New houses waste energy

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:01:00 +0200

Greenpeace has today published a report about energy efficiency of new Finnish houses (in Finnish, sorry). They claim that with construction that use latest low energy techniques can reduce energy consumption to one third.

With the increasing price of energy in any form, this sounds like a very attractive proposal!

My own house is warmed with night electricity. It heats a large pot of water during the night with cheaper electricity, and then releases it slowly during the day. While this makes sense money-wise, it will still consume as much or maybe more energy than direct heating with electricity. I need to start considering changing the heating system to something that makes more sense both for costs and for environment.

Lightbulbs

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:43:00 +0200

Update: Grist has provided pictures of a line-up of CLFs.

Grist, a nice site that I just added to the sidebar, has made a hands-on comparison report on some of the CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Bulbs) on the US market. I like the informal style of it! The author ends up recommending soft-white bulb from Philips ($3.88).

Motiva, the Finnish site, calculates that if you change five ordinary 60W light bulbs to 11W CFLs, and you use them 2 hours a day, it will save 175 kWh electricity (they say it's about 20€ per year). The CLF's last also 6-15 times longer than ordinary ones. So it's 5 times less electricity and at least 6 times lifespan.

I'm just checking some Finnish web sites, and the quotes for 11W CLFs are in the range of 10€ each, and ordinary 60W is about 1€. If you need to replace ordinary ones 6 times while one CLF, you need to pay 6€ for the same amount of light. You will save 4€ per CLF bulb in electricity per year, and it should last many years with the 2hrs a day average. So eventually it will be cheaper, but not very obviously so.

So financially, changing the bulbs doesn't really make much of a difference. However, I think the best motivator for me is the convenience. Some of the bulbs in our home are quite difficult to change. Need to get ladders out, get a screw driver, open up lamp shades etc. If I can spare of doing this only once in 6 years rather than every year, I'm sold!

The only trouble with CLFs is that they need to be recycled properly. Can't throw them in trash can.

PS. If you know cheap places to buy CLFs, please let me know.

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New houses waste energy

Lightbulbs