My first LED lamp

Since some of my CFL energy saving lamps are beginning to fail, decided to try a 6 Watt LED lamp, priced £9.99.

The equivalent wattage to an incandescent lamp is 31W, which is on the low side, so will be using it in a small room. You can buy 40W equivalents for about £13 to £15.


The stats on the package says it will last about 25 years and can cope with 50,000 on/off switch cycles. Doing a few rough calculations then I would say that in a typical room where a lamp will be switched on and off a few times each night, then 20+ years is probably a reasonable life time.

The thing is, it seems a bit outdated to compare the power consumption of LED lamps with incandescent bulbs. At some point no one will have experience of using incandescent lamps, so the comparison should in theory fade into history as a quirk that was required during the transition to low carbon energy.

Update: Have installed it in my small kitchen and I am pleasantly surprised. The light is a bit 'whiter', but certainly fine for the kitchen. Also tried it in the light fitting that I use all the time in the living room and I could not tell the difference between it and the CFL I normally use, other than the fact it was a bit dimmer. It looked just as warm behind the glass frosted lamp shade.

Based on that test, I will now be getting a 40W equivalent (or near that) LED lamp/bulb for the living room.

Decoding Special Offers...

I always find it annoying when I am confrinted with special offers that sound so good. So I thought I would write a guide to what they really mean. Here goes:

3 for 2

At first this sounds fantastic. You buy two products and you get one free!
But with all these discounts, you need to translate it into a monetary value of a single item. You then find out what you are really getting. In this case imagine that the 3 products are containers and two are filled to the top with a liquid, where the liquid is the cost of the 3 for 2 offer. To understand how much you are paying you need to take liquid from the two full containers to fill the third, untill all three have equal amounts.

Say each product is £1 then the cost per product is (£1 + £1)/3 = 2/3 = 66p each
So the discount is 33%

BOGOF (Buy one get one free)

Same principle applies as the 3 for 2 offer.
Say each is £1 then the cost  per product is 1/2 = 50p each
The discount is 50%
A bit obvious really but like the 3 for 2 deal, it's easy to forget exactly what you are getting.
When they say you are getting a whole one free, psychologically it sounds better than getting 50% or half off the price. What you have to remember is that it isn't just the amount of goods that is important, the money you pay per item is the real info of interest.

5 products for £3 (products normally cost 79P each)

This is an example I came across this week.
Sometimes they use a different tactic and this sort of thing can require mental arithmetic that can be difficult on the spur of the moment. I'm not brilliant with mental maths standing in a shop staring at the prices!
I cracked this one by first assuming the deal was 5 for £1. That would mean each was 20p.
So then to crank it up to 5 for £3, we just multiply 20p by 3, which gives 60p each.
So in this case the discount is 24%

All of this of course assumes that the special deals are genuine. That the manufacturer hasn't changed the product for the period of the deal, to make the product cheaper, or that the retailer hadn't for a short period increased the price (legally) only to reduce it to the 'normal' price for the special deal offer.

Often the only time you can be sure of a good deal is when a product is an 'end of line' product or the 'use by' and 'sale by' dates are coming up.

Superscrimpers - Channel 4

Excellent programme on Channel 4 and although not specifically an eco show, it probably does more to get people changing than an eco show would.

But what really shocks me are some of the figures they give. Such as this week a mother that spends £45 per week on each of her kids clothing (£90 in total)!??!
Some people live on £90 per week (that includes food and bills).
Geez, £90 is probably more than I spend on clothes a year! And I try and buy organic if I can. My favourite winter coat is over 20 years old (I bought it in the 80s sometime, but can't remember the exact date). Sure kids need new clothing when they grow, but when I was a kid, I don't remember getting new clothing every month, let alone every week.

Then a few weeks ago they said the average adult in the UK spends over £1000 per year on clothing??
Who are these people??
No wonder wages are high and debt is high, along with masses of waste being generated. Hey folks, you are really sick in the head.

Superscrimpers web site

Why does turning the thermostat down 1 °C save money (and Carbon Dioxide)?

To many it may seem at first that turning down the thermostat on the central heating system a tad, as recommended by many government public information films, to be one of those crazy ideas with no founding in science or every day common sense. But when you consider the system as a whole (something that any eco friendly person should do) then you realise it is based on very sound science.

So where do people get the idea that it is crazy?

The reason is that people think of numbers in absolute terms from zero up. So 20°C is obviously greater than 0°C. Hence a 1°C reduction seems small in comparison, just 5% of the total. If that were how a thermostat controlled heating system worked then not much money would be saved.

But the science in that scenario is incorrect. In order to get an accurate estimation of energy saved, the 'heating system' should include the world outside your home. We must include the temperature outside the home in our calculations of energy saved.

So how do we do this?

First of all the minimum temperature possible in the home will be the same temperature that is measured outside it. So if the temperature outside is 14°C and we normally have the thermostat set to 20°C then the difference is 6°C.

In our scenario lets take the thermostat down by 1°C.

Since our temperature difference in the scenario is only 6°C, the percentage saving is now roughly 17%. This is more than triple the original perceived reduction for that particular set of circumstances. Obviously as the temperature outside the home drops further, less will be saved and if the temperature outside increases then more will be saved.

So the main defining factor is the temperature outside the home and the fact that the temperature range the central heating operates, is between the outside temperature and the thermostat setting. Since outside temperatures in the UK are not very often near 0°C, a 1°C reduction in the thermostat setting is often not as small as it seems.