If it’s daytime, chances are your home has enough natural light coming in to avoid using artificial light. We don’t have a ton of windows, but there’s at least one in each room, so we just try to stick to the areas with the most light and only flip a switch if absolutely necessary. And it’s always good to get some extra Vitamin D outdoors (where there’s plenty of light!). :) We put the kids to bed around 8pm, which is when it starts to get dark here right now too, so we don’t even need artificial light for that process, and they have a battery-operated nightlight that turns off automatically after about 20 mins. When hubby and I need a bit of light after it gets dark, we use only lights that have really low-wattage LED bulbs installed. We get 7-watt LED bulbs from IKEA that are as bright as 60-watt incandescent bulbs. But even then, we usually have an absolute max of 28 watts burning at once (two lights–four bulbs).
Now, there are exceptions–for instance, if we have company over for dinner, or a group of friends over for game night, we use a few more lights to make sure everyone feels more at home. :) But we do have LED or other types of energy-saving bulbs installed in most of the sockets at this point anyway, so it doesn’t put a major dent in our power bill to use a few extra for a few hours.
Did you know there is a device that will tell you exactly how much each electric powered item is costing you? It’s called a Kill-a-watt and it’s available from Amazon for about $20-$25. You just plug in your fridge, hair dryer, laptop, and program in your local rates and it tells you exactly how much it costs per hour/day/month, whatever you want. I’m on the Green Team at work and we bought about 10 of them for our employees to use. It has been a very popular item and I’ve been surprised at how much some of our items are costing. #SITSSharefest
That is amazing, Adrian! Thanks for sharing! I will have to look for that next time we are out. :)