In this article in today’s Plain Dealer, John Funk describes how Mike Brakey cut the electric consumption in his Shaker Heights home dramatically through various measures, including replacing all the light bulbs in the house with LED’s.  Here is more detailed information on what LEDs were used.

We installed 88 LEDs at a total cost of $2,400 over a three-year period.  The combined load of the LEDs is 709 watts compared to approximately 7,000 watts for equivalent incandescent bulbs.  $330 was also spent on 11 Lutron LED dimmer switches for individual rooms.  If a power outage occurred, a back-up generator could operate every LED light in the home with as little electrical draw as 100 watts.

Details on the fixtures we used are shown in the table below:

The Kelvin rating relates to both the color of the light and the temperature.  3,000 K is a warm white light, with a tinge of yellow.  5,000 K is a cool white light, with a tinge of blue; it is better for reading.  All of these fixtures are rated for a minimum of 50,000 hours of life, with less than 10% degradation.

Presently, residential electric rates across FirstEnergy territories in Ohio average approximately 12 cents per kilowatt hour.  For 50,000 hours of light, this translates into $42,558 for equivalent incandescent bulbs as opposed to $4,255 for LED’s we installed.  Thus, the savings would be about $38,300 over 50,000 hours of usage.

The payback period is sensitive to family living habits.

• In the extreme, if you are part of a large family that never turns lights off and they are run round the clock, 365 days a year, 50,000 hours would be 5.7 years.  The simple payback period would be 4.3 months.
• If a family has each LED turned on for 6 hours per day, 50,000 hours would translate to 23 years. The payback period would be closer to 17 months.
  

Another benefit is that, for the next twenty or more years, I won’t hear my wife ask me to change a burned out light bulb!  These payback periods might become shorter for future LED users because for the following reasons:

• LED pricing continues to fall as sales grows;
• LED technology advances are continually providing more lumens per watt; and
• Residential electric prices are likely to climb much higher over the coming years.

With financial savings of $38,300 over 50,000 hours, we have additional green benefits of:

• 742 less metric tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide)
• 4.72 less metric tons of SOX (sulfur dioxide)
• 1.25 less metric tons of NOX (nitrogen oxide)

Mike Brakey