HOUSE OF SOLAR

I want to preface this account with a little background. When I first started with Citizenre back in March of 2006, I was your average American Citizen. I went to work. I paid my bills. I knew electricity prices were headed up but just accepted it. I knew gas was going up but really just swept it off as “a inevitable cost of living increase”. I have heard a lot about “Global Warming” and thought Al Gore was a “Fruitcake” who made a ass of himself in his run for the Whitehouse. O.k., I know some of you may disagree with the last statement but that is how I saw it.

Since becoming a Ecopreneur, my life has changed. My eyes are open. Peak oil is either here or has just passed. Oil prices are probably not coming down this time. And, whether you believe in “Global Warming” or not, you can’t argue that breathing in smog and pollution from our energy producing coal plants is good for us.

So now to our “Living with Ed” moment. I was helping my wife empty the groceries and noticed that she bought a four pack of 60w incandescent light bulbs. I asked why did you buy these instead of the compact fluorescents.

Her reply was “well they are much cheaper and those compact things burn out just as fast as the regular bulbs.” Now in the past I would have just let it go and moved on, but now, “Oh No.” I pulled out my calculator, pen, and paper and this is what I came up with:

For this example I used a 60w incandescent and its equal, a 14w compact fluorescent. In keeping with my wifes argument, “That the compacts burn out just as fast as the regular ones”, I used the 2000 hour life expectancy of the incandescent. Also we used the ave. Kwh rate of $0.13/Kwh.

60watts x 2000hrs=120,000watts/1000=120KwH x $0.13=$15.60 for electricity to run this bulb through it life.

14watt x 2000hrs=28,000watts/1000=28KwH x $0.13=$3.64 for electricity to run this bulb through the same life expectancy of the incandescent.

Keep in mind that the compact is rated to last for 14,000 hrs.

Conclusion: For each bulb we change in our house, we will save $11.96 in electricity through the life of the bulb. Since the incandescent cost $0.36 each and the compacts cost $1.74 each, the savings in electricity more than outweighs the $1.38 difference in cost.

Last Conclusion: We will be switching all of our lamps over to compact fluorescents as the “regular” ones expire. I hope you will do the same.

Louis Petrik
Senior Sales Director – citizenre– CapCitySolar team
www.longhornsolar.com

(If you have your own living with Ed moment email it in)