More bulb replacement taking place

I'm in the process of slowly changing over all my bulbs to the more efficient variety. The new house is littered with halogen bulbs just about everywhere. They provide wonderful bright light, but because they are spotlights you end up needing quite a few lights to cover an entire room. Case in point, the hall has 9 of these bulbs, and the kitchen 12.

At 50W each that means keeping the lights on in two of the most used rooms in the house uses up 1050W - compared to the old house where low-energy bulbs kept the usage down to around 100W in total. Unsurprisingly that's had a detrimental effect on the power bills - they've virtually doubled and I can only put that down to the lighting requirements.

For the spotlights, I'm trying out the LED alternatives - these consume about 2-5W compared to the current halogen bulbs. That will bring the consumption back down to about 100W. Costs were at about $20 a bulb just a few months ago, but you can often get them for a tenth of that now.

This march to use the low-energy bulbs is bringing the prices down considerably, helped on immensely by programs like the Wal-Mart drive to sell 100 million CFLs. Wal-Mart beat that target.

The real test though is whether you can tell the difference between the old incandescent and the newer LED and CFL bulbs. With the right CFL, I could barely notice any difference (albeit they required a longer warm up), but the LEDs are basically instantaneous.

When the costs of electricity are going up all the time, we should take every opportunity to lower those costs.