Re: An old friend powered up after 30 years !! Message #11 Posted by Garth Wilson on 10 Oct 2012, 2:05 p.m., in response to message #8 by Dave Shaffer (Arizona)
CFLs take a couple of minutes to come up to full brightness. I have measured one in our living room with my light meter, and initially it is only at half brightness. I end up turning it on before I need it, to give it time to get up to speed. For something like a hall closet where it's only on for ten seconds at a time, incandescents are appropriate. Also, the oven light can't be LED or CFL, and the whole point of the oven is to produce heat anyway, so it makes sense to have an incandescent there. I don't know if that's true of the light in the clothes dryer.
But a 20% savings was $160?? So the whole bill is $800?? We have at least three computers and two aquarium pumps running 24*7, an aquarium light running all day every day, electric stove and oven, and the total electric bill is about $60, with several incandescent bulbs. BTW, when we replaced our 30-year-old refrigerator with an Energy Star one, our bill actually went up, not down, and then I read of corruption in the agency that gives the ratings. When I checked the wattage on the refrigerator label, yep, the new one takes more. It's the same size as the old one, and needed repair in the first year.
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