Limit your lumen hours

The amount of lights that are left on all day in Sweden is astonishing. In almost every home there are lamps in every window and extra lighting here, there and everywhere. No one can blame the Swedes for wanting to keep the place lit up, given that in the winter, there are only a few hours of light each day and for most of them you are at work.

That got me thinking. Where I come from turning off the lights as you leave the room is more or less a habit for people. I mean, why leave the light on when you aren't in the room? That's why they put the switch next to the door.

I do most of the work, but you still need to
be "switched on" to the issue!

Often people in Europe (and this is certainly not limited to Swedes) are into energy saving things like energy saving bulbs and other things, but they often don't understand the extent to which they save. Having a fluorescent bulb instead of an incandescent one, doesn't mean that there is no impact and the bulb is 100% good. You might go down from a 70 W globe to an 18 W globe. It produces the same amount of light, but uses less energy, which is great.

What isn't great is that people offload responsibility for turning off the lights when they buy these bulbs. They leave them on 24 hours a day and say "oh they are energy saving." The house I moved into when I first got to Sweden had an obscene amount of lights and they were all on all day. I went round turning them off because it feels strange to leave it on as you leave the room, but it was a losing battle. In the kitchen especially it was an energy black hole: there would have been 20-25 light globes in there.

Also, the place where we have our office at university leaves its lights on seemingly all the time. The main room is something like 200 square metres and has all the lights on, even during the day and on the weekends. Hardly an environmental usage of energy.

It's about personal responsibility. By buying the energy saving globes (which I wholeheartedly support and support because they're cheaper in the long run though the globes cost 10 times more) people think they have done their part and don't need to worry about anything. They shift any blame and responsibility on the energy saving bulb.

Normally a bulb might be on in a room for 3-4 hours a day (lets suppose), but when it is energy saving people forget where the light switch is and just leave it on all day. It uses three times less energy, but is left on for six times longer. Its clearly more energy.

People need to reduce their usage with better bulbs and still remember to turn it off. The maths are simple and the problem of global warming still exists. That's a bright idea — pun intended.