People who replace their bulbs with LED bulbs may have a tendency to burn them unnecessarily more often. What is this phenomenon called, whereby a more lax use cancels out the expected lower consumption or lower cost? Does this behavior affect other areas? Can it be compared with the suction effect after the widening of the Brussels Ring, for example?
Answer
Dear Didier,
This effect is called the rebound effect.
And yes, it also plays a role in other types of residential energy use, eg heating or cooling your home. If you purchase a more efficient installation, you often (unconsciously) increase your comfort requirement, so that the savings are lower than originally (correctly) calculated, assuming the same comfort requirements and usage.
There are two types of rebound effects: The direct and indirect rebound effect. You can find more scientifically based studies on this, for example in this paper:
Hugo Hens, Wout Parijs, Mieke Deurinck 2010, Energy consumption for heating and rebound effects, Energy and Buildings, Volume 42, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 105–110, International Conference on Building Energy and Environment (COBEE 2008). It is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877880900142X
I cannot judge whether this behavior also occurs outside the residential household energy use setting, you will have to approach other scientists or domain specialists for that.
Answered by
ir. Joachim Verhelst
Energy, HVAC, Thermal Building Modeling
http://www.thomasmore.be
.