Has your electric bill gone down if you have a lot of LED bulbs?

[Zerk]

A quick pic of my stat, it's been in the 60s during the day, the house picked up enough heat that at 1am it's still 70 in the house which means it barely ran at all today.

View attachment 503761

Wow, glad you included a pic.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

I think it depends on the school and what their goal was. To TS and install or fundamentals? I never went to school, but worked for company installing boilers and furnaces. I bent tin, sweated copper ect. We had techs come and dial the natural gas in. Though some of plumbers felt they could do it too, but it was factory warranty thing. To trouble shoot and install you don't need theory. That is why they have tech schools and engineering.

Maybe yours covered it.


When it is around 0 out, I do leave it at constant temp, figuring in that case it is more efficient. Again all of this is from bowels.


Below are not technical articles, so maybe you are right. But the first 3 sites i came to disagree with you. Googled how low should I turn down my furnace.
Heat pumps,are different. But we don't tend to use those up here. Unless you are a hippie and want to save the penguins.
turn your thermostat down 7-10 degrees.
Turn Your Heat Down, Not Off, to Save On Your Heating Bill


A 10-degree drop could be 10 percent savings.
Common heating myths that can raise energy bills - Chicago Tribune


When your home will be empty for 8 hours or longer, set your thermostat 5°-8° higher in the summer and 10°-15° lower in the winter.
When you get home, set the thermostat back to your comfortable setting.
Doing so can save you 5-15% on your yearly energy costs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
3 Dumb Things You Do With Your Thermostat That Cost You Money - Minneapolis Saint Paul Plumbing Heating Air

The school I went to was a vocational school in 11th and 12th grades in HS, it was a fundamentals and tech based class.

That was the industry standard back when I was in school is not to swing more than 4 degrees.

The energy to regain heat on a heatpump is different from a furnace, boiler ext ext, each has there own value to recover. That's why I said that was the standard 7-9 years ago, it could have changed a little as far as swing goes (more than 4 degrees ext) but the idea of burning more energy to recover is the same.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

While this makes sense you can write the same story by saying you are not heating it as much gone. Th question is how much do you save by not heating it, and how much does it cost to get it back to temp. I'd like to see more on this. Because you can tell the story either way, that it makes sense, if you don't use any math.

With forced air that recovers quick, I suspect it is ok to let it go down. With my boiler maybe not as much.

I put some research into this 10 years ago, and ended up letting it swing. i won't swear that it is right. But that was the conclusion.

A swing is deff saves money, how much to swing is the key.

Old timers like the guy who used to live in my house before me lived his life under the idea of if I shut it off when I don't need it and only run it before I need it, I save money. I was taught that a swing was best without fully shutting down the system due to the recovery energy burned.

Let's say my way, the hot water tank burns an average of 3h a day, let's say his way just before he takes a shower he turns it on and he takes his shower and flips it back off, he might have only let it run for 1.5 hours so in my mind that would save money.

He would have a inconsistent shower and not much hot water the rest of the day.

That would be calculated of running two 4500w heating elements for 1.5 hours vs running all day. When a tank is in idle I don't think it burns both elements the whole 3h average time but that would have to be researched or tested.

Now if you really want to crunch numbers you can see what your heat loss on your house would be and where you lose most of the utilities at. Everything has a insulation value, there is formulas for everything like the insulation value of a brick wall vs wood, how thick the drywall is and insulation, it does on and on.

I have never done the math on any of that but I remember reading about it when sizing commercial equipment, because the whole 200,000 sq ft 1 story building has a totally different load than the 200,000 sq ft in a skyscraper. Based off the BTU loss on top of the building load you can correctly size the HVAC equipment. Even heat generated from the sun can greatly affect the conditioned space, so if that side of the building only gets 6 hours of direct sunlight the radiant heat gain will be significantly less ext.

In residential it's mainly by sq ft of the house, commercial has more bodies, more windows, more doors ext. I believe each person puts off 120btu, times that by a few thousand and all the sudden you have a much greater load than before.

 

[Zerk]

But either way you gave to heat the water up following a shower. Instead of heating at after the shower, and then keeping warm all day. There may be a benefit to heating it before the shower.

They do sell timers for electric water heaters.

I did not go this route, because I wanted the luxor of taking a shower if dome crazy thing happened. But I think he is was right.

You are depleting it during a shower. This is different from a house where you are maintaining it.

 

[Zerk]

Offices are interesting in that they may start ac early in year because of all computers.

 

[PJSprog]

We have switched the entire house over to LEDs during the recent remodeling. It's going to be hard to tell any savings, though, as we've done it in phases over a few months, and the usage there has changed dramatically since my Wife's Grandmother died, rendering useless any previous baseline data. Going strictly by the math, there will indeed be savings. However, as others have noted, lighting is but a small percentage of the overall electric usage.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

You do want to move your heat temp up gradually so that aux heat doesn't kick on. That will negate your savings.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

You do want to move your heat temp up gradually so that aux heat doesn't kick on. That will negate your savings.

I read awhile back that they make diff stats for heat pumps, mine will do this I'm pretty sure but I will have to check.

I read this specialized stat will delay the heat banks from firing in a schedule for that reason, if you swing too much then it fires off the emergency heating coils thinking the heatpump can't keep up which burns way more electric then just the heatpump.

My stat knows it's controlling a heatpump, past that I forget if there was an option of delaying the emergency heat when it runs the heatpump or not. I remember it can only start a max of 4 times an hour to save the compressor under a short cycle.

But I only swing 2 degrees on my schedule and do not gradually go up.

With a gas furnace it's usually on or off, it's usually firing at 100% or 0% so the idea on that would be less run time overall.

I like the 2 degrees mainly for the comfort reasons, it saves me a little money but even when I'm home when it's lower I'm the winter or hotter in the summer it's not a huge change in temp and most the time isn't really noticeable.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

Offices are interesting in that they may start ac early in year because of all computers.

In the building I work, were just shy of 300k sq feet, we run A/C year around, there's so much load in the building that mostly it creates it own heat, only places we really heat is exterior walls and windows. We can have over 2,000 people in the building.

In the winter the roof top units pulls in the outside air to cool the building, it also exhausts air that's saturated in co2 from people.

I'm the building engineer so we cover everything electrical and mechanical in the building.

 

[Argonne]

...I have added several LED lights that are now on all night that we didn't have last year...

Not to hijack this thread, but let me ask you a question. We moved to Texas a few years ago from rural Illinois. In Illinois, the power companies will install a streetlight on your farm property at no initial charge for a very attractive, non metered, fixed, monthly, rate. They started doing this probably 60 years ago, and as a result, almost every farm is lit up by at least one. Here in Texas, the norm seems to be that not a single light shows on most properties at night.

My wife goes out with the dogs at night, and she prefers light. Like you, I replaced several exterior lights with LED bulbs and let them burn all night. I even ran power to my front gate and have a couple of 1 watt LED lamps on the gate posts...very handy for spotting the drive at night. Those 2 bulbs running 24/7 cost me under $5 a year in electricity.

So where I'm from, light at night is the norm. Here in Texas, dark is the norm. As a native Texan, can you explain this phemonon? I'm sure my lit property pegs me as a "forigner"....

I myself like total darkness at night. Except on the darkest nights, I think you can see better, further, but since I can light the homestead cheap now with LED's, I do so, and it keeps my wife happy.