Electricity and Gas
The important energy uses and the savings opportunities for lights and appliances is straightforward to calculate. Electricity is the major factor here and you’ll see the wattage rating printed on nearly every lamp and device. Gas appliances may have a label concealed, though the Guide identifies typical “burn rates” (burner input) for key gas users.
Why do we say calculating light and appliance use is straightforward? Because use is determined by:
• the rating for the appliance, and
• how long you have it on or frequency of use.
Using the graph, you can see the range of ratings for appliances, lowest to highest, and the typical hours or frequency of use. Either reduce the rating or reduce the time the appliance is on.
Simple Energy Savings and Energy Conservation
Options for reducing appliance rating are numerous. Lighting, for instance, is highest for incandescent bulbs we know so well. Compact Fluorescent (CFL) lighting provides equal light with 75% or more reduction in wattage. Your electricity use is based on wattage times hours (you will see “kilowatt-hours” on your bill, thousands of watts-hours). If you switched the light on/off the same, changing the bulb from old-style incandescent to a CFL would eliminate 75% or more of the cost to use the light.
You can gain control of lights and appliances without replacing what you have with a more efficient device. In fact, for some devices new products are not any more efficient. If you reduce use from 1000 hours to 500 hours, it’s easy enough to figure that the cost displayed for 1000 hours would be cut in half. Reducing use does not improve efficiency of the device, but improves efficiency in how you manage the use of the device. We call this conservation, frugality, or perhaps just being smart. Do you have appliances that are left on, or kept plugged in, even when you are out of the room, out of your house, or even out of town?
Most appliances are “on” less than half the time. Engineers design refrigerators to run less than half the time. We have created more room on the graph for hours up to half the time, and more room to observe the smaller number of hours typical of most light and appliance use. Note that we have focused on larger appliance use. There are great resources to tell you how little electricity a food blender or electric can opener use. We’d like you to focus on managing the “big stuff” – reduce the amount of time the appliance in use or “on” and, when able, replace efficient appliances with new efficient ones.
Graph coming soon!