Tyla laughs whenever I start talking about light bulbs, but here we go again. Our living room, eating area and kitchen are now completely incandescent free. When we bought the house, that area contained 11 60-watt bulbs, 2 100-watt bulbs, and 5 40-watt bulbs. When all the lights were on, that was using over a killowatt every single hour! We spend most of our time in that area and if we left all those lights on for 5 hours a day, that’s $193/year in electricity bills. With the new combination of CFL and LED bulbs, that same usage would cost $32. Not too shabby. By my calculations, it will take us about 2-3 years to recoup the cost of the bulbs and then we’ll be saving money.
The tricky part of this was finding good 40 watt equivalent LED candelabra base bulbs. There aren’t a lot of them out there yet. I tried three different types:
- Costco sells a 3 pack made by Feit. These were the cheapest at about $10 for three bulbs, but they were also the lowest quality. The light wasn’t the standard 2700K color that you get from incandescent. It was significantly whiter and it also has a delay when you turn it on.
- Torchstar sells a bulb for $7 that turns on instantly but is a bit too white. It’s better than the Costco bulbs, but still not acceptable for a lamp that we use all the time in close proximity to other lights.
- The winner was a bulb from Sexy LEDs. It has the right color and comes on instantly. If I had to knock it, I’d say that it’s not quite as bright as a 40w incandescent bulb. It was close enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately those Sexy LED bulbs are also the most expensive. I chose to use them in that main light fixture above our eating area and then use the cheaper Costco bulbs in the other areas of the house like the stairwell and the upstairs hallway. Color and delay don’t make as big of a difference there.
This will all pay off as long as the bulbs are reliable since part of the savings is that you basically never have to replace them. We’ll have to wait a while to figure out if that holds true.
Tim and Chelsea have an amazing Mexican meal. They sent me the recipe, but they do it so well, I didn’t want to just copy them exactly. So instead I took pieces of their meal and changed it up a bit. The end result is something that makes my mouth water just typing this out. It’s a lot of work, but I think you’ll find that it’s worth it. And if you’re really pressed for time, there are plenty of places where you could take shortcuts.
Grant Imahara is currently one of the hosts of Discovery’s Mythbusters. He’s fun to watch on the show, but that’s all I knew about him. He was recently interviewed on a 
The massive 8-way tie for first place is over, but I think it’s going to be a long time before this season is decided. Andy, Austin, Logan and I were all winners. Logan could have topped 200 this week with a perfect roster. A big chunk of that was due to Tony Romo who had over 50 points… on his bench. He didn’t need the points to pull out a win though.
I love a good burger. Up until now if you asked me for the absolute best burger I’ve ever had in an area restaurant, I would have to say it was the burger at 
Do you look at this whole Kindle thing and think that you might be interested in it but you aren’t willing to pay for a new one? I’d love to sell you my second generation Kindle along with a case. Yep, it’s old but it still works great. It’s one of the 3g models so no matter where you are, you can download new books without trying to find a wifi connection. Plus you can even check your email and surf the web for free (though it’s pretty slow and I can’t imagine anyone doing that very much.)
This was another interesting week for our league. Tim almost broke 200 points, Andy was on the wrong end of the biggest blowout for the second week in a row, and all teams are now tied at 2-2! It’s really difficult to predict who’s going to win any given game. But if you want to try to make guesses, go to the “League Pick’em” page. A few of us are making picks each week.
Government Shutdown Still Doesn’t Balance The Budget
So the first question is how much is the government spending during the shutdown? The estimated answer is that we have stopped about 17% of our spending. 83% of it is still trucking along unaffected. And secondly, how much of a deficit did we write into the 2013 budget? For that budget, we planned to bring in enough money to cover 76.3% of our spending.
Put those two facts together and you can see that even during this government shutdown, we are STILL spending more money than we collect.
And one final, somewhat-related thing before I return you to normal blog posts, KenC pointed me to a video that does a good job of putting all of these enormous numbers into perspective.
I’m sure people can take these numbers and use them to argue on either side of the aisle. That’s the beauty (and confusion) of our political system. But it’s helpful if we all start with the facts and go from there instead of starting with other people’s opinions that are screamed at us from the televisions.