Kitchen Lighting Upgrade Pays for Itself

Ever since we moved into our house we've talked about changing out the lights in the kitchen. The track lighting spots that had been there before did a good job lighting, but with all the white cabinets we wanted a little color. After talking about it for months, this past week I finally put up new lights. These were about $45 each at Lowe's after purchasing both the lamps and pendants. These 4 lights replaced for 50 watt spots.

At the time, I didn't even consider the fact that there might be energy savings from this project. When picking out light bulbs, I just happened to walk past the CFLs and noticed that they now come in a candelabra size, which is what was needed for our new lights. A quick calculation using http://www.e3living.com/CFLCalc shows that replacing the 200 watts w/24 watts of CFLs could save me $132 over the life of the bulbs. The payback is as short as 14 months, with 2 hours of use a day even after considering the regular candelabra lights cost as little as 25 cents apiece.

Plus it makes everyone in the house happy with the new look of the kitchen, and that makes me happy, regardless of the savings.