Monday, June 25, 2012

How to Reduce Your Power Bill in the Virgin Islands

As I may have pointed out once before, our rate for power here is 42 cents a KWH, check out your own bill (maybe 15 to 25 cents) and you can see how high a power bill can be here.

To help defray that cost, in our kitchen living area there are 4 light fixtures that are halogen. Each bulb is 50 watts and there are 4 bulbs to fixture or 16 bulbs total.

So at Home Depot here, they had the LED replacement bulbs, and yes, they only use 4 watts a bulb! Although they are expensive, $21 a bulb, I decided to replace 3 fixtures with these new bulbs. Let's say one fixture is used 4 hours a night, that is 64 watts. For the year that would be 23,360 watts. One kilowatt equals 1000 watts or 23.36 kw's a year for a cost of $9.81. The old bulbs were using 200 watts an hour and at 4 hours would be 800 watts a night, yearly 292 KW. That cost annualized would be $122.64. This would be a savings of $112.83 minus the cost of the bulb of $21, $91.83. Since I did three fixtures, a savings of $275.49!


As our CFL bulbs start to burn out, I will be slowly switching the rest of the house over to LED, yes the CFL provided a great savings, but I think LED will be the way to go?

No comments:

Post a Comment

We would love to hear your comments, no need to sign in, just comment using Name/URL and leave URL blank or as Anonymous User