Costs of lighting in the home

Discuss

1. What types of lights do you have?
2. How much do you spend on lighting each year?
3. Do you know how to work it out?
4. Do you know which lights are the most energy efficient?

Think

1. Think about lights in your house.
2. What types of lighting do you have? And how many do you have? How many hours in a day are they used? Take a rough guess at how much your home lighting costs are per year. __$_____________

Fill in table

Type of lighting	Number in house	Hours used in a day
Compact fluorescent (20W)
Fluorescent tube (40W)
Halogen downlights (50W)
Incandescent (100W)
2 bulb light heater fan (650W)
Floodlight (150W) (outdoors)
Floodlight (300 W) (outdoors)
Other

What is a watt?

The W = watts

Relates to how much power is needed to use an electrical appliance at any time.

Therefor a 50 watt (W) globe uses 50 watts of power to operate.

1000 Watts (W) = 1kilowatt (kW)

2000 W = 2kW

We pay for electricity per kilowatt hour. (kWh)

If you look at your electricity bill it will show you how many kWh –kilowatt-hours you use.

Find out-Research

Use the internet to find out the costs of running lights.

1. Go to the government website Switch On

http://switchon.vic.gov.au/

2. Click on the “More ways to save” tab

3. Then click on “Appliance Calculator”

4. And then click on the  “Use appliance calculator” tab

5. Use the calculator to work out your lighting costs.

6. Search for the lighting image and press ‘Add’

7. Click on the dropdown menu and choose.

8. Then choose the number of hours.

9. The costs will appear next to each choice and as a total per year at the top.

For example;

Answer questions

Look at this example. 

• How many lights do they have in total?
• What is the most expensive type of lighting?
• How much does this household spend on lighting per day?
• How much do they spend per year?

Calculate your lighting costs. Compare with others in the class. Check your rough estimate and compare with this calculation.

For more activities about energy costs and electricity bills go to the Energyinfohub website and download the Energy-Did you know? Free teaching resource. 

There are also other information packs and translated consumer advice about gas and electricity.