Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent. However, please do not say "this is enough for me" after you replace all your incandescent light bulbs with these. Household energy consumption is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to industrical energy consumption and shipping.

This is actually a common misconception: in the US (as in most OECD countries), households consume slightly more energy than the industry.

As a case in point, in 2009, industry consumed 256 million tons of oil equivalent, versus 262 mtoe for the residential sector (ie households).

http://www.iea.org/stats/balancetable.asp?COUNTRY_CODE=US

Most energy consumption in the US goes towards heating and cooling, not illumination. Making your house more energy efficient starts with your windows and doors, not your lightbulbs.

Obviously, that's right. I was just pointing out that in the aggregate, improvements to energy efficiency in the residential sector are not a "tiny, tiny drop" vis-a-vis industry as the GP was implying.

And it's also true that residential lighting is not a big energy consumer, even though it still represents close to 10% of US electricity use (not of overall energy use, of course).

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...

That depends -- the energy wasted by illumination needs to be cooled away (if you live in a climate where cooling is necessary, obviously), which not only uses energy but also increases the necessary size of the HVAC unit needed. This can be significant in places with a lot of lights so more applies to offices than residences.

OTOH, if you live in a climate where heating is necessary, and even more if you heat with electric heat, there's obviously little gain to be had by switching to LEDs.

It's a given that most bulbs are located on the ceiling, unless you have a fan to redistribute that heat to the ground you aren't feeling the warmth. Also, when lights are off you still need to heat the house. Unless you're using the bulbs during the day, your HVAC unit will need to be just as big.

That's a difficult chart for an outsider to interpret. How are there electricity exports if there is no electricity production? How do they count "industry" and "residential?"

In any case, I'll note that the "residential" line does indeed read 262 mtoe but the "production" line at the top is 1,686 mtoe, leaving the "residential" category consuming something like 15% of total production.

Most novices and outsiders would probably be content to count non-residential energy use as "industrial," even if that doesn't match the IEA's more detailed classification. Especially energy-intensive commercial activities that I imagine must make up the "transport" category (like aviation, trucking, railroads, and shipping).

I agree that this table is a bit confusing ;)

Actually, residential energy consumption is expressed in final energy terms. This is the actual consumption by end-users of energy carriers (e.g. electricity, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc...). The sum of all these end-use consumption is the Total Final Consumption (or TFC).

This is to be distinguished from primary energy sources (crude oil, coal, natural gas, etc...), which are used to produce the energy carriers that end-users consume (e.g. in a power plant to produce electricity, or in a refinery to produce gasoline). The sum of all primary energy sources consumption is the Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES).

Since residential energy consumption is reported in final terms, the correct denominator to calculate the share you were looking for is TFC. Residential energy consumption thus accounts for 17.9% of TFC, versus 17.7% for industry.

The non-residential sector is denominated in IEA terminology as 'Commercial and Public Services'. This sector encompasses office buildings, hotels & restaurants, education & research, hospital & healthcare, sports facilities and public administrations. In short, buildings that house the tertiary sector. Therefore it can't be identified at all with the industry (btw industrial buildings consumption are accounted for in the 'industry' sector).

In total, residential and non-residential buildings account for 32% of TFC in the US, second only to transport (39.5%).

Disclosure: I've worked as an analyst at the IEA for 4 years.

That's a great clarification, thank you!

I'm not quite sure what you're saying... that the LED bulbs have a much higher energy and environmental "cost" in manufacturing, compared to a standard incandescent? That's quite likely true and has to be considered in the big picture (similar issues with electric vehicles, that their proponents like to ignore).

For me the answer is simple: $13 is way too much to pay for a light bulb, I don't care how efficient it is.

That $13 led lamp will last you 10x as long as an incandescent while saving you all of that electricity. As long as the cri is acceptable there's really no reason not to get it.

Nakedrobot2 is saying that industry in general wastes / uses very much more energy than households do.

While it's a good thing for households to move to energy efficient lighting it's not nearly enough. We need to work out ways for industry to reduce their energy waste / use.

