Afraid of the dark? Yeah, we are too.
Night lights have safety and decorative benefits in addition to repelling bedroom specters. These little puppies are often on full-time, so using an LED night light or a sensor can save money while making your kids feel safe.
Traditional night lights use incandescent lamps running on 4 to 7 watts each. One 7-watt night light left on all year will cost about $7 in energy costs at $0.11/KWh. (Not a lot, right? But if you have several, it can add up.) As lamp life ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 hours, those wee bulbs may need replacing several times a year. But you have a number of options for saving money with your night light.
First, faithfully
turning your night lights off every morning can cut costs roughly in half. You can also save money if night lights can “see” daylight and turn off automatically. Or consider
energy-efficient light bulbs—they can be pretty cheap! Swap out your teeny incandescent bulbs for light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which come in both standard and candelabra bases. Some use as little as a third of a watt. Lamp life ranges greatly: 12,000 to 100,000 hours (so at the very least, they last four times longer than incandescents).
Some LED products also have photo and motion sensors. A stellar option is battery-powered LED units with motion sensors—they’re portable, work during power outages, and only operate if you or your cat prances by. There’s even a high-end option for bathroom night lights: One product (originally designed for hotels) incorporates an occupancy sensor with an LED night light in the main light switch. Shnazzy. One caution: LEDs rarely fail outright, but they fade away and some less expensive products may fade rather quickly (as in months or a couple of years).
Heard enough about LEDs? Neon night lights use .25 to 1 watts, are often amber in color, and have a 25,000-hour life. Or miniature fluorescent night lights use 1.5 to 6 watts and live longer than incandescents. And those glowing green or blue flat panels? They’re electroluminescent lamps, and they use an almost negligible amount of electricity (about 0.07 watts), costing about three cents a year to operate. They last for years and can fit smoothly against the wall. Note that this technology tends to fade over time, and cheap ones may do so faster or develop dark spots on the panel.