Yesterday our old and broken freezer was replaced by a new A++ class freezer, a Liebherr GP1466-22.

While hunting down the large power consumers in our house, i found out that our old freezer had a defective thermostat. It was constantly freezing, 24 hours a day! Something had to be done about that, since constantly cosuming 65-70W is way to much! Now that the new freezer has been working for 30 hours or so, i can see it has an average power usage of 16.5W. That’s 145 kWh per year, where the old freezer used 587 kWh. That’s another 440 kWh saved on a yearly basis…

Now i wonder how the manufacturer has come to the advertised 135 kWh…

While doing all kinds of things to reduce power usage in our house (very good to combine with Domotica), i realised it was time to do something about those fluorescent tubes in my office.
There are 2 lighting fittings above my head, each one of them having 2 (120 cm) fluorescent light tubes of 36W. That’s quite a lot of light, but also Watt.
First thing i did was reduce the amount of tubes to 2. This still gave me enough light; but still i wasn’t satisfied and was looking for a way to reduce power usage further.
So i started looking for a way to replace these TL tubes with a LED version. After searching some websites that have lots of information about LED lights (like www.olino.org), i found these tubes.

Power consumption of these tubes is 15W, and they can operate without a ballast. If you’ve ever felt how hot a ballast can become, you’ll understand what waste of energy this is.

I decided to buy 2 of these tubes and yesterday they arrived:

Because i have to modify the fittings a bit (removing the ballast and rearrange the wiring inside), i have to wait untill next weekend before i can start replacing the tubes with their LED version since that’s the first time i’ll be home during daytime…

I hope that replacing the TL tubes with LED tubes will also reduce the noise i am experiencing from the TL tubes. That would be a nice advantage; this will save me a few X10 noise filters. And i’ll get rid of the sometimes very annoying time the TL tubes need to start giving light.

We’ll see what happens.