If you’re reading this, odds are you’re a college student. Now, if you’re a college student, odds are you’re always looking for a way to save a couple bucks, am I right? I thought so.
I’m going to take one more guess here and assume that if you’re living off campus, you’re probably living in an apartment or house paying rent. What if I told you that you could reduce your utilities bill for the next 17 years by making one small change? That got your attention didn’t it? Well here’s what you can do, switch out the light bulbs you’re using for LEDs.
I’m sure by now you’ve heard of LEDs. You probably even know a good bit about them and how environmentally friendly they are. They’re eco-friendly because of how energy efficient they are. Where an incandescent bulb needs 60 watts to light up a room, an LED only needs six.
Just switching out one incandescent bulb for an LED would save you nearly $20 a year on energy costs alone.
That’s not all though. LED bulbs will last you 50,000 hours. That means instead of having to go buy a new incandescent bulb every few months, you could use an LED for 17 years, and that’s if you use the LED for eight hours a day every day.
To put that LED’s lifetime in perspective, you could buy an LED light bulb and have a baby tomorrow and the LED would last all the way up into that baby’s senior year of high school. Mind blowing, I know.
But hey, maybe you don’t use incandescent light bulbs, maybe you use compact florescent bulbs (CFLs). Those are more efficient than incandescent bulbs, however they still use more energy than LEDs, usually around 14 watts compared to the LED’s six. They also have shorter life spans, close to 7,000 hours, but you know now that LEDs last 50,000 hours, nearly eight times as long!
So instead of thinking about your light bulbs as utilities, think of replacing them not with new bulbs, but with LED investments.
If you’re still using incandescent bulbs, then you really don’t have any excuses to upgrade. They’ll burn out before summer’s over.
CFL’s won’t last you much longer either, maybe through a bit of next year if you’re lucky.
Maybe you need one last push. An LED bulb costs just a bit more than $40 over its entire 50,000 hour life span. If you wanted to run CFL bulbs that long, it would cost nearly $150. Don’t even get me started on trying to run incandescent bulbs for 50,000 hours, it would cost you close to $400. You’re literally burning money by not using LEDs. Make the switch.
Cole Connelly is a weekly writer of the Trouble Shooting series for Hitlights.com where he addresses common LED questions and concerns. He’s also an English junior at LSU.