[POLL] Do you close lights when you leave room for at least 5 minutes?

Hello, after doing research about north American culture. I have learned that most people do not close lights in their houses even if they leave their house. After learning this I thought it will be a good poll for this forum.

Poll

In the winter it does not matter so much. No electricity is “wasted” because the waste heat is heating your house.

Fuzun,

Yes, even in the U.K. we all have the ability to turn into our Fathers as we get older!

I remember as a kid my Dad turning off lights in empty rooms.

I think once you are old enough to pay the Bills, and especially if you have children, then this habit can start.

I light my study / man-cave with flash-lights 95% of the time, so mains powered lights definitely off, even though not empty.

Cheers,
Splott-Light :slight_smile:

If you have tungsten lamps you are right but I am not sure if it is still not “wasted” if you use modern LED lamps.

But according what I have seen, it is not related to this. It is just a general behavior of North American people, for example they use car to go to a shop in 50 meter range if they do not do exercising exclusively. Or they do not close computers while sleeping (without any work done on the computer).

No, because it’s literally just a few watts from an LED bulb.
All power here comes from hydro anyway, so not a big deal.

Something like an oven or dryer will use thousands of times more energy compared to 5 mins of an LED bulb being on.

“Close” lights? I don’t even open mine when I don’t have to mess with the internals! :smiley:

Not all Americans are as fat and uncultured as the rest of the world has been led to believe. I turn the lights off when I leave the room, and I don’t fight for the closest parking spot so I don’t have to walk an extra 20 feet.

This^

Yeah, i’m supposed to turn the lights off when i leave a room, but sometimes i forget.
But i don’t see any point in leaving them on when nobody’s there.
It would be a waste of energy, even while we have only a few incandescent (halogen) lights still in use.

As for heating by means of lightsources, they’re placed too high off the ground to be useful, although eventually most of the light will be transferred into heat, except for the bit that escapes through the windows.

I think Americans are just as uncultured and fat as the rest of the world by the way.
Maybe just a bit fatter though. :wink:

When I see a light that's not closed, I close it.

In fact, I'm always closing lights.

They call me the light-closing-commander.

By the way, how do you close a light?

I’m part Reman, so I usually have as minimal lighting as I can stand. Too bright just gives me headaches.

And yeah, I’m anal-retentive enough to shut off lights when I’m not using them. Drives others buggy when they “have to walk around in the dark”. Tfb.

And I tend to park in the farthest corner of the parking lot at work (shared with a mini-mall, oddly enough), to be as far away from those monkeys-with-car-keys as possible. I’m tired of “dings” and scratches, etc., on my cars’ doors and such.

I heat the house with my windows open, drive a 6mpg gas guzzler 10 passenger SUV by myself, leave the oven on so I don’t have to pre-heat it, take one drink of orange juice and dump the rest down the drain, cook 10 times more food than I can eat, and leave the water running. Recycling? what’s recycling?

They call my house a lighthouse because the lights are on 24/7 :stuck_out_tongue:

:sunglasses:

This is a highly confusing topic
close lights?
like WTF!
who turns ON lights when they have flashlights?
This does not compute
:smiley:

Who needs lights anyways with Rudolf the red nose reindeer and his glowing nose.

Taking into account start-up energy and the decrease in the life of a lamp or bulb, my rule of thumb is turn off fluorescent lights if you will be out of the room for 15 minutes or more.

Yeah, that’s why you don’t use CCFLs in places where you expect the lights to be turned on/off frequently (eg, a bathroom), but only in places where you expect them to be on for several hours straight without interruption (eg, a living-room).

Come on guys, let’s try and show at least a little bit of the “culture” that the rest of the world may not believe we have. The reason for the title is probably due to the literal translation of the phrase from Chinese, where the word used for off and close can be the same. The proper term would be extinguish the light, like from the days of candles and oil lamps, but nobody speaks that way anymore. Y’all git wher imma comin from?

KuoH

I have outdoor lights that go on at dusk and stay on all night.
I have indoor lights on timers that “open and close” at night :innocent:
But I still turn off the lights when I leave a room.
:open_mouth: