Interested in Saving Money at Christmas Time? Switching to LED Christmas Lights May Be You're Answer!

Almost everyone is looking for ways to save money at Christmas time and for the most part we do that by hitting the stores during sales, making gifts instead of buying them, or just cutting back on the amount of stuff we buy but there's an often overlooked way of saving a fair amount of cash this Christmas that is also environmentally friendly and can save you a ton of headaches. How you ask? Switch to LED Christmas Lights, of course!

Pretty soon, if they haven't already, family, friends, and neighbors will be sauntering out of their garages, attics, basements, or sheds carrying boxes of indoor/outdoor Christmas lights for decorating their trees, bushes, roof lines, doorways, mantles, and Christmas trees. As displays get more elaborate, the lamp count goes up and so does you electric bill. In years gone by, these would have been those lovely gigantic C7 or C9 Christmas Light bulbs of your childhood (depending on how old you are). You know the kind that could fill an entire tree with just 20 bulbs and burn as much electricity as the east side of London every hour while doing it. As time marched on, these slowly segued into the miniature Christmas lights that most of us are familiar with and continue to use today. Increased electric bills at Christmas time are something most of us have just learned to live with. It's the price of being festive. Now LED Christmas lights are making the scene and many people may be looking at these and wondering why they should pay more for what at least outwardly appears to be the same thing as their existing miniature Christmas lights. Many of the benefits of LED Christmas lighting may not be obvious to anybody first encountering them so let me explain a bit about them and you can decide for yourself if making the switch is the right idea.

First and foremost, LED Christmas lights typically burn way less electricity than incandescent Christmas lights (what miniature Christmas lights are if they don't say they're LED Christmas lights), saving energy for the environment and saving money for you at the same time. How much electricity do Christmas lights burn and how much money can I save? Well, the typical miniature