Over the past year, I’ve led quite an aggressive campaign at my place of work to reduce our carbon emissions, cut our bills, and spend the resulting savings on people rather than things. We’ve had quite a success, which was borne out again when we just got the most recent bills for our electricity. In fact we managed to save 25% of our bills over the past two months, which is quite staggering. Of course, when summer is here, the savings head towards 1/3 because we replaced two air conditioners.
This is good progress really. So what did we do?
- a. replace all CRT monitors.
- b. replace all aging PCs with lower power machines.
- c. replace two aging AC machines that consumed the most power.
- d. switched to CF tubes wherever we could.
- e. cut wattages where we could on lighting.
- f. switched hi-power 50watt spots in non-essential areas.
But, I’ve been eyeing purchasing several kinds of led light. I haven’t made the transition yet, but I believe soon we’ll hit the sweet spot for these lights, and I’ll be able to reduce 450watts of spot light to just 1/10th of that. The trouble is: led lights tend to be expensive, and the light quality is still too low for higher light locations.