If your heat is electric then it doesn't matter if you leave your lights on in the winter, does it?

I guess if you don't care about using energy unnecessarily . . . .

How does your heat being electric or not determine if you should leave your lights on in the winter? Just curious.

But if your electric heater has a thermostat and if all the energy used by the light bulbs gets turned into heat then wouldn't leaving your lights on just make the heater run less and it would all even out? (i could be wrong, if so just wondering why)

The heat and the light bulbs have to both be using electricity for my question to make any sense. If the heat was gas powered and gas was ten times cheaper then of course turning off your lights would make sense.

Indeed, all the energy consumed by the light ends up as heat, but if those light bulbs are in a ceiling fixture then most of that heat will end up in the air around the ceiling, where it doesn't do much for your comfort.

Ah, I see what you're saying. It's going to depend on the square footage of the area, the amount of heat the light bulbs give off, the amount of light bulbs, how well sealed your house is, what rknichols mentioned about placement, etc.

Someone with two identical houses in the same area with electric heat needs to leave all the lights in one house and all the lights off in the other house. And then see if the house with the lights on gets a higher electric bill.

Sure. I think another consideration (assuming there were savings) would be the cost of light bulbs. Surely they would burn out faster if you left them on 24/7. So you would have to subtract the cost of light bulbs off your total savings.

In my bathroom, the lighting around the mirror use these specialty light bulbs (four of them) that are $10 a pop and burn out every couple of months. I wasn't having any of that so I put a floor lamp in my bathroom that uses a light bulb I picked up from the dollar store almost a year ago.

Interesting question you posed! I was all set to get some work done after dinner until I was distracted by your question

But you forgot to factor in the cost of heater maintainance. The lights are taking part of the load off the heater so you have to subtract heater maintainance savings from light bulb cost.

the only country i know of where one could do that with a good conscience - is norway (the why is for another story).

since you're apparently not:
don't do it.
heating your house with electricity is bad enough, leaving the lights on is worse.
don't have to be a physicist to understand that.

That's true. I guess for that one it would depend if you're a renter or home owner.

Having been employed by a solar heating company that routinely collected sophisticated "energy profile" data on client's homes, usually discovering that conservation was required before active solar, I can tell you that your level of insulation, including infiltration levels for outside air, is far more important than the tiny bit of thermal gain from electric lighting. In a home with R30 in the walls, R40 in the ceiling, externally insulated foundation, and with an impervious wrap-around barrier for infiltration, even the heat from human bodies matters. In most homes both body heat and light bulbs heat (rather inefficient source and use of electricity) are like spitting in the ocean. In general it is wiser to use the device(s) designed to create and distribute heat do the job.

What about leaving computers, TV, etc. on all the time? A computer must use more electricity than 60 watt light bulb. Do you unplug your Xbox, PS4? Everything with a little red light that stays on is described as an "energy vampire".

I'm of the opinion the repeated heating and cooling of components is harder on them that leaving them on 24/7 so I leave everything on even when I go out including the TV.

I have an electric meter in my apartment about 10 feet from me, it's not a smart device, and am allocated so many killowatt hours per month before start to accrue an electric bill. I haven't received an electric bill since last summer and it's never been over $40 during the summer. Since shelving my energy hog towers it's dropped to around $20 a month last summer.

My apartment is small enough I can turn on the oven and leave the door open to keep some heat without using the AC unit much and dress warm anyway. I have houseplants so it can't get too cold. I only get direct sunlight from about 4pm on in the summer so that helps keep it cool.

Yo Trihex, using an oven to heat a home is inefficient and bad for the oven. Spend 20 bux and get yourself a space heater. As for power hungry towers, that doesn't apply to all towers. It is dependent on the efficiency of the PSU. My 800 watt PSU powered tower drops to less than 30 watts when in deep hibernation.