My husband and I had been slowly replacing inefficient light bulbs with LEDs for years. We had made an initial investment to buy LEDs for the lights we used the most, but we'd put the rest off. It's hard to get rid of things that are still working! 

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Then we decided to make the investment. It wouldn't take that long for the savings in our electric bill to pay for the bulbs. 

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First step, we had to take an inventory of all of the light bulbs in the house. This was something that our 5 year old daughter could help us with. 

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We started with the first floor. We asked her to draw a map with each of the rooms.  Then, we went room by room and she marked the approximate location of each bulb with a circle. The next step was to color code the circles: green for LED, highlighter yellow for fluorescent, and red for incandescent. We also put X's on colored circles that represented dead bulbs. 

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We did this for each room of the first floor, then we mapped out the 2nd floor and the basement and repeated the process. We added more symbols along the way: squares for flat reflector bulbs in ceiling cans, triangles for candle shaped bulbs, outlined shapes for dim-able. We broke up the project over a weekend and she really enjoyed herself - we all did for that matter! 

 

What was even better was referring back to her maps over the following weeks as we made bulk purchases of bulbs and installed them throughout the house, turning our yellow and red dots to green. (We used stickers). 

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