Our school used our McKnight Foundation grant money to install LED lights in our library. Our building is almost eighty years old and has seen some updates but we have a ways to go yet. The library lighting was irreplaceable and not functioning. To begin, the students looked at the school’s electricity bills to find out how much our school pays per KWh and then we estimated how much the current lights cost vs. new lights. We did this by counting the current number of lights and checking the watt usage of the lights, then figuring out how many lights would be replacing the current lights and the wattage of those. The students also demonstrated the differences in watt usage for LED, Incandescent, Halogen, and CFL bulbs at our spring Environmental Education Exhibition. The students had also realized the potential cost savings of replacing all the lights in the building, as well as how it would save pounds of carbon entering the atmosphere as well.
