Down with downlights
Downlights: cute, fashionable little spotlights. Miniature car headlights staring down from the ceiling.
Down with downlights
Downlights: cute, fashionable little spotlights. Miniature car headlights staring down from the ceiling.
Whoever invented them obviously has a share in a power utility, because they are an extraordinarily inefficient way of lighting a room.
They were originally designed to highlight features such as artworks, so they cast a relatively narrow beam. You might need five or more to light a smallish room.
Each of these babies burns 50 watts, so five adds up to 250 watts, three times as much as ordinary incandescent lighting for the same area.
You can of course replace them with lower-energy units, but you still need three times as many as a more efficient form factor.
So why are they so popular?
They look neat – you have a flush ceiling with no nooks and crevices to gather dust. But that’s a poor excuse for a heavy burden on your electricity bill.
To give you some idea how wasteful they are, I have a smallish room in my house that is brilliantly illuminated with six watts of LED lights.
LEDs are still relatively expensive, so you may not want to make the conversion yet – or should you?
My three LED units (each two watts) cost about R200. At the domestic metered tariff of R1.13 per kilowatt-hour, it would take less than three months to recover the cost if I lit up the room 10 hours per day.
The payback time scales by how many hours per day you light up the room. Even if you have to add in the cost of a new light fitting, you could recover the cost in less than a year.
As LEDs become cheaper and electricity more expensive, downlights become even more ludicrous.
What’s more, they are also a fire hazard. Because they are very hot and are recessed into the ceiling, anything in contact with them could catch fire – for example, inexpertly installed insulation.
Down with downlights! Phantsi!
Here comes the sun
Many people I speak to are confused about the difference between solar electricity and solar hot water, so here’s a quick primer.
Photovoltaic cells, in panels you can put on your roof, convert sunlight to electricity. A box called an inverter converts the generated DC to AC.
In some other parts of the world you can earn money from any excess solar power you send out to the grid.
Solar hot water is very different: you harvest energy from the sun as heat. There is no electricity involved, unless you have a backup heating element for less sunny days.
Cut off by water limits
A report by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) SA notes that the availability of fresh water is one of the major limiting factors to the country’s development.
Furthermore, as our modern water cycle is comprised of both man-made infrastructure and natural systems, “The built (engineered) part of our water system is dependent on the healthy functioning of the natural (ecological) part of the system”.
Our water security then depends on our ability to plan development that is compatible with the ecological infrastructure.
The WWF report says in order for the country to prosper, “We need to acknowledge the limitations of our natural water resources and prioritise their use and protection if we are to grow a sustainable economy”.
Full report at http://tinyurl.com/qzewd94.
Enviro-news contacts:
Nikki Köhly: n.kohly@ru.ac.za, 046 603 7205 | Jenny Gon: j-gon@intekom.co.za, 046 622 5822 | Trisha Nathoo: nathootrisha83@gmail.com078 584 9496 | Nick James: nickjames@intekom.co.za, 082 575 9781 | Philip Machanick: p.machanick@ru.ac.za, 046 603 8635 | Strato Copteros: strato@iafrica.com, 082 785 6403
