Go Green in Your Home

If you have read my article about using CFL bulbs to save electricity you already know incandecent light bulbs are not energy efficient. Most of you that want to go green that are already using CFL bulbs will probably waste some of that money you saved over the year during the holidays. Why? Most of you will use your regular Christmas decoration lights which are circuits of incandecent lights. That’s right each one of those little lights on a Christmas tree, Christmas wreath, or any other Christmas decorations you have are most likely using incandecent lights.

How Much Electricity Do Christmas Lights Use

Christmas lights that are using incandecent lights use a lot of electricity. Depending on the brand, quality, etc. a string of 100 incandecent Christmas lights will use around 45 watts of power! Most of you have around 500 lights just on your Christmas tree. So that’s 225 watts of power being used by Christmas lights! Most people will probably have their Christmas tree on for about 9 hours per day, and probably from Thanksgiving until a little after New Years, so your Christmas tree will be on for around 40 days.

So  let’s calculate how much electricity your Christmas tree is using:

40 days x 9 hours per day = 360 hours of use
360 hours x 225 watts / 1,000 = 81 kWh
81 kWh x $0.10 per kWh = $8.10

So now after calculating your Christmas tree’s electricity usage we found that it costs $8.10 just to power your Christmas tree for those 40 days if you only have 500 lights on your Christmas tree.  Most of you will also have more incandecent Christmas lights decorating other things as well wreaths, stair hand rails, windows, icicle lights hanging from your gutters, etc.

How Can I Save Money on Christmas Lighting

You can save money on Christmas lighting by using LED ( Light-Emitting Diode ) Christmas lights instead of your standard incandecent lights. There are also many other advantages to using LED Christmas lights instead of incandecent Christmas lights. Go Green in Your Home suggests replacing all of your standard incandecent Christmas lights with LED Christmas lights to save money, save electricity, and save the environment!

What are the Advantages of LED Christmas Lights

LED Christmas lights have many advantages over your standard incandecent Christmas lights. The 2 major advantages of LED Christmas lights is that they use a lot less electricity than incandecent Christmas lights. The technology used in light-emitting diodes is based on a semiconductor diode. When the diode is forward biased, or powered on, electrons recombine with holes to release photons. This is called electroluminescence. The next major advantage is that the light-emitting diodes last a long time. So you won’t have to replace light bulbs every Christmas and check the strings to make sure they work. LED lights are very durable and will last anywhere from 25,000 – 100,000 hours! A lot of the light-emitting diodes produced in the 1970’s are still in use today! Some of the other advantages of LED lights are that they are smaller in size, very fast light (instantly turn on), do not give off a lot of heat, and overall more energy efficient!

How Much Does Electricity Cost for LED Christmas Lights

Light-emitting diodes will cost you a lot less than standard incandecent Christmas lights, but how much will LED Christmas lighting save you? Well lets calculate the electricity usage of a Christmas tree using LED lighting instead of incandecent.

200 LED lights use 12 watts of power. So we will use 500 lights as we did when calculating the incandecent Christmas lights. So 500 LED lights will use 30 watts of power. We will also use the same amount of time and days used in the incandecent calculation.

40 days x 9 hours = 360 hours of use
360 hours x 30 watts / 1,000 = 10.8 kWh
10.8 kWh x $0.10 per kWh = $1.08

As you can see $1.08 for lighting a 500 LED Christmas tree is a lot more efficient than the incandecent Christmas lighting. So buy LED Christmas lights for your Christmas tree, Christmas wreaths, and all your other Christmas lighting needs so you can start saving money, and not have to replace all those light bulbs every year!