Article from last year...
“With the Philips Hue bulb, the wattage display on the Kill A Watt unit steadily hovered between 0.0 watts and 0.3 watts—it uses up so little electricity that the Kill A Watt was barely registering anything at all, but it was still registering something.
But for the sake of data and doing some math, let’s average it out and say that the bulb pulls 0.15 watts of power when it’s on “standby.” To figure out how much that’s costing you on your electric bill, we first need to convert that wattage into kilowatt-hours (kWh).
Long story short, it would take roughly 6,600 hours before a Hue bulb uses up 1 kWh of power in standby mode (or 9.17 months). Depending on where you live, the cost for a single kWh of power differs, but for me it costs 15 cents. Therefore, a Hue bulb in standby mode costs around 1.6 cents per month—at least in my area.”
Smart bulbs are super convenient, and can save you money compared to traditional bulbs.
www.howtogeek.com
Once you’ve set them up to sunrise and sunset timers, as well as other timers, you never really have to touch a light switch. Which also means no more forgetting to turn a light off.
I run 21 Hue lights in my home varying from the play bars behind the tv to the basic bulbs outside. My electric bill went down once I started using them. So much so that I have 16 of those 21 lights on every single night 20 minutes before sunset until midnight when they shut off except for the 4 that I leave on outside and 3 I keep on inside until sunrise.
As for the bulb costs, some are super expensive (the play bars I bought 3 of were $200) but Ive been getting the basic white ones from $11 to $13. Far from expensive.