I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus Underneath the LED's Last Night

Light-emitting diode (LED) lights are a popular item this holiday season, and for good reason.  They use less than 10 per cent of the electricity and last 66 times longer than conventional incandescent lights.  They are also cool to the touch, eliminating fire hazards around trees.  

Two years ago, Calgary resident Robert Andrews began swapping his conventional Christmas lights with LEDs.  Now during the holiday season, the house perimeter and trees inside and out all twinkle with these high-efficiency lights.

“I was consuming way too much energy with my old lights, and I wanted to maintain the Christmas spirit without causing a blackout in the southwest part of the city,” Andrews jokes.  “It’s a difference of roughly seven watts per string versus seven watts per bulb.  If you compare my December and January electricity bills from one year to the next, you see they have gone down a bunch.”  

According to BC Hydro, if you use six strands of lights to decorate your home and they are on for an average of six hours a day throughout December, using traditional incandescent lights would cost you over $23 in electricity, whereas their LED counterparts would only run you 28 cents.  This is because a typical 50-bulb incandescent strand uses 250 watts whereas an equivalent 70-bulb LED strand of holiday lights only uses three watts.   

So the few extra dollars it costs to purchase LEDs is recovered, in power savings, in just one or two holiday seasons.  These are yearly savings that – considering an average LED light lifespan of 200,000 hours – will continue over the several lifetimes it would take to burn them out.

So even if the incandescent strings dangling from your trees and homes are practically new, replacing them with LEDs is a smart investment, both economically and environmentally, especially now that solar-powered LED holiday lights are available.