One of the easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to switch off lights in rooms that you are not using. Lighting your home makes up 10% of your residential carbon footprint. There is an opportunity to make significant savings on your carbon footprint by choosing the right bulb and being less careless leaving lights on.

Choose the right type of light bulb

Incandescent light bulbs are the least efficient bulbs and research show they produce twenty times the amount of carbon emissions as the most efficient bulbs, LED light bulbs. Changing all bulbs in your home to LED lights saves 0.1 ton of carbon emissions a year. But remember, even when you do make the change to LED lights, it doesn’t mean you can be complacent on keeping lights on. It is still important to switch off lights otherwise you can end up creating the same amount of emissions. Changing light bulbs will help you save £40 – £50 a year of your energy bill.

Wasted money from leaving lights on

National surveys show that people waste a lot of energy by leaving the lights on when going to work and during the night when sleeping. We are also most likely to keep lights on in the bathroom by accident in this room than any other room in the home. This is hugely wasteful from a carbon emissions perspective and being more careful when switching off lights can reduce your carbon footprint by 0.31 tonnes per year.

Final note: is it true that if you switch on and off lights too much you waste energy with bulbs going on and off. This is NOT true, so there are no reasons to keep lights on unnecessarily.