We sold a lug or case of Avocados, very large and superior Fuertes, for $20 to a great local restaurant. Cases are usually 25lbs, but we added an extra five pounds to make sure they were happy. Also, they offered to help us with the project by saving the CRV containers for us and saving the 5 Gallon Oil containers so we could recycle them as planting containers. This is going to be a great relationship. The restaurant is also going to save the Avocado pits so we can plant them for resale in a few years. (See, www.recycledplants.com for how they look as starter seedlings)
We then took this money and went to Costco in San Bernardino (http://www.priceviewer.com/costco_locations/478-California.html) which a great promotion on with Southern California Edison for an instant rebate program on Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. (http://www.sce.com/residential/rebates-savings/lighting/)
Basically, the deal was to buy the lights bulbs and get an instant 75% to 83% discount at check out. So, we bought two packs of 4 120W outdoor flood lights from FEIT Electric (http://www.feitelectric.com/compact_fluorescent/feit_compactfluorescent.html) They are significantly brighter than the old 100 Watt bulbs and the claim is they used 75% less energy or 23 Watts and last 5 times longer and save me $465 per year per pack? Not bad. Even better was that these CFL’s would have cost $17.29 and with Costco and Southern California Edison’s teamwork on the instant rebate the cost to us was: $17.29 – $13.00 = $4.29 plus tax per pack.
We also purchased a 16 pack or indoor 100 Watt CFL from Lights of America (http://www.lightsofamerica.com/en/Product%20Categories/CFL.aspx) and again the claim was they only used 23 watts per bulb and this would save me $77 per bulb per year? or life time? It is unclear what they are claiming….but somewhere, sometime, we are supposed to get 16 X $77 = $1232 in savings. Again, even better was that these CFL’s would have cost $30.59 and with Costco and Southern California Edison’s teamwork on the instant rebate the cost to us was: $30.59 – $25.60 = $4.99 plus tax.
The total purchase was only $13.57 after rebate, and with the claims of $2162 in savings (unsure of time frames) would still be in the 15932% return on investment (not concerned about), let alone the astounding claims of beneficial impact to the environment like “green house gases saved by using the bulbs in this pack are the equivalent to planting 165 trees” (do care about).
