LED lightbulbs

we have switched to LED and not sure there is much of difference, but sure some. hey every bit helps right?

We switched! But, only been here 6 weeks in this house and haven't gotten a bill yet! Oh, boy! I'll let you know.

Thanks roses, I would be interested in seeing if it is worth the initial investment.

We switched to the cfls rather than using LEDs...they seemed too expensive to risk the ups and downs of WAPA power, for one thing. And, one of the best point of LEDS is their longevity, but I'm not so caring about that in stx...the wattage difference between CFL and LED is not that significant either, but just our opinion.

We switched sometime ago but primarily because of the availability of incandescent bulbs versus CFL bulbs.

If you use 100w bulb as an example, it is fairly easy to figure out the yearly cost.

A 100w ICB uses 100w every hour, so if you have it on for 5 hours per day every day of the year, the total watts used would be 500W per day and 180000w for the year or 180 KWH. If you multiply that times the WAPA cost per KWH (.50), you come up with about $90 per year for that one light bulb.

A CFL that is equivalent to a 100W ICB uses around 23W per hour. Using the same formula, you would use 41400w for the year or 41 KWH. That bulb would cost approximately $20 for the year.

Now, just think about the refrigerator, freezer, A/C, pool pump, etc. and you know why the WAPA bills are so high compared to the mainland.

If it is any consolation, the cost of electricity is just as expensive or more downisland but it is interesting that no one ever really complains about it like here. A couple of years ago, we were paying $250 per month in the Grenadines and that is about our average bill here before we installed solar. Now they are $40l per month.

Both at my home and on my vessel, we changed out our incadescent bulbs to CFL's and noticed an immediate difference.

I must say, that because of the toxic materials contained in CFL's I was concerned about the environmental impact of widespread disposals, especially at land fills....

BUT, clearly; the benefits out weigh any other concerns- for instance, I have some 4000 lighting fixtures on my vessel. They were almost all 2' and 4' T-8 type Flor. lamps- in the 2 and four lamp assortment, also about 500 incadescent fixtures, running between 60w and 100w each.
Cargo Hold floods (873) were 100w HPS.

Starting earlier this year, we upgraded our lighting- a very large expenditure (300k), we changed the cargo hold HPS to 56w LED, flor fixtures to T-12's with T-12 electronic ballasts, all incadescents to CFL 12w and 18w..

We estimate that the bulbs will last a minimum of 3 years, the ballasts more than 6, the LED's (?) and the CFL's have been on nearly continuously for 1 year- expect to get 3-5 years out of them- Just in KWH savings, our calculated return is about 90k a year- so within four years it paid for itself...

Right now my lighting at heating load runs around 240 amps, previously it was about 390. SO figure the math- so about 150 kw now, vs 243 kw- that;s a saving of 814,680 kwh a year...

I goofed on my earlier post:

"Starting earlier this year, we upgraded our lighting- a very large expenditure (300k), we changed the cargo hold HPS to 56w LED, flor fixtures to T-12's with T-12 electronic ballasts, all incadescents to CFL 12w and 18w.."

Should have read that we changed from T-12 to T-8 Lighting, keeping the white light spectrum at 5000k for light color- improved our lighting by some 30% while cutting down our bills by some 40-50%.

A WORD OF CAUTION REGARDING LED BULBS: Please read this electrical engineering study regarding LED replacement of T-8's and even T-12's-

apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/.../troffer_benchmark_01-09.pdf

This plainly states that the CURRENT LED Drop In replacements for T-8 Lamps are clearly lacking. The cost of the bulbs are roughly $50 for the 2 ft, $69 for the 4 ft and $115 for the 8 ft- the same T-8 Lamps are $5 for the 2', $5 for the 4' and $12 for the 8'-

I don't think that the performance of these LED's comes anywhere close to the performance of the T-8's even at 1/2 cost energey savings- the mere cost of the retrofit alone is high!