$13 for a lightbulb isn't too bad, if it's a nice light and efficient and lasts a long time.

Businesses pay more than that if they need their light-bulb repair technician to get a ladder.

For me the benefit of all these low energy bulbs is to have lamps everywhere, rather than one or two bright lights. It's a shame that most of them are a harsh blue/white light at the moment.

Cree offers its bulbs in daylight and soft-white variants. I've seen in-between bright-white 60W LED bulbs as well, but usually for about ~$6 more or so from other manufacturers (mostly Philips).

> $13 is way too much to pay for a light bulb, I don't care how efficient it is.

You probably should care. It only takes 6 hours per day of usage for your 60W incandecent to suck up $13 of electricity in a year. And you'll have had to change it at least once. The LEDs will last for over a decade.

Yes, if you're only renting a house/apartment for a year then you may not recoup your costs (although it will be close). Similarly if the light is on for less than an hour per day. But if you plan on sticking around awhile it makes complete financial sense. You can literally save $200 per bulb over the lifetime of a bulb used heavily.

Also, the prices will continue to fall.

EDIT: mikeash is right that I should have mentioned the dependancy of efficiency savings on your local electricity prices. I used 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is a bit under the national average of 12 cents (meaning I was being conservative in potential savings).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the-pric...

Make sure to state what price you're assuming for electricity when making these claims. The cost of electricity in the US can vary by a factor of 3-4 depending on where you live.

I'm sure it's worthwhile for any heavily-used light even in very cheap areas, but the specific breakeven time will vary quite a bit.

You also have to make an assumption about the typical weather. The waste heat offsets heating costs in cold climates, but in hot climates, you must also burn additional electricity to pump the waste heat outside. My estimate is that a 50W bulb efficiency improvement results in a saving between 30W-70W depending on the climate.

If you live in Iceland, the payback is probably never. If you live in Singapore, you will recoup the cost in months.

I personally use LEDs everwhere except my bathroom during winter, where I use inefficient globe bulbs because it warms the bathroom.

That's an interesting point. Reminds me of when a Wisconsin city replaced all of their stoplights with LEDs, then discovered come winter that the new bulbs wouldn't melt snow like the old ones did, requiring a lot of manual cleaning to remain visible.

I'm not sure how much of a difference it's likely to make, though. Houses in cold climates usually use more efficient heating systems, so the heat from a light bulb will be pretty costly by comparison. With a 50W savings, the cost for additional heating to make up for that will probably only be equivalent to about 10W of electricity, or less, depending on your setup.

Air conditioning is usually pretty efficient, with efficiencies better than 10 (10W of heat removed for 1W of electricity used). So that 50W savings will still be 55W or less when taking air conditioning into account.

> Air conditioning is usually pretty efficient, with efficiencies better than 10

I think you are off by a factor of 3.412. The SEER rating may be 10, but that means you push 10BTUs per Watt Hour, or 2.9 WH/WH.

I am also assuming that burning NatGas produces electricity about 40% efficiency delivered, and burning it at home for heat is about 80% efficient.

My whole life is a lie!

Thanks. Never thought people would actually use an efficiency rating where 1 didn't mean 1:1. Now I know better.

Heck the efficiency gains are the maybe the fourth most important reason I switched to LEDs. #3 is bragging rights of course, #2 is the instant-on vs CFLs (barely perceptible 1/10 sec until 100% brightness).

#1 is the annoyance cost of having to replace a lightbulb. Almost all of my lights are either recessed in the ceiling or in annoying-to-access fixtures; not having to find a ladder or chair and balance the replacement in one hand is well worth the ~$10-20 LED bulbs cost. Amortized over their expected lifetime it's minuscule and if I move I'm taking the bulbs with me.

On kWh costs, don't forget that when you reduce use, you reduce the last kWh first. Meaning, in a tiered pricing model, you reduce your most expensive electricity first.

So, the price you would use to calculate savings is not your average price / kWh. You should use your max price / kWh.

That's also why if/when you install solar panels on your roof, you recover your investment faster if you don't quite cover your entire electrical needs.

