Where to save energy

[mmcirvin]

This article about the savings from compact fluorescents is pretty good. It's really about the interaction between all your electrical appliances and the rest of your energy consumption.

The basic message is that electrical appliances heat your home; all the energy you "consume" running appliances and lighting is really converted into heat that gets dumped into your home. If you want to heat your home, this is a side benefit—so reducing your electricity consumption under those circumstances doesn't save as much in fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, energy costs, etc. as you might think, because you'll be running the furnace a little more. It does probably save some, because electric resistive heating is not the most efficient way to heat your house; but less than a naive calculation would imply.

On the other hand, if it's hot and you're running the air conditioner, the analysis turns upside down, and there's a large multiplier attached to any energy savings from more efficient (or less-used) appliances and lighting, because you'll have to work to pump that heat back out of your house. In that case, switching to fluorescents could save you a lot, and reduce your carbon footprint correspondingly.

And in either case, making your home more efficient at retaining the temperature you want is a big, big win.

Comments

[thette.livejournal.com]

That depends on what kind of heating you've got.

My parents heat their house by geothermic energy, which is getting more and more common as oil prices go up. Remote heating (often from burning household waste) is pretty much standard.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There are also situations where the heating is of some conventional fossil-fuel-burning type but the controls and incentives are perverse. For instance, in the building where we lived in Arlington, Mass., there was a furnace that was directly below our apartment, whose operation was in no way related to the temperature in our apartment, for which we were not billed (heat is included in rent by state law) and that provided us with much more heat than we needed for most of the year; we'd sometimes have to run wall air conditioners just to make the bedroom bearable. So from the perspective of our behavior, the apartment was effectively in the tropics.

[megmimcg.livejournal.com]

Those of us in cooling load dominant climates definitely benefit fom the use of CF bulbs. Personally I prefer the light from the Sylvania CFs - I have found it most closely approximates the light from an incandescent bulb.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah... you're more or less an expert on this subject, aren't you?