Save energy, change your bulbs
Ever since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb (well some say Edison didn’t invent it he just perfected it, but that’s a story for another day), it has become a part of our everyday lives that we just can’t live without. Candlelight is now reserved for romantic dinners and for when ‘current gone’. It doesn’t even have to be really dark anymore for us to use them. Offices across the country have the lights turned on when you reach to work and turn them off when you leave, which seems to contradict the reason why they were invented in the first place, you know, to provide light after the sun goes down.
There are many different types of bulbs out on the market today, the majority fall into the following categories:
1. Incandescent Bulbs – most people will be familiar with these, electricity heats a tungsten filament in the bulb until it glows
2. Halogen Bulbs – as with incandescent bulbs, electricity heats a tungsten filament, except the filament is enclosed in a tube containing halogen gas
3. Projector Bulbs
4. Fluorescent Bulbs - these bulbs work by passing a current through a tube filled with argon gas and mercury. This produces ultraviolet radiation that bombards the phosphorous coating causing it to emit light (sounds so technical)
5. Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL) – these work just like fluorescent bulbs, but in a smaller package
6. High Intensity Discharge Bulbs (HID)
7. Full Spectrum Natural Daylight Bulbs
8. Specialty Bulbs
Stemming from the light bulb, hundreds of other products have been invented and thrive around ‘our source of light’; wiring, decorative lamps, outdoor fixtures, timers, dimmers, coloured lighting, flood lights, emergency lights, flashlights; the list could go on. The most important of them is the one that was invented over 200 years before the light bulb was conceived, electricity.
Again, I’m no expert on electricity, but basically a fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) is burned. The heat produced is used to boil water and the steam produced from that is used to propel electrical generators. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/electricity.htm). Of course there are other ways to produce electricity: solar, wind, water, but that too is a story for another day. For now let’s just concentrate on the ways that produce carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels. When fossil fuels are burned it produces carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. On average, each of us produce about 48,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.
I’m sure most of us don’t think about how much electricity we consume on a daily basis. For instance, the computer you are reading this on right now, depending on if it’s a laptop or a desktop, uses about 15-250 watts per hour. That figure will vary also depending on the processor, type of monitor, etc. Your frost free 16 cubic foot fridge uses about 725 watts per hour. Your flat screen TV, about 120 watts per hour. And something you might not have known, your TV draws about 10-20 percent of its total power usage when it’ switched off!
So now you are wondering what you can do to make a difference. Two words, start small. You don’t have to try and save the world in one day with one ginormous gesture. Let’s start with the light bulb, there are many little things you can do that will help save energy:
1. When you exit a room for more than 15 minutes, switch off the light.
2. Security lighting should have a day/night sensor, timer or motion sensor.
3. Change incandescent bulbs to CFL’s
If you change just one 100 watt bulb with a 28 watt CFL (you’ll get the same amount of light don’t worry), with the light being turned on for just 4 hours in a 24 hour period you will have reduced your annual carbon dioxide production by 451 pounds. A small dent in the 48,000 we already produce, but it’s a start. Imagine if just a quarter of our 1.2 million population changed just one bulb, that 451 will turn into a 135 billion pound reduction in carbon dioxide. That’s a much nicer figure.
The only way to reach that nice figure is to change your bulbs and tell a friend. When you do change your bulbs, go to this website
http://www.onebillionbulbs.com and log how many you’ve changed. Let’s get Trinidad and Tobago green. Track our progress here
http://www.onebillionbulbs.com/Stats/Country/TT
I hope this has motivated you in some way to make this small adjustment.