Who pays variable rates in a residential setting? I pay a flat $0.095/kWH regardless of time of day, demand, etc.

I do. Sample size = maybe 3 (I've moved around a bit). I'm in the US, have lived in Southern California (Edison Electric), Phoenix (SRP?), San Francisco (PG&E), and Boston (NStar pronounced N-Staaahhh by my Mass. friends).

I thought all utilities were on a tiered pricing model. It's actually a technique employed by Arcata, CA to fight pot growing houses [1][2] that use > 600% of the baseline usage.

Also, I have lived places where middle of the day pricing is higher. My utility company just sent me an offer for tiered pricing by time of day. Smart meters help with implementing time of day pricing.

[1] http://www.arcataeye.com/2012/08/measure-i-the-grow-house-el...

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/03/pot-tow...

OTOH, my entire house is fluorescent and LED. My monthly electricity bill is $65. For a house! I never have to replace burnt out bulbs. At $13 I'd guess the LED is actually about at break-even over the life of the bulb vs incandescent unless you're buying incandescent in the big packs of 30 bulbs for $10.

The only gas in my house is my central heating, and my old water heater. I plan to replace that with point-of-use electric tankless units. No more waiting 2 minutes for hot water at the kitchen sink! With a $3,000 grid-connected solar kit I'm pretty sure I can get to near $0/month on electricity, even with the electric water heaters and the Nissan Leaf I just bought last night. ;-)

It's the future brother. Stuff lasts longer, provides a better experience and is cheaper. It's win/win/win. The environmental wins might not be all that dramatic with the impact of production factored in, but if you're in it for the long haul I figure you can still feel OK about it if you were up to replace a bulb/water-heater/car/etc anyways when you make the switch.

PS: Have you seen the price on POU tankless water heaters? Once you have the panel/breaker/wiring in place, they're dirt cheap compared to traditional water heaters.

Lighting is a small fraction of your overall electricity usage. HVAC alone uses many times as much. While using efficient lighting is a good idea far too many people get hung up on it when there are better places to conserve.

It depends on how many people are in your family and how frequently they forget to turn off the lights. Plus, having 400W of incandescent bulbs on is 400 more watts that the A/C system has to cool.

Wow. I never thought of that. Thanks for the enlightening comment! Makes perfect sense.

A good rule of thumb is it takes and extra 1/3 as much electricity to cool.

So your 400 watts of bulbs will consume 133 watts in the cooling process.

Yes and No? I mean, my bill only goes up $20 in the summer to cool the house, and that's in a 35 year old home in Dallas. That's over 90 straight days of 110F temperatures last year.

It's a new, pretty efficient HVAC unit though. Thankfully. First home I've had that didn't struggle to maintain 76F indoors during the hottest part of the day.

Still, there's not a ton you can do around the house as cheap as replacing the bulbs in the high-traffic areas. Anybody can do that. Replacing your HVAC for something more efficient is going to be a challenge for most.

Then there's high-R-value windows to install. Foam insulation on exterior walls (brick, so that's a lot of dry-wall work). Radiant barriers in the attic space. More ceiling insulation. Tankless water heaters.

Outside of maintaining your weather stripping, I can't think of anything that pays off as much, for as little, than replacing your light bulbs. Maybe getting a Nest thermostat? We've got recessed lighting in the Living Room, which had four big 90W halogen bulbs when we moved in, and are almost always on if somebody's home. Replaced 'em with 17W LED bulbs (http://www.usa.philips.com/c/led-light-bulbs/ambientled-17w-...).

That comes out to about $7/month in savings. (360w vs 68w @ $0.0912 per kw/hr). In the year since I installed them they've paid for themselves. They'll last 22 years according to Phillips. The ROI on LED (for your highest-traffic rooms at least) is stupid cool, and I'll effectively never have to bust out the 8' ladder to replace them. I might be off base, but I think I've typically replaced halogens every couple years or so. So even over 5 years the old bulbs probably would've cost me 10X more.

