Sunlight and LED Lights; a match made in heaven.
Posted by Amit Soni on 8th Nov 2011
If you’re planning on running your home on solar energy it’s a good idea to upgrade your lighting to energy efficient LED at the same time.
Rooftop mounted solar panels are designed to provide homes with lots of free electricity by storing energy from the sun’s rays. Any extra electricity that isn’t used is automatically sold back to the National Grid for a ‘feed-in-tariff’ of 41.3 pence per kWh of energy. The less energy you use the more you will have left over to sell. It’s as simple as that.
The initial investment for solar panelling is very high, with installation costing anything from £6,000 upwards. This makes the time frame for return a whopping 7 years on average. Finding ways to reduce the energy consumption of your home and thereby freeing up more electricity to sell is a great way to increase the rate of return on your investment.
The lighting in a typical household accounts for almost 20 per cent of its overall electrical usage making it an ideal place to cut down on your energy use. Swapping your old incandescent bulbs for energy efficient LED Lights will do the trick.
LED Lights are much more effective at converting electricity into light than conventional filament bulbs. Because of this they run at about 10 per cent of the cost, freeing up more electricity for you to sell. With an operational life span of between 30,000 and 50,000 hours, LED Bulbs will also allow you to save money on replacement costs as well.
If you’re not already running your home on solar energy you won’t want to wait much longer. The tariff currently paid to homeowners that sell their electricity back to the national grid is due to be halved on the 12 December. To take advantage of the higher tariff, which is guaranteed for 25 years, you need to have your solar panels installed and registered before this date.
LED Lights really are a green technology. This isn’t just because they can help you lower the environmental impact of your home; they also complement other green technologies as well. As solar panels are an effective way of converting light into electricity, it seems only suitable to use LEDs as an efficient way to convert your electricity back into light again at a fraction of the cost.
