Like most things in this world, people only take notice of positive ideas when money is involved. One of the roles as a team leader in a marketing company is to be able to convince people to use technology (especially one that we are promoting) to enhance their everyday lifestyles. Off late we as a company have seen a big push from the European / American product manufacturers to move in the direction of possible “Green” solutions.

I believe that in the recession anything that will save you money is a good darn investment to make. Or should I say investing in something that will give you a return on investment as soon as possible. Well how does one quantify such a thing. I was talking to Allen this morning, and he mentioned that he wanted to know the usage of electricity of his existing incandescent bulbs to check if it is worth making the change to CFL considering the cost of CFL vs Incandescent which is almost twice, at least here in Dubai that is the case. I do know that the price difference would be more in India. So moving on, in typical Allen style he asks for information regarding the tariff of the electricity. I used our faithful Google and got him the info that he needed.

After about half an hour he messaged back “AED 25 saving per month, will get changing right away !!”. I said wow, that was really sweet and then when I spoke to him, he mentioned about how he had got it and made a calculator on excel for this. This sparked off an idea of using Google Documents to make the same in a online spreadsheet such that people use it to check out their own electricity usage and see the difference it is going to make to their lives. Well the calculations are pretty simple and can be shown below :

KWH Usage of the bulb = ( No of Bulbs x No of hours they are used x wattage of the bulbs x no of days in the month ) / 1000

The electricity bill = KWH usage x Cost per kWh

Replacing the wattage of the incandescent bulb with the CFL (13W) will show a significant saving. As an example Allen has 15 Incandescent bulbs of 60 W and with 7 hours usage for 30 days the electricity bill with only the Bulbs at a fee of 24 fills per kWh gives AED 45/- as the bill. Consider the same with a 13 W CFL the bill is AED 9 /- a direct saving of about AED 35 or close or USD 10 per month.

Now that makes economic sense to change.