For our situation at least, that's a no brainer. If I can spend $50 today and avoid paying $5/month indefinitely, that's a big win in my book. I may not be able to afford to buy a car cash, and have to pay the financing penalty, but at least I can break out of the "financing" cycle with my home lighting. ;-)

Maintain 76? 76 is borderline torture.

To each his own. I'm comfortable at 76, which is good, because my family will complain about being cold. (They're happy at 70 in the winter, though... go figure.)

When it's 100 outside, 76 is down right chilly!

I live in a new construction condo in the Pacific Northwest. A couple of times per year I have to turn on a single heater.

My $35 power bill is my desktop computer, refrigerator, hot water heater, and the 7 lights that end up turned on just to light up a 500 or so sqft living space. (Recessed lighting is evil.)

Why is recessed lighting evil?

My biggest problem with either fluorescent or LED is that the brightness is not there at the top end, once you get into 150W-equivalent and higher. I'm sure we'll get there though.

> I plan to replace that with point-of-use electric tankless units.

So what is your gas bill right now? It costs around five times as much to heat with electricity.

If you wanted to be smart about it, add an electric heater with a sensor. Best of both worlds that way. Hot water is instant but after two minutes you are using cheap gas-heated water.

Gas is typically more than my electricity bill and I only have the gas water heater and central air. Dryer, cooktop, etc is all electric.

You're right of course, but given my cheap electric rates, the fact that "some day" I could produce electricity on my roof, and I won't be throwing 2 gallons of water down the kitchen sink waiting for it to warm up, that it'll be a win overall.

I'm not going to be drilling for gas in my back yard anytime soon after all. :-)

Plus, I'd find it hard to believe that generally speaking my electricity isn't far better for the environment considering it's 100% wind. It's probably easier to ask what weeks has there not been some mishap in Texas City than not. That's not normally a primary driver for me, but all things being equal it's a plus.

One of the most interesting parts of lighting energy efficiency to me is that once lighting uses so little power, you can use battery backup for power outages.

I'm surprised there isn't a push for low voltage LED lighting. Running low voltage cabling and electrical boxes is a lot easier and the LEDs run off of low voltage anyway. Outside of appliances, who needs 120VAC in most of their rooms?

I was going to do this in the house that I am building, but the building department has very strict codes for how often you need 120VAC outlets (quite often to prevent daisy chained power strips and similar unsafe behavior). The relevant code is from the International Building Code:

"Receptacles shall be installed so that no point measured horizontally along the floor line of any wall space is more than 6 feet (1829 mm), from a receptacle outlet." [1]

[1]: http://publicecodes.cyberregs.com/icod/irc/2012/icod_irc_201...

Yeah, that is a common building code requirement in most states. It's going to be more annoying when everything starts having USB plug adapters and charges off 5v.

Where do you live, and what's the square footage of the house? My monthly bill is hundreds per month, but the significant majority of that is AC - I live in Arizona, and cooling in the summer here takes a crazy amount of juice.

Lighting is all CFL, though - the bulbs are about $1.40 apiece and consume 13w of juice, which works out to around $11/year to run 24/7. A 60w incandescent would cost around $52/year to run 24/7. We obviously don't run them constantly, but even if the incandescents were free, the CFLs are a better deal over the bulb's lifetime.

Dallas. ~2400sqft maybe? I forget. It's pretty easy to lock in ~9c rates here. I think I actually pay 9.6c per kwh because I chose the "100% Windpower" option.

I expect the car will probably kick that up <$10.

Wow, that's impressive. How old are your AC units? Newer ones are apparently crazy more efficient - I'm wondering if it might be worth the upgrade cost now.

We just bought the house a year ago, so I have no idea. I know it was on the market for two years and got all new kitchen appliances. The condenser certainly looks new though, and bigger than I'm used to in a single story home, so it's my guess it also saw an upgrade.

Please tell me you're using CFLs as the very least. Yes the upfront price is higher, but these bulbs actually pay for themselves in approximately two years and they start saving you money after that and not to mention time from not having to buy and install new bulbs.

