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New Evidence of a Decline In Electricity Use By U.S. Households (wordpress.com)
There's some surprising news from the Energy Institute at the University of California's business school. America's households are using less electricity than they did five years ago.
So what is different? Energy-efficient lighting. Over 450 million LEDs have been installed to date in the United States, up from less than half a million in 2009, and nearly 70% of Americans have purchased at least one LED bulb. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) are even more common, with 70%+ of households owning some CFLs. All told, energy-efficient lighting now accounts for 80% of all U.S. lighting sales.
It is no surprise that LEDs have become so popular. LED prices have fallen 94% since 2008, and a 60-watt equivalent LED lightbulb can now be purchased for about $2. LEDs use 85% less electricity than incandescent bulbs, are much more durable, and work in a wide-range of indoor and outdoor settings.
"I would add LED TVs replacing LCD, Plasma and CRTs," writes Slashdot reader schwit1.
It is no surprise that LEDs have become so popular. LED prices have fallen 94% since 2008, and a 60-watt equivalent LED lightbulb can now be purchased for about $2. LEDs use 85% less electricity than incandescent bulbs, are much more durable, and work in a wide-range of indoor and outdoor settings.
"I would add LED TVs replacing LCD, Plasma and CRTs," writes Slashdot reader schwit1.
LCD TVs using LED backlights were dubbed "LED TVs" to distinguish them from the original batch of LCD TVs which used CCFL backlights.
Enough with the nerd rage over marketing terms. You should be clever enough to have figured out that "LED TV" is used to mean "LCD TV with an LED backlight instead of CCFL" and OLED TVs are called, well, OLED. The LED backlight is, by the way, not a trivial thing when it comes to power use. If you look at an LCD most of the power it consumes comes from the backlight, with only a bit from the panel itself. So if you replace an older style set that uses CCFL backlights with a newer ones that uses LED backlights, you cut power consumption by a non-trivial amount.
Well prices are expected to go up over time due to inflation. The real problem is that wages have been stagnant, and haven't kept pace with inflation.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
They're surprisingly nice, too! I can hardly distinguish their light from a real 60 watt incandescent. Not like the original CFLs that gave everything a strange tint
The key is to make sure you get the right color temperature. For the "soft-white" look that everyone loves from incandescents, you want 2700K.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Most Americans pay less for electricity than anywhere else in the world and are wasteful of it as a result.
You are understating the costs a whole lot. $1500 isn't what it costs to do a good job insulating a home. You can spend that on a single good window. It costs quite a bit to get a well made window with two (or three) panes of low-e glass, filled with an inert gas, and so on and then of course you have to pay to have the old one cut out and the new one installed. You can get something much lesser quality and just drop it in the existing thin frame for a good bit less, but you don't get the big efficiency gains unless you do it right and have ti really redone.
So on a normal house with some big windows and sliding glass doors you can hit $5-10k easily just in redoing your glass.
Walls are another matter. Depending on the construction of your house, it can me pretty to very costly to insulate your walls. If you have something that is drywall mounted straight on concrete block, there's nowhere to insert insulation. You have to either tear down the drywall, add in framing, insulate in that, and put up new drywall (which also cuts down on the size of rooms) or tear off the exterior facade, add insulation, and put up a new one. Either way it's 5 figures to do.
It's a lot of money to renovate an old home and make it energy efficient.
Bullshit. What's happened is that the ballast is not working properly and the maintenance people make more money replacing tubes every 6 months than replacing the ballast.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!