Finance Travels

Last month, I wrote about how I was in the process of migrating about 85% of the household lights to compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs. Today, I started seeing the savings. Our electricy bill came in and we used about 26% less electricity this month than what we’ve been averaging over the past 10 months (graph below shows usage). I can’t give the CF bulbs all of the credit, though. We haven’t been running the two highest electric consuming devices, our air conditioner and hot tub, over the past 3 months. However, even when compared with January and February of 2007, our electric usage has dropped close to 200 KHW.

The only negative things I can say about the CF bulbs is their initial up-front costs and the 1-2 minute warm up time that some of the bulbs experience. Now that I see the numbers that we are saving and will continue to save throughout the life of the bulbs and the fact that we are making the world just a little bit greener, I’ve very happy with the purchase.