Friday, September 11, 2009

The Free Light Bulb & Rebate Store

This has been quite a summer for new appliances and rebates around here, and an added fillip in terms of free energy efficient light bulbs.

Back in June, we got a washing machine to replace the old worn out one, paid for by a federal stimulus in the form of a tax rebate. It qualified for a $100 rebate from our local utility company, about whose conservation program I've referenced before.

This past week was kicked off by our water heater catastrophically disassembling itself and its subsequent replacement.

Ferguson's, which calls itself a 'Bath & Kitchen Gallery' and indeed has a small showroom with a coupla faucets and the like, is a pretty big plumbing supply store, and there are always more plumbers' trucks there than Volvos, if ya get my drift. They musta had fifty water heaters there. They had exactly one that fitted my needs and it is humming away under my house now.

Just as an aside, I took the junk water heater up to the Eastern County Landfill and paid a very reasonable $10.75 to properly dispose of it. The Mexican lady took my money and directed me "Up the hill. Number 9.". No. 9 was the appliance pile, and there were several water heaters there just like mine. The folks up there do an absolutely first rate job of recycling everything and have cut actual landfill usage by 50% over the last few years. Our town has a 'blue bag' recycling program which is pretty successful, and in addition to that the landfill takes every bit of trash that comes in there through the regular trash pickup process and sorts it. Picture a conveyor and a buncha Mexican ladies with gloves and clothespins on their noses and you get the idea. They also do oil, batteries, all kinds of hazmat, everything. My hat's off to them. If you come visit, one of the highlights will be a tour of the joint. You'll be dazzled. Go see what their program looks like. What used to be called 'the county dump' is now called 'the solid waste management and material recovery facility'. Sign of the times.

I think the landfill itself is closed and they just do material recovery up there. The landfill stuff is shipped to Nevada. Good place for it and the best use of space. They won't run out of room over there forever and there's no one around for any smell to bother. Heh.

I thought I'd go to the PUD and see if my new water heater qualified for the energy rebate. Frankly, I was much more interested in getting hot water restored to my house than in energy efficiency. Remember, I got the one water heater available in my town that would work for my application.

I went into the office there that handles this kinda shit and thought I'd walked into a light bulb orchard. More on that in a minute.

The rebate & light bulb lady and I hit it off instantly because a) we're both really nice people and b) we have the same last name. She had a book with the energy efficiency scores of every appliance on the planet. My water heater missed qualifying for a rebate by one point. Oh well...

Then she started in on light bulbs.

I've been replacing my incandescent bulbs with CFLs for a coupla years now, and I'm doing pretty good at it. One of the big drawbacks is that the curly bulbs look funny in some applications and people don't want their lights to look funny. We have four-bulb vanity lights in both bathrooms and I hadn't yet replaced those bulbs with CFLs just because of that.

Well, the light bulb manufacturers are getting better at it. I walked out of the PUD with four 40-watt-equivalent 9-watt CFL vanity bulbs that looked just like round vanity bulbs!. I hadn't known they existed. When I installed them, until they got warmed up the first time, I could see the curly bulbs inside the globes. Clever. And boy are them suckers bright! A good score and for free!

I mentioned to the PUD lady that I'd gotten new kitchen appliances in 2007, but hadn't known about the rebate program at the time. She said the program applied to any appliances purchased since May '07. I got them in September. She said to bring in receipts and she'd see what she could do.

Yesterday I traipsed back on over there with the paperwork on the kitchen appliances that I had dug out. I never throw anything like that away. There was a different guy there and we chatted until the light bulb & rebate lady got back from lunch. Turns out that energy programs are required by California state law for utility companies. Some do more than others. He said that the local light bulb giveaway program, "here kid, first one's free", had reduced electrical usage by 3% so far. I thought that was pretty good. He loaded me up with more vanity bulbs and some other ones in a free cloth shopping bag and told me to check back in the near future for CFL bug lights and night light bulbs.

The best part came when the lady returned. They don't offer rebates on ranges, power suckin' monsters that they are, but the icebox and dishwasher both qualified! $200 more dollars are coming my way outta the blue!

I'd say it was a pretty good trip to the power company. I had so many free light bulbs stuffed in my saddlebags that it woulda sounded like a popcorn popper if I'da went down! Heh.

One more light bulb story. I finally got some 3-way CFLs for my end table lamps. One of them screwed right into Mrs. G's lamp, but it was too big to fit inside the harp on mine, and it had an odd style of harp that I couldn't get at the hardware store.

The lamp was a cheap piece of Chinese shit that I've had for long enough that I've had to replace the 3-way socket and the cheapass lampshade disintegrated. The replacement shade was a little longer than the original, and the light shone on my arm instead of up where I could read by it, so I had the lamp sitting up on a pile of books from the horrendous backlog in my reading schedule. I went to Lowe's and got a new table lamp that eliminated the books, but the bulb still wouldn't fit so I got a replacement harp and now it all works just fine.

The bulb claims that I'll save $46.95 over its life. Damn good thing, that! That's what it cost me to get to where I could screw the light bulb in!

I'll close this with a money shot, literally. Since I've gotten the new washing machine and the 3-way CFLs, my electric bill has gone from about $170 every month to $114 on the last bill. I'll have to see if that holds, but for now it's looking good. A penny saved is a penny earned even if you had to put a buncha pennies out front to get it.

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