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Work-from-Home Musings: Saving Energy Can Be Fun (Or Not)
Those of us who have spent the last couple of months working from home, or even just sitting at home, have had a lot of time to think about the little things that surround us in our houses or apartments. Since climate change and conservation are two of the things I blog about regularly, my topic today is going to be the petty annoyances and occasional satisfactions associated with saving energy at home.
Let’s start with light bulbs. Those good old Edison-inspired incandescent bulbs. How we loved them — except when they burned out, which they did regularly. Somehow the one that burned out most often was the ceiling light in the hall that couldn’t be changed without dragging a ladder into the house.
But if we loved the incandescents, how we loathed those ugly little compact fluorescents that replaced them! In the name of being a good citizen of the earth, we had to put up with something that gave us bad light quality while being undimmable, hazardous if broken, and not really all that long-lived.
The early LEDs that replaced them were even more expensive and sometimes even worse in light quality, but at least you didn’t have to put on a hazmat suit to clean up if you broke one. Soon the LEDs got both better and cheaper. The old bluish ones have now been retired to light the garage or the crawl…
