Monday, January 05, 2015

Thorfire Monday

Today the first of my test batch of LED bulbs arrived: the awesomely named THORFIRE!

It's a bitty thing, with a standard screw-in base, drawing 3 watts and producing the equivalent (...the packaging says...) of a 30 watt bulb. The issue here is that there aren't a lot of places around my home that I used 30 watts of illumination. I settled on the laundry room, where detail work or reading fine print is never an issue.
Because that room's time of useful illumination is relatively short (loading and unloading the wash and drying) I might put it near the bottom of the priority list but for one factor: its light is the one most often left on accidentally overnight. I'm not going to name any names, but a certain housemate does not have the habit of turning off lights when leaving a room, and many's the time that light's been left on all night. Thus minimizing its energy use should have a greater impact that a simpler analysis would suggest.
As Installed, THORFIRE!
Looks less vulnerable to accidental
Breakage than Pigtail CFL
With such reasoning, I had previously installed a pigtail CFL in there. I replaced it with the THORFIRE! and flipped the switch. Honestly, the room seemed more-or-less as well illuminated as before.

I did not toss the CFL, bur installed it in the downstairs bathroom, replacing a 60 watt incandescent. Therefore the THORFIRE! effectively displaced a 60 watt bulb. In doing so, I noticed that the bathroom lamp glass was dusty, so I washed it and the result was noticably brighter (...there's an important principle here!) The bathroom light is on an absolute minimum of twice a day, for perhaps roughly an hour a day or 365 hours a year.
In this case, calculating the energy savings, and therefore the ROI, is complicated by the two different rooms with very different lighting habits, but since I intended to be here for decades, it should all pay off.
I have a bunch more LEDs coming over the next few days, as following my success with the first one last week prompted me to go on Amazon and order a bunch of them. I hope I can make some interesting comparisons.

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