Problem is, the CFLs don't last. They usually don't last even a single year. My story:

I got the faith: I replaced every incandescent in our condominium association with CFL. After one year, most all the CFLs had failed, despite having 3- to 5-year warranties. Also noticed another peculiarity: CFLs are stolen more often! Apparently our condominium parking lot has become a CFL bank for individuals who want to lower their light bills.

So last week I bought a 4-pack of 40W incandescents for $4! That is down from the $12 I would have paid for four CFLs that wouldn't last any longer and that, when broken, are a mess/danger to clean up.

No more CFLs for me, thank you! The whole CFL thing is looking like a scam.

> when broken, are a mess/danger to clean up.

When a company or a government agency gives instructions for clean-up they're going to go 'by the book' as much as possible.

They give these scary sounding instructions because for every 50 people who manage to put a broken CFL into a bin without instructions there's going to be 1 who'll gather a bunch of broken CFLs in a sack and toss it into a lake; or who operates a trash business and who stores kilograms of them in the open leaching stuff into the water table.

See also women being told to avoid '4d scans' (no medical purpose; everything carries some risk even if unknown and unquantifiable; thus avoid this risk because there's no medical benefit) or coffee cups with "This is hot" printed on them.

I just replace my CFLs under warranty. As you said,most have 3-5 year warranties, so I just go back to the shop and get a brand new one. I always put the receipt in the box and the box in a safe place so I can always find it.

> Problem is, the CFLs don't last. They usually don't last even a single year. My story:

CFLs are very picky about the quality of the electricity supplied to them, and the cheaper CFLs save money by using a cheap ballast which ends up frying the bulb pretty early in its lifespan.

If you buy a name brand (such as Phillips) you will get a product that lasts 3+ years easily.

Now in theory LEDs can a bit over a decade if not driven really hard, but to get the current brightness you see out of home lighting LEDs the poor things are driven way past the point of living their optimal lifespan / lumen.

It doesn't help that LED bulbs are housed in super hot bulbs with heat sinks desperately working to keep the bulb from frying itself!

We have used every brand available including Phillips. The CFLs don't last; the incandescents work reliably. As for the quality of electrical power - that's in the hands of the power company.

We returned bulbs on warranty but, seriously, if you're spending money/time driving to/from Home Depot to get replacement CFL bulbs on a warranty instead of buying cheap incandescent bulbs that work, you are suboptimizing.

> The CFLs don't last

Then go with LEDs then. They still save you money in the long run.

> if you're spending money/time driving to/from Home Depot to get replacement CFL bulbs on a warranty instead of buying cheap incandescent bulbs that work, you are suboptimizing.

How is it sub-optimal? Aren't you driving even more to and from Home Depot buying new incandescent bulbs?

Have you priced LEDs? They'll likely be stolen more frequently than CFLs and at significantly greater cost (they are very distinctive and easily-recognized).

Incandescent bulbs last years; CFLs don't. I save money and time buying incandescents instead of CFLs.

It's probably a big difference in quality depending on what you get. Most of our CFLs have lasted so long we've physically broken more of them while moving to a new house than have given up in use.

I get IKEA ones which are really cheap. They've lasted me 4-6 years. There's a warranty too as long as you keep the receipt.

No. Incandecents. I tried CFLs, they didn't last, the lighting was inferior, and disposal involves HAZMAT concerns.

If I were to replace all the bulbs in my house at $13/per I would be looking at about $1,000. And the energy savings would be noise in my budget. I mean it would literally be dwarfed by one extra dinner in a restaurant per month. It's not worth any mental energy at all. I like incandescents, and that's what I use.

Per Ahmdal's law optimizing something like residential light bulb energy use isn't going to have a large impact. So don't do it and say "this is enough for me" because you have made the smallest drop in the smallest bucket.

It was not very long ago that CF bulbs were $13 each. And even they were still more cost efficient to buy than incandescent bulbs.

> $13 is way too much to pay for a light bulb

A bulb that never needs replacing (assuming you stay in residence less than 10 years) and pays for itself (and more) in energy savings? Sold. Easy.

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