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Lonely Light Love Featured on Mar 20, 2011

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Challenge Details

Glowing lights in an empty room are a lonely sight. They’re like a songbird without a mate, a singer without an audience, a park with no children. Help the lonely lights. Turn them off until they are needed another day.

The Carbon Connection:
Approximately 39% of all CO2 emissions in the United States are caused by power plants burning fossil-fuel to create electricity. The more electricity we use, the more fossil fuel gets burned by a power plant. And the more fossil fuel burned, the more carbon dioxide that gets pumped into Earth’s atmosphere.

Almost 10% of the electricity used in our homes is being used for lighting. Every time you turn on a light switch, you’re most likely using electricity that was made at a power plant that runs on fossil fuel. Decreasing your consumption of electricity by lowering your lights directly decreases carbon emissions from your local power plant.

Getting It Done:
We’re asking you to find one room that is unnecessarily lit, and turn it off. Do this every day for one week, and you’re done. If you feel like you’re getting into a light-saving groove, go ahead and repeat the challenge for another week. Here are a couple tips to make it easier:

• Check all the rooms of your house or apartment before heading out. You might just find some lonely lightbulbs hiding (and burning) somewhere.
• Be the last to leave your classroom or meeting, to make sure the lights gets doused when the room is empty.
• Check the lights in the rooms around you before settling into do something stationary like reading or watching TV. Be sure you’re not leaving any lonely bulbs burning in those empty rooms.

See the Math:
Completing this one-week challenge will result in 8.13 pounds of CO2 reduction. Here are the known or estimated numbers we used to calculate the value of this challenge:

• On average, room lighting consumes about 1 watt of electricity per square foot.
• An average bedroom or dorm room is 150 square feet.
• An average classroom or office room is 600 square feet.
• To make it simple, we’ll assume an average room size of 375 square feet for this challenge
• By turning-off an unnecessarily lit room, we’re assuming you’ll avoid two hours of wasted lighting energy for that room.
• A kilowatt is equal to 1000 watts. Using 1 kilowatt for 1 hour is what your electric company describes as 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh).
• A fossil fuel burning power plant releases an average 1.55 pounds of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour it creates.
• Putting it all together, you’ll save about 8.13 lbs pounds of CO2 by turning off the lights in one room each day for seven days.

And don’t forget to tell you’re friends that you’re taking this challenge. They might want to join you. There’s no reason to be lonely.

Discussion 40 comments so far

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