After reading about compact fluorescent light bulb on slashdot and "if every one of 110 million American households...[replaced] an ordinary 60-watt bulb... [it] is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads". Wow.
That got me to thinking... how much would we save if we didn't actually turn the lights on? Like at places of business... people seem to treat power differently than if they were at home. At home when someone leaves a room and no one else is there, they turn off the light. At a place of work, not so much. Why? I don't know. If we just changed the social aspect that it's "okay to waste" when you're not directly paying for it, then I think that we'd use a lot less power.
I know at some places they have motion sensors to figure out when the lights should turn off, but I think that's overkill. Just turn off the freaking lights.
Think about that next time you walk by an empty board room with the lights on, or an office building that seems to have all the lights on at 7 pm on a Wednesday.
Just for the record, where I work there's a sticker on the bathroom light telling you to turn it off when you leave. And when the last person leaves the office, the lights are shut off. I'm usually the first one in, and don't turn on all the lights. Just the ones that are necessary.
ReplyDeleteI think that people just don't care that much though, because you don't see the hydro bill at the end of the month. You also don't have your significant other reminding you to turn off the lights.
If you're the first one in, how do you know if someone shuts off the lights? And I'm not talking about security that comes around at 11 pm...
ReplyDeleteI think what you mean is that if i'm not the last one to leave, then how do I know the lights get shut off when the last person leaves. Being the first to arrive has nothing to do with whether or not the lights are shut off in the evening. Anyway, I know they get shut off, because it's not some super huge organization with security and tons of other people walking around the building at 10 pm. And there isn't anybody else to shut the lights out but us. Plus, even when we leave for lunch, the lights get shut off.
ReplyDeleteAhh... I keep on thinking that you work in gov't... my bad.
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