How Much Energy Will You Save by Turning Off Lights?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson, and I'm going to talk to you about how much energy you could save by turning off a light. Now, how much energy you could save really depends on the type of wattage bulb that you're using. So if you're using regular incandescents, those can range anywhere from 60 to 150 watts. If you're using the compact fluorescent that are readily available, you know, those can run anywhere from 8 watts up to about 26 watts, so substantially less energy by leaving those on. But let's just look at 100 watt bulb if you were to leave that on for 10 hours a day and for 30 days. So how we calculate energy usage for 10 hours a day over 30 days, that would be 300 hours of operation. For example, with 100 watt bulb, if you burn that for the 10 hours a day for 30 days, that'd be 300 times 100 or 30,000 watt hours. And energy is consumed based on a kilowatt hour, which is 1,000. So if we took that 30,000 and we divided it by 1,000, we would get 30 kilowatt hours that you'd use. Now, if you pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour, then you would use three dollars worth of electricity for running that 100 watt bulb 10 hours a day for 30 days. So that will give you an understanding of what you can save as in cost and in energy by not leaving 100 watt bulb on. Now, there's some other things just besides lighting that you need to be considered as far as energy savings. We have chargers for laptops, we have chargers for cellphones and various devices that are electronic in nature that when they are plugged in, even though they're not being used, they are still consuming electricity. So some ways that we can save energy is make sure that you turn off lights when they're not in use whenever you leave a room, and if that is something that is a little difficult to...for your family, then something you might want to look at is installing motion-sensing switches. These switches can be found at home improvement stores or hardware stores, and they install in place of a regular switch, so now when you walk into the room, it senses you. It'll turn the light on. When you leave and there's nobody in the room and no motion for a few seconds, it'll turn the light off. So those things can pay for themselves over a relatively short period of time. Or convert to compact fluorescents or LED lighting, which use substantial lower amounts of energy. But either way, the best way to save energy is to make sure that if you're not in a room, turn those lights off. I'm Tim Gipson, and that's how much energy you can save by turning off a light."