This artical shows you how to push a 1920s house into a modern, low-carbon age. The last few touches - appliances and rare light bulbs.
After spending the past year reducing the home's heating bills by adding stacks of insulation, the owner has now turned her attention to slashing her electricity needs. She buy electricity from Good Energy which is a 100% renewable electricity supplier, but she would like to reduce our dependence on it, as all electricity is expensive – green or not. She monitor her energy usage with weekly measurements taken directly from both the gas and electricity utility and currently the house consumes 8kWh of electricity every day.
As part of her drive to save eneergy, She has reviewed the efficiency of all of her electrical appliances. Fridge freezers are significant consumers of electricity in the average house because they are switched on 365 days a year. As she was old, she recently replaced it with an A-rated one to minimise energy usage. Their television is an old-fashioned boxy cathrode ray tube, which is quite energy-hungry, consuming 300 watts per hour when on. The plan – when she has the money – is to change it over to a LCD type. They'll plan their purchase with a great site called Sust-It which you can use to determine the energy cost per year of new tellies and other products.
What else? Well, she changed most of our conventional light bulbs to energy-savers several years ago. That was easy with standard bulbs, so now she is replacing the more obscure ones.
The garage security floodlight was rated at an energy-guzzling 500 watts – the equivalent of around 50 standard energy-saving bulbs. Although it produced an instant bright light , it was repeatedly set off by animals wandering into the garden at night. So she found a low-energy bulb from B&Q which, although less than half as bright, consumes just 18 watts and reaches full brightness within a few seconds. B&Q now sells a better version using an incandescent bulb for instant bright white light, but after a few seconds the more efficient but slower compact fluorescent bulb takes over.
Continuing outside, our garden lights used to consume only 6 watts each, but having eight of them she was determined to replace them with a more efficient option. Compact fluorescent bulbs don't exist for such a small wattage so an LED light was the obvious choice. She has now replaced each of them with a very bright 1 watt LED version which nicely lights up the path to the house. A timer ensures the overall energy consumption is minimised.
She has used LED technology inside too. Earlier in the year she bought several Deltech LED bulbs from ebulbshop.com and was very impressed with its brightness and warm-white colour. It matches the incandescent GU10 bulbs (one of the most common spotlight-style fittings) very well and most importantly it has the same physical size, so it fits in her bathroom ceiling's recessed bulb-holders. These GU10 LED bulbs consume just 5 watts each but come close to the light output from their 50 watt incandescent equivalents. They won't pay for themselves for more than 10 years because they're so expensive up-front, so I justify the LEDs on the grounds that their carbon payback is immediate.