I’m trying something new today. This is a copy of a short paper I wrote for school on easy ways that you can go green around your house for fairly inexpensive prices.

There are several ways that energy can be conserved around anyone’s home. Some things that you can do easily to save energy and money are replacing traditional incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL’s), taking shorter showers, and using a programmable thermostat.

Compact fluorescent bulbs are a lot more efficient that incandescent light bulbs. CFL’s, according to Energy Star, use about 75% less energy than normal light bulbs. Additionally, fluorescent lights tend to last longer, eliminating the need to buy new bulbs as frequently. CFL’s also conveniently fit in any light; as with incandescent bulbs there are all sorts of shapes and sizes to fit your needs. Because CFL’s use 75% less energy and last about 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, they ultimately save you money. Compact fluorescent bulbs cost a little bit more than an incandescent bulb would. To prove, a single 14 watt CFL costs $4.00 while an incandescent bulb running at its equivalent based on light, 60 watts costs about $1.50. This is a substantial price difference, but savings are also substantial. I went around my house and counted all the light bulbs we have; 50 was my final number. All of these light bulbs are incandescent. A typical incandescent bulb draws 60 watts, or .06 kilowatts, or energy. Connecticut has one of the highest average energy prices in the county, 16.86 cents per kWh. Using these figures, to run a single light bulb for 1 hour, it will cost you about a penny. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you are running all 50 of your light bulbs, it costs 50 cents an hour. The average light bulb is used for 3 hours a day, thus all traditional light bulbs combined cost you $1.50 for all the light bulbs per day, $45 a month, and $540 a year. CFL’s cost about $4.00 each, but you can buy them in bulk for less; a 50 pack of CFL’s costs $130. The savings pay off this initial expense quickly as they only use 13 watts (.013 kW) of energy. This breaks down to .22 cents per hour per bulb or 11 cents per hour for all of the bulbs. Using these base numbers, you would spend 33 cents per day, $3.30 per month, and $39.60 per year. This is a significant $370 savings (the first year only, every year after that new bulbs do not need to be purchased it saves $500) over using incandescent bulbs. The fluorescent bulbs pay for themselves in 4 months. The pros to this are that the savings are huge and it’s inexpensive considering the savings. Cons are that it costs quite a bit up front, which may deter people from making the switch.

Another way that you can save energy is by taking shorter showers. Most shower heads allow 2.5 gallons of water to pass through them each minute. It costs about $1321 a year to heat water with an electric system if you use 100 gallons of hot water a day on a 75 gallon water heater. This equals $110.03 a month and $3.66 a day. Let’s say your average shower is 8 minutes and your shower head allows 2.5 gallons of water per minute. This equals 20 gallons of hot water per shower. If there are 4 showers a day in your house, showers account for 80% of your hot water heating bill or $1056.80 yearly. Cutting down the length of your shower to 5 minutes saves you money without sacrificing anything (except maybe relaxation and cleanliness to a degree). This reduction would reduce the amount of water used by showers a day to 50 gallons (50% of water heat bill). Assuming that the remainder of hot water consumption has stayed the same (20 gallons after showers) you are only using 70% of your previous hot water needs, saving 30% more hot water, using only about 70 gallons of water. This reduced your hot water costs to $925, saving $396. Pros to this are that it doesn’t cost you anything and it saves money. There aren’t any real cons to this change except possibly that you would need to change preexisting habits.

Finally, installing a programmable thermostat can save both energy and money around your home. Programmable thermostats are more efficient that dials because you can set the thermostat to cool your house when your not there, say during the day, and while you sleep. Programmable thermostats can save 10% annually on home heating costs. This assumes that the temperature is lowered by at least 10 degrees for 8 hours while you are either sleeping or out of the house. If, at home, your family uses 4 tanks of oil a year and one tank of oil costs about $850, your heating cost is $3400 a year. Ten percent of your annual heating cost would be $340, so that would be your annual savings. These savings can change based on how much the temperature is lowered and the length of time daily that the temperature is lowered for. A programmable thermostat usually enables the end user to set up heating routines for a typical weekday and two independent weekend days; they cost around $30 and can be installed by just about anyone. Your final savings for the year would be $280 if you replaced two thermostats. Every year after that, however, you would save around $340. Using $30 as the price of one thermostat, it would only take two months for the savings to pay for the investment. Some good things about doing this are that it’s highly efficient and helps you not be wasteful with your heat or cooling. Cons to this improvement are that some programmable thermostats can be tricky to configure.

I think that the best improvement out of these three that you could make would be replacing incandescent light bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent ones because it saves you the most money and is the easiest to do. Switching to CFL’s is maybe the easiest thing to do because all you have to do is screw in a light bulb to start saving money. If you buy a 50 pack of CFL’s to replace all your light bulbs, you save $370 assuming that the light bulbs last for a year (they last about 10,000 hours). For those two reasons, I would choose to switch to compact fluorescent bulb over the other improvement suggestions.