Driving by a house near my street earlier this week, it pleased me to see lights on in nearly every room of the good-size Colonial.
“At least I’m not alone,” I thought.
A few second later my happiness waned. I know the dad and he probably is doing his best to make sure every light in the house is not on at once.
Pulling on to my own street about a week earlier around 8 or 9 p.m., I noticed that there were lights on on all three floors of my split-level house. As always, we had the most lights on in the neighborhood by far. The unusual thing was there was no one home at the time.
My own father was and is a stickler about turning off lights and keeping the thermostat at 62. When I was first married and tried to enforce the same rule, my wife told that my father and I were both nuts and pushed the thermostat up to 70.
My dad’s mom, my grandmother, worried about her utility bills even when she was older and her sons paid the bill. They implored her to turn up the heat during the winter, but when I visited I always found her wrapped in a blanket with the thermostat set around 60 in the dead of winter. Like many children of the Depression, she worried about money even when she didn’t have to.
My wife’s theory on lights is that it costs you more to turn them on and off so our children have gotten used to turning a light on and leaving them on when they leave the room. They have apparently never noticed or don’t care that their father runs around behind them turning off the lights they leave on.
When they have to pay the bills themselves do you think they will follow my example or continue to waste money and harm the planet?
I’d also appreciate any advice on how to convince my family to change their ways.
Let me know what you think.
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2 comments:
My husband and I have electricity wars, too. I am constantly turning off lights when people are not in a room. He will come in, turn on lights downstairs, then go spend time upstairs saying that he's coming right back down, yet minutes go by. He claims leaving the lights on only costs pennies compared to the electricity it costs to run other things like central air conditioning.
I think having a couple of lights on while you're out is o.k., but I don't think the house needs to be blazing.
He and I are opposite re: the thermostat. I like 68 and he would always have it be so much lower.
It will be hard to offer incentives to lower the electric bill since you pay the bill. Maybe the next time they ask you for something (like a new phone, radio, or whatever) you can tell them you'll buy it for them if they do their share in helping to avoid wasting electricity.
We've gotten the kids to shut off the lights and be aware of electricity by bribing them. Any month we have a drop in the electric bill (over the month or year before, depending on the season), the kids get to pick out a new Blu-Ray disc to add to our library. So far, so good. They're now shutting off the lights.
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