the lights in the bathroom. They were fluorescent and took awhile to brighten up, so of course this meant that one would enter a darkened room, turn them on, and then slowly get some light. Was it a huge deal? No. Did it make our lives worse than just leaving the lights on? Yes.
> Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs, but I can’t stand the thought of random lights being left on for no good reason, even if it costs 40 cents a year to keep lit.
At 40¢/year, leaving it lit costs .11¢/day, or .0046¢/hour. At any reasonable rate for your time & mental energy, it makes sense to just leave it lit.
LEDs don't do this. At absolute worst, you'll have a fraction of a second before they light up at all, but once they light up, they light up immediately.
People are still not installing 10x as much light.
Yes, not exactly the same as LED light bulbs, but illustrates the point. LED's are cheap and the power is a rounding error, so they go in everywhere.
(This is infuriating to me because I would like my house to be dark at night)
Whether you're interested in saving energy or saving money, you should remove and smash your incandescents.
Here's a blog entry I wrote with some of the simple math: https://blog.sense.com/articles/smash-incandescent-bulb-swit...
We then immediately set out to purchase an entire house full of CFLs. They were still going years later when we split up and each took our share, I still have one somewhere, maybe in my living room.
Let's just repeat that.
More than 99 percent of the total lifecycle energy of a typical incandescent bulb is in its use. That includes raw materials, manufacturing, and transport.
Source: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/10/f27/lca_factshee...
Not when you're talking about a cheap consumable product which mostly converts power into heat. A 75W bulb is about $2.50/yr worth of energy consumption per hour of daily use at $0.09/kWh. An LED equivalent is +/- $0.35/yr at a cost of $3-$6.
Maybe 5%-10% of my home's bulbs weren't worth replacing out of cycle, but LEDs are so cheap and the overall savings so high that it's not even worth thinking about.
But quantifying the wastefulness of prematurely sending them to the landfill is much more difficult. We can suggest that LEDs longer expected lifetime is another benefit to the environment but that is equally challenging to quantify for the premature replacement scenario.
I've seen that in a few theatrical/architectural lights, no idea if it's available in the consumer market yet.
If you can find a "ELV" or "reverse phase" dimmer and you have the wiring for it, you can at least avoid the inrush current problem.
An anecdote: I have a fancy computer power supply that buzzes rather loudly when the lights are on. This is presumably because the lights are drawing a big inrush current spike 120 times per seconds due to dimming.
To top it off, LEDs have much higher frequency response than incandescent bulbs. This means that, unless you drive them with clean DC or with a very high-frequency PWM input, they'll flicker. (Not the kind of flicker you're talking about -- the kind you're seeing is the system malfunctioning. I'm talking about the kind where it flickers as designed and someone waved their fingers and decided it was hard to notice.) There's a new standard called IEEE 1789 that describes what levels of flicker are likely to be harmful (causing low productivity, headaches, general crappy feelings, etc.) and what levels are very likely to be safe. Very few LED drivers meet this standard so far. At least California has imposed a less stringent but still helpful for Title 24 compliance [1] for the last couple of years.
(This is extra nasty given that incandescent bulbs don't actually produce light proportional to the power with which they're driven.)
[1] It's Title 24 JA8.
Also I simply find it convenient that LED's just. don't. die. I haven't had to change a single bulb since I upgraded ~4 years ago.
Smart bulbs are so cheap now that I've obsoleted nearly all of my "dumb" LEDs.
The 100W bulb always lit in the living room will last 6 months but a 30W will do a decade.
I deliberately got a dimmer model because I wanted something to encourage my mum to sleep more; due to Alzheimer’s she has no idea what the time of day is any more, and has developed a fear of the dark and only sleeps with the light on.
Last thing we have invented which consume electricity is home PC. And it was 40 years ago. Without this invention we probably observed the declining demand much sooner, but hey, large monitor and good graphic card and latest 3D shooter, this stuff rocks. But before we invented home PC, people "had everything they need", they were just unaware of 3D shooters, and your argument was as valid as today.
For the last 20-30 years we had no other inventions which can convert electricity into value. And older inventions, such as fridges, got more efficient.
Yes it does. I personally added a bunch of lights I would never have added if they were inefficient. But because lights are so cheap (it's barely worth my time to turn it off, although I still do it), I added a bunch of them.
I'm still spending less on lighting power than before though.
If you think that you need to visit an American suburb two weeks before Christmas.