Virtually all of our bulbs are either CFL or LED nowadays but we still turn them out when leaving a room when there is no expectation of returning to the same room within a half hour or so. Except the primary living room light, which is on a timer.
There are a couple of LED nightlights here which are always on; they’re not supposed to be but their sensors always say it’s too dark to not be on. Even when the primary light fixture is on.
This. And all the lights are off while I’m sleeping.
And otherwise: when I’m in the house after dark, or in dank dim wet weather, I’m usually moving back and forth fairly often among three downstairs rooms; so I’ll leave those lights on until I go to bed or leave the house for a while. If I go briefly into another room and need to turn the lights on there, I turn those lights off when I leave the room, unless I’m expecting to be back in there shortly.
Most of my lights are now LED’s.
In our stupid suburb there is so much damned unnecessary exterior lighting that there is no difficulty seeing well enough to get about safely, even in the middle of the night. Our dog has taken to lying in the bathroom door at night. Not once have I failed to see him there when I get up to pee, despite not a light being on.
I think a majority of folk grossly underestimate their ability to see in low light conditions.
I can see well in the dark and prefer it. I rarely turn lights on - it’s usually my wife.
Nearest house to me is about 750 feet away and behind a treeline. At or near full moon I can find my way to the john by moonlight, no problem. The rest of the month if I need to get up in the night I use a small flashlight, as turning the lights on wakes me up too much.
On the rare occasions when I sleep somewhere in a city or village I’m often bothered by the amount of ambient light.
Does she have a glow? 
This is me. And this place is dark at night. No ambient light to speak of.
During the day, my home is flooded with natural light from many windows and skylights, so I rarely need to turn on a light. I prefer the house dark at night because I have no drapes (by design).
I always turn off lights I’m not actively using. My electric bill is low despite still waiting for some non-LED bulbs to burn out. That’s because after more than 20 years, some of them are still working. (!!!)
I really dislike lights left on in rooms that no one is using and must actively fight my OCD tendencies to turn them off when visiting my parents, who never met a light that shouldn’t be left on or an appliance that shouldn’t keep running despite its having completed its assigned task. They have a clothes dryer that will continue running until someone retrieves the dried items. I’ve listened to that thing buzz repeatedly every 15 minutes for hours on end. It makes me want to scream.
Exactly. The noise drives me crazy if I’m in a town or suburb tryna sleep.
Its dark dark dark out here in the boonies.
But with the people in this house and kids running around theres always lights and TVs and devices lit up.
I would sit in the dark, like a mole, if alone here.
I don’t even like night lights.
If I get up at night I grab a phone. My android phone, you shake it and the flash light comes on. I hate a digital alarm clock and those huge numbers and bright light.
Another thing that bugs me is all the tiny dots of light on appliances. The microwave thingy is always blinking.
The dryer tells me my clothes are dry. The dishwashers tell me the dishes are clean. Several more.
Even my fridge has a tiny screen with the temperature and other info that no one understands.
I swear I could live with just kerosene lamps and candles. But I do like AC in August.
:snerk: Indeed she does!
I hate those, too. I put tiny squares of black electrical tape over all the damn electrical outlets with GFIs, of which this house seems to have dozens. (Slight exaggeration – but not much!) I cover the many lights on my wireless router with a folded black kerchief.
I leave the microwave alone, the fridge has one tiny light I ignore, and there are others I’m regularly tempted to cover but I don’t. It takes a significant effort of will. Astonishing how much light those little suckers give off.
Are you guys covering the little lights in rooms where you’re not sleeping? I wouldn’t care.
Yes. Here’s why, for me:
I never realized how much ambient light I ignored when I lived in urban/semi-urban areas. But when you move to deep rural country as I did 20-odd years ago, it becomes immediately obvious how little light it takes to stick out like a sore thumb and to light a space well enough to move silently through it without bumping into stuff.
Now, I’m not much paranoid about home invasions and I sleep fine, but they do happen. We’ve had a couple in my area in the dead of night. I prefer to give no advantage to such evil-doers should they decide to target my place. Call it a passive aggressive deterrence measure.
Makes sense. We also live in a very dark spot, but we have a few very low wattage LEDs on here and there around the house at night (well, actually all the time). We don’t have any light that I notice in our bedroom. Maybe the tv has a little red dot?
In case anyone doesn’t know, a fan (ceiling, table or floor) doesn’t cool an empty room. It only cools people (and presumably animals) in the room. So it’s pointless to leave it on when no one is in the room.
I generally agree. Our fans are intended to circulate the warmer (higher) air back to the lower parts of the room we’re occupying. They are in rooms with high ceilings. How good they are at this I have no idea. I don’t think they use many electrons.
If I lived in a place as large as yours, I might do the same!
I do have a lot of motion-triggered outdoor lighting, though. Another early warning system if anyone is game to enter the property in the middle of the night after having breached other security measures. I do not assume benign intent with such persons.
I’m not sure what kind of national indoctrination took place around 1976, but it sure worked on me. Leaving a door open meant you could be accused of being born in a barn, but leaving a light on in an empty room meant you must hate America.
Yes, moving air increases the level of heat transfer between your skin and the environment, cooling you off faster. It’s not actually lowering the ambient temperature of a room, it just increases the rate at which you are naturally cooled off when you are in a room with an ambient temperature lower than your body temperature.
It does the opposite with something cold, as I discovered once as a kid. When I lived on Guam, we had a car without air conditioning (yeah, I know, stupid, but we couldn’t afford a car with working AC, that car was a piece of crap). So we’d drive with the windows down. Once, I remember buying ice cream cones from McDonald’s and as we drove away the air blowing in from the open window made my ice cream melt like it had a freaking blow dryer on it. (I mean, the air was warm but not that warm; it was the moving air that was to blame.)
So yeah, don’t leave fans on in an empty room to cool it. Though as @Procrustus said, circulating air between rooms might still be a sensible thing to do.
Gawd would you please tell that to my wife!!
Under certain circumstances it will. If we can substitute a car for a room for the purposes of an example, the Prius used a solar panel powered fan to keep the interior of the car cool. While an extreme example, it’s not unrelatable to a room with some heating situtation going on where the fan can expel the heat.