The holidays are just around the corner. Almost time to put up the holiday lights. But if you’re like me, you want to be festive but habor some guilt around putting up holiday lights because they use up so much energy. Assuming you put up the lights end of November and take them down end of December for an average of 5 hours daily that’s around 150 hours! According to a study done by the Washington State University Energy Program the average cost of lighting up 5 standard C-7 light string with 25 bulbs(that has incandescent bulbs) for 150 hours uses up 500W and costs around $26.8. That almost $27 for not a lot of lights. Most houses probably use up 2-3 times that. So what do you do to save energy?
The answer is LED Holiday Lights. They are safer, don’t heat up as much use a fraction of the energy. Using the same example. an LED light string would use up 12W of energy and cost $6,2. Take for instance this C6 LED Light String. It contains 70 bulbs and consumes 4.8 Watts of energy.
You can go a step further and hook up the lights with a Outdoor Light timer . This timer has a built in photocell so you have the choice of selecting dusk-to-dawn operation or a progammable mode with a 1 to 9 hour countdown after dusk. e.g. you can set the lights to turn on at dusk and have it turn off automatically after 4 hours.