Light Up Your Holiday With LED Lights

I read somewhere that people were expected to downsize their Christmas celebrations this year because of added home energy costs. Nonsense, when decorating your house, simply use LED lights inside and out and you will save money!

Let's look at some comparisons between regular holiday lighting and LED's.

Traditional incandescent bulb: 6 watts

Typical strand of 50 lights: 300 watts (.3 kilowatts)

Using the national average of 9.81 cents per kWh, this averages out at a cost of $4.50 over 30 days, if you run the lights for 5 hours per day. Multiply this by the number of strands you plan on hanging up for your total approximate usage cost.

Let's compare this to the cost of using LED bulbs:

LED bulb:. 08 watts

Typical strand of 50 lights: 4 watts (.004 kilowatts). Using the same parameters as for the regular lights, total usage cost for 30 days would be less than 6 cents.

Durability: LED bulbs also generate less heat than regular bulbs, giving them a life span of up to 100,000 hours. This translates to 10 times longer than fluorescents and 133 times longer than typical incandescent bulbs. They also don't contain delicate filaments, and are not damaged as easily as regular bulbs. These features make the LED a safer form of lighting.

Cost : At one time these lights were over priced and hard to find, but now they are widely available, and the prices have dropped considerably. Although the purchase cost may be higher, the real savings is in the usage costs as explained above.

Light field: LED's do not radiate light in 360 degrees as do the incandescent bulbs; they are more of a focused light. The light will be brightest wherever it is pointed towards.

Variety: Indoor and outdoor bulbs are available in a wide variety of colors and shapes for the holidays.

Safe use of your LED lights:

Make certain you are using the lights for their intended use, i.e. indoor/outdoor.

Do not connect standard light strings to LED light strings. This could result in power loss, damage or fire.

Understand your total wattage for each string and do not exceed this in your circuits.



Be sure to decorate your home this holiday season with this efficient, energy saving form of lighting.

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