Found on the back of our electricity bill:
When we moved into the house in October of last year there were bare incandescent bulbs hanging from the walls. We didn’t get around to putting in low energy bulbs (CFLs) until December, when we replaced about half. At that point, our average daily electricity consumption dropped 16%. In February we replaced the rest of the incandescents and suddenly we were using 32% less electricity than when we moved in.
Compact florescent bulbs rule: the colour of the light is excellent, they’re 3-4 times more efficient than standard bulbs, and cheaper over their life because they last so long. The only downside is that they take almost a minute to warm up to full brightness, but that’s hardly a reason not to use them. I’m looking forward to the EU following Australia’s lead and banning incandescents by 2012. Bulbs are boring, but effective in reducing emissions.
Following a tangent, I think ENEL are required to put this information on your bill by an EU directive. It was useful in this case because we’d only made one change in the whole house: light bulbs. But day to day it’s useless – the feedback is totally dislocated. As they quote in a DEFRA report on the effect of feedback on energy consumption:
…consider groceries in a hypothetical store totally without price markings,
billed via a monthly statement… How could grocery shoppers economise
under such a billing regime?
Now that we’ve changed our bulbs I honestly don’t know where else we can save a significant amount of electricity. And these numbers on the back of my bill won’t be any help.
BTW, here is some information on a Carbon Trust field trial of the effects of advanced metering on consumption (they find it reduces consumption by 10-15%).
carbon limited 
Pretty dramatic difference in electricity consumption. Imagine if every household in the developed countries made the switch from incandescent bulbs to cfls. An interesing outgrowth of the global warming debate here in the US is the conservatives’ lament that, “Yes, global warming may be true, but since it may not be human caused there’s nothing we can do about it.” Or conservatives go directly from denial to disaster; global warming is such an overwhelming event that there’s nothing we puny humans can do. Your electric bill proves there is something we can do and it’s easy, inexpensive, and do-able on a household unit basis. Shouldn’t all electric companies in the “developed” world be required to supply householders with compact fluorescent bulbs? Maybe there could be a regulated phasing out of the production of incandescent bulbs? I really don’t accept the lament that there’s nothing we can do.
[…] May 21st, 2007 in climate change, kitchen, house, energy, food I was lamenting in a post about compact florescent bulbs how I didn’t know where else we could significantly cut electricity consumption. Then I saw […]
I hope you won’t put your CFLs in unsuitable fittings – such as enclosed luminares, because if you do you will quickly exceed their maximum rated operating temperature and they will actually only last a few hundred hours rather than the thousands claimed. They also have a habit of catching fire under these circumstances, so don’t leave them on as a “security measure” when you go out. In the UK it is estimated that only 50% of fittings are suitable for CFLs for this reason, and so I am waiting to hear what the proposals will be when incandescent lamps are banned. Will the Government be sending round electricians to check the fittings and change those that would be unsafe with CFLs ?