Let’s say your wife or girlfriend are in the bathroom getting ready for an hour or two.
Would constantly switching on / off the bathroom light use more electricity everytime they left the room, rather then just leaving the light on for whole hour or two?
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Does constantly switching on / off your light use more electricity, then just leaving your light on?
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Category : Bathroom Lighting
It depends entirely on the type of light.
If you have traditional incandescent or halogen bulbs, then switching them off and on will use less electricity–unless you stand at a switch like a little kid and go off-on-off-on as fast as you can.
There used to be a theory that starting up incendescents would take more electricity because the resistance of the filament is theoretically zero and current flow is almost infinite. But that turned out to be false when someone finally got around to testing it with a real ammeter.
If there’s fluorescents, turning them on uses more juice because it’s necessary to vaporize the gas inside the bulb. Once the bulb is operating, it uses far less electricity. Therefore you shouldn’t turn off a fluorescent unless you’re going to leave it off for at least a couple of hours.
yes, flipping the light on and off uses more electricity if it is often, but if it is every 10-15 minutes it is fine.
When a light is switched on there is a large surge of current that heats the filament then the current requirement goes back to minimum when the Resistance increases in the tungsten element.
There is likely a number of on and off intervals that could maximize it’s efficiency.