(This article has little to do with Legal Project Management, other than as a discussion of planning for long-term value.)
There was an interesting article in the NY Times today about LED lighting. I hadn’t thought about the odd “unintended consequence” – bulb-sellers will sell a lot fewer bulbs, since they last so much longer.
In the past year, I’ve change my office and the “great room” (kitchen, sitting area, TV, etc.) of our house from incandescent to LED bulbs. I just ran a quick spreadsheet of my savings.1 My office has two bulbs, and they’re on about 3000 hours/year. Our great room has ten bulbs (PAR floods and spots) and they’re on a bit over 2000 hours/year.
The upshot? Including the cost of bulbs, I’m saving about $21/year in the office and $73/year in the great room. The office bulbs will pay for themselves in a couple of years; it’ll probably take about four years for the more expensive (dimmable floods and spots) to pay for themselves.
The quality of light in the great room especially is better as well, because I could carefully select the color temperatures. For example, I put it two bright-white spotlights over the cooktop and warm-daylight floods in the rest of the room.
These numbers were calculated using Seattle’s electric rate of about 6.7 cents/kilowatt-hour, which is the lowest of any major US city, thanks to abundant hydropower. In other cities:
| City | Annual Savings, Office | Office Payback | Annual Savings, Great Room | Great Room Payback |
| New York | $76 | 7 months | $263 | 15 months |
| Phoenix | $34 | 15 months | $118 | 2.5 years |
| San Francisco | $45 | 1 year | $157 | 2 years |
I’ve done some approximating here, and haven’t spent a lot of time researching the costs of the bulbs in various cities. I figure Home Depot is pretty much Home Depot. Seattle’s sales tax is 9.5%, which is still a bargain compared to, say, Canada. Office bulbs – those “regular” shaped lights – are less expensive, and there are some bargains available such as the very weird looking Phillips bulbs that seem opaque yellow until you turn them on.
The point is that if you keep your lights on a lot, it’s time to switch. Prices are continuing to drop, so maybe you’ll benefit more by waiting another few months, but sometimes it simply feels good to be an early adopter.