Now that you know how electricity gets to your home, let’s look at how we use it around the house. Every appliance that is plugged into an outlet in your home uses electricity. To provide power to your appliances, a circuit must be formed between your item and the outlets in your home. A circuit is a closed loop that lets energy flow into and out of your appliance, thus providing power.
CPAU measures how much electricity your family uses with a unit called kilowatt hours. The more electricity you use in your home, the higher the number of kilowatt hours measured by CPAU. Did you know that even when you turn your appliances “off” they are often still using electricity?
 In addition to unplugging devices when they are not in use, your family can switch to more efficient appliances, meaning appliances that use less electricity to complete the same function. Let's use lightbulbs as an example to study efficiency.
oLighting our homes is one of the main ways we use electricity. There are many options to choose from when it comes to selecting lightbulbs to use in your home. Let’s look at three main types of lightbulbs - incandescent, compact fluorescent (CFL), and LED (light-emitting diode) - and how they use electricity differently.
Incandescent lightbulbs light homes by heating tiny filaments (small thread-like wires), until they glow and produce light. If you touch an incandescent light bulb after it’s been on for a while, it will feel very hot and may even burn your hand. That’s a sign that the bulb is using lots of electricity.
CFLs contain mercury gas, a potentially toxic element that produces light by interacting with electricity and the white coating on the inside surface of the glass lightbulb. Because of the mercury, the used bulbs can’t be thrown in the garbage.
LED bulbs are the most efficient choice. An LED is basically a solar cell (how we collect energy from the sun) in reverse: instead of light in, electricity out, you put electricity into the same (solar cell) material and get light. LEDs come in lots of colors and do not get hot. If you use holiday lights, there is a good chance those are LEDs.
Check out the chart below, which compares the energy usage and lifespan of the three types of lightbulbs. Energy flow is measured in watts. The brightness of light is measured in lumens. To understand how each bulb uses energy differently, we examine how many lumens are produced when one watt of energy is flowing.
 Now that you’ve assessed your family’s energy usage, you can make better choices about how to use energy in the future.
Stay tuned for our next issue where we’ll look at electrification, switching from using natural gas and gasoline to electricity, and how that impacts the environment.
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