Central lighting control can save money
Q. My electric bills are high, probably much of it due to lighting. I thought some type of central lighting control might allow me to use fewer lights. Would this save electricity or cost more to operate the controls?
A. Using electric lights can account for a substantial portion of your monthly electric bills, not to mention the cost to periodically replace light bulbs. In most homes, the total lighting wattage in just the kitchen can be greater than the electricity used by a microwave oven. During summer, the air conditioner has to run harder to remove the excess heat from lights.
The potential electricity savings from installing even a simple central lighting control system can be more than most people realize. Just count up all the lights in a typical home. If a lighting control system can allow you to conveniently switch them on only when actually needed, the total on-time is greatly reduced. The light control units use very little electricity themselves.
In addition to the electricity savings, the livability, safety and security at your home can be improved with a central light control system. For example, a system can allow you to switch on exterior and interior lights from your car just as you pull into your driveway.
You can even select which indoor lights come on to light your usual path when you walk indoors. With this feature, there is no need to keep several interior lights on when you leave home during the day and don't plan to return until nighttime. Keeping several interior lights on for hours while you are gone is not a great deterrent to break-ins anyway. A potential thief will notice no changes in the lighting and no movement indoors.
A significant convenient and electricity-savings feature of a central system is grouping various lights and brightness settings. All control systems include light dimming features. For reading in the evening, you can program a "reading" button on the control to provide brightness where are you sitting and perhaps for someone else.
If you later plan to watch a movie on the DVD player, program a "movie" button. This turns off and dims other lights for the best view of your television. Built-in timer controls allow you to program the timing of the lighting changes or you can make them manually. For example, you may want to have the lights slowly brighten in the morning at a certain time instead of being awakened by a loud alarm.
Many of the do-it-yourself central lighting controls use Z-Wave technology to communicate among the central control and the various individual lighting control modules throughout your house. The central control often runs on batteries. The lighting modules plug into a standard wall outlet and the lamp is plugged into the module. Z-Wave wall switch modules replace a standard wall switch.
The following companies offer efficient lighting controls: Intermatic, (815) 675-7000, www.intermatic.com; Jasco Products, (800) 654-8483, www.jascoproducts.com; Lightolier, (214) 647-7880, www.lolcontrols.com; Lutron, (610) 282-3800, www.lutron.com; and Wayne-Dalton, (800) 827-3667, www.wayne-dalton.com.
Q. I know that a mirror reflects light, so I assume it also reflects heat. I am planning to put some mirrors on a wall in my office.
Should I locate them on an exterior wall to save energy?
A. Standard glass mirrors do reflect light energy, but not much heat energy. Reflective Mylar and some other reflective materials will reflect heat energy in addition to light. Highly polished aluminum is one.
You will gain some energy advantage though by putting the mirrors on an outside wall. The mirrors will create another layer of materials between indoors and outdoors slightly slowing the heat transfer through the entire wall.