27102010

energy efficient homes and energy saving

Energy can only be saved through using less of it to achieve the same end results, logically. It is from this simple statement that all techniques of energy saving stem.

Now, further to this, you can break down energy saving into two 'forms': the first being reducing the energy to be put into some activity, and the second being 'keeping' more energy for longer to get better usage out of it.

The first form is the 'input' part of the energy equation and this is where products like energy efficient light bulbs, etc come into their own. The second form is often seem as the 'energy' wastage part, i.e. you have gone to all that effort to transform the energy into something useful to only have it go to waste over time. This is where what I term 'energy preservation' comes into play (i.e. you have spent energy heating or cooling a room, you would like to make sure the room stays at the desired temperature for a long time without any additional heating or cooling).

For more information on how to achieve energy efficient heating and cooling see this article. This is important to read, as the most energy is often consumed in climate control in houses.

Energy efficient lighting

There is a lot of focus on this at the moment, and rightly so, the old incandescent light bulb as a horridly inefficient user of energy to produce light - most of the energy gets converted into waste heat and they do not tend to last all that long.  But is going all 'LED' really the way we should be approaching this problem? Industry has been making use of fluorescent tubes for many years to good effect. Although having a long tube on your ceiling is not an ideal look in most modern homes; hence welcome in the compact fluorescent light blubs (CFLs).



A word of warning though,  CFLs will only give you an energy saving if you use them the same way as the old incandescent light bulb - i.e. just because they use 20% of power does not mean you should leaving them on 5 times as much... net result the same energy usage with an expensive CFL to boot.