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Originally Posted by Sticking It to the Man
I once heard that it uses less electricity to leave a light on for several minutes vs. turning it off and on in between uses.
The theory suggested that it takes more energy to turn the light on (getting the current running) than it takes to leave it on for a short period of time.
There must be a threshold of minutes off outweighing the energy that it takes to turn the light on.
I do not support this theory either way because electricity is not my field. However, I would like to know because I find myself constantly going in and out of rooms, turing the lights on and off as I do.
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Purchasing
one of these will pay for itself in the first year if you have any sort of electrical usage. It doesn't answer your question about the lightbulb however it does address the point of saving electricity. However to address the lightbulb question found
this on a google group thread (see below for a snippet).
Quote:
A compact fluorescent loses about 6 minutes of lifetime (0.001% of its
10,000 hours) every time you turn it on, so you might leave it on for a
few seconds when leaving a room, to save 0.01 cents of a $10 bulb cost,
while consuming 10W/1,000/60x10 = 0.0016666... cents per minute's worth
of energy at 10 cents/kWh. Frugal people might turn it off if they were
going to be out of a room for more than 6 minutes, at which point the
energy saved is worth more than the increased bulb lifetime...
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