Relax.
Oh, I'm relaxed. This is how I let off steam. I also give zero fucks anymore, because this forum is no longer in any way aligned with that which I care about, which is reducing consumption, doing work yourself, reducing your environmental footprint, and if you are wealthy as a result of these habits, not being an insufferable smug ass about it. Which, I will suggest, is
exactly what you're doing.
I'm trying to share a simple way to save money on a forum about saving money. That is all.
No. You're not. A simple way to save money if you're in the habit of leaving your outdoor lights on all night is to
turn them off. And leave them off. You're doing a beautiful demonstration of how to justify spending money by absurd math, loony assumptions, because you want to be lazy. Fine. Consumerist Sukka Forum, it is. You know, if you really wanted to do it better, you could justify a whole lot more. What about smart bulbs? And then some wifi extenders to do that? Plus, the surveillence hub microphone systems in your house. And, hey, while you're at it, a new phone to better make use of those smart things! Hey, you're saving money by turning the lights off, never mind the environmental and direct financial costs of all that, the data extraction to manipulate you and your family from all the data collected, everything else. You'd get the lights turned off that way, too!
On the forum getting soft - yeah. This is true. A lot of us are millionaires pulling down over six figures and have largely optimized all the expenses out of our life. I spend a little over 2k / month for six people. Most of this money is spent on healthy food.
Great. So you should, somewhere in there, be able to find some time to turn the lights off with the switch. I recently splurged on a couple nice motion sensor outdoor LEDs to improve lighting in our driveway, because we've been having a bunch of people over regularly and it makes it easier in the winter for people to get in/out of our driveway, load cars, etc. But they also remain almost entirely
off, even with the motion/light sensor feature, unless we actually need them. They're not mindlessly lighting the night, they're providing more light for the driveway during specific times when they're needed, and even then we let the motion sensors do their thing so they're not blazing away all evening pointlessly.
We over-light the ever loving hell out of homes, which is bad enough, but then we do it to the outside too, which is incredibly wasteful, and absolutely evil to animals. Throughout the entire animal kingdom, artifical human lighting screws with their ability to live and reproduce. Why? So we can sleep to a bright back yard? Nonsense. Light pollution is horrid for humans too.
Your eyes are amazing. They adjust over something like a million to 1 contrast ratio, and when properly adjusted, are capable of detecting single digit numbers of photons - and also work at noon day sun intensities. Let them work! A dim light, or some deeply dimmed bulbs, or a kerosene lantern are more than enough for useful illumination at night, and, in the process, don't ruin your sleep. I've heard claims that in a properly dark, open environment, the light of Venus is enough to navigate by.
I'm deploying software at the moment that is worth about a billion dollars.
Good boy! Wow. You must be
so fucking important! So important. Much executive! Smug asshole! I mean, I guess in the context of that, the energy you waste lighting your yard isn't a big deal, given all the data centers and clients and everything that will run that super expensive, very important software. But, seriously, who are you trying to impress? Sure as hell not me.
I will accept the face punch for 'wasting' $11 dollars on two led light bulbs that saves me tons of time turning lights on and off. This just isn't something I'm going to waste my time on.
Time is worth way more than money.
I won't argue. So if you're already a millionaire or multi-millionaire, why not cut back on work? Work a 24 or 32 hour week. That'll free up way more time in your week than a stupid automatic light bulb. Why, you might even have time to flip a light switch for yourself!
I spent $11 dollars to save 2 minutes of time per day for 22 years. This is about 16,060 minutes. Or about 268 hours.
Oh man. Justification math at its finest. So the lights aren't even at doors you
use? You have to go out of your way, all the way across your house, to turn the lights on and off? I can tell you that "Glance at the switch as you go past the door" doesn't take a minute, since I do it somewhat regularly. Also, there's no way those bulbs will actually last 22 years. I don't care what it says on the plastic blister package. Consumer electronics just aren't built that way anymore, haven't been for a while. So, you'll almost certainly have to replace them at least once in that lifetime, if not more than once (my experience with LED bulb reliability has been poor - and the dimmable ones are worse).
How much is your time worth?
You can justify all sorts of stupid crap that way. It's a dumb path to go down. So don't do it. You're smart enough to deploy a billion, with a B, dollars worth of software, you should be able to figure out just how much of that falls into "consumer sucker" category. But you're in good company, don't worry.
Alternatively if I just leave the lights on the new ones pay for themselves in 14 months.
Turn them off, and they pay your time the first night or so.
How well are your investment returns these days?
Not great, though the returns on my self-built solar array remain consistent. But neither am I trying to justify stupid purchases with a pay-back period.
Are you trying to retire early or save the environment?
And this is the core of my objections here. We
know that we're all collectively buying too much crap. Strip mining, mountaintop removal, the wastes from processing (China is cheap partly because you can literally just leave your slag heap anywhere, who cares if there was a village there, they're too dumb to have gotten out of the way), slave labor, the destruction of ocean life (the sounds of shipping are so loud that entire categories of marine animal are having trouble actually hearing each other enough to mate and have babies or to find their family afterwards)... I mean, hell, what does it matter if we've made some good profits in the meanwhile?
[meme] But why not both? Spend less money
and have less environmental impact by not buying shit you don't need to solve problems you shouldn't have!
I don't understand how this is seen as a bad thing. Certainly everyone on this forum buys light bulbs.
Again, it's amazing how little light you really need, though I certainly have gone through light bulbs. Lately, my analysis has been digging into just how much blue comes out of the white LEDs, and the answer is "A lot. More than enough to screw with human sleep. We probably shouldn't be using them at night. Daytime is fine, when we don't need them, but once the sun's down, LEDs in the house are clearly demonstrated to screw with human sleep, badly."
Do most people on this forum simply leave the lights off at night, I assume?
Yes. I wish, so badly, my neighbors would do so too. I
like the Milky Way outside in my yard. If I have lights on at night, outside, it's because someone is doing something that actively requires illumination - kids on the playground in the dark, or people getting stuff loaded into cars in the driveway. Or... well, that's about it, really. There's no reason to have them on at night.
Anyway, sorry, not particularly picking on you, but this forum has just gotten absurd lately, and this is the one that struck me as the most absurd. Not that car threads are any better. "My unreliable 10 year old, 100,000 mile Toyota is just an unreliable piece of junk because I never maintain it or even check the oil, what new car should I buy instead?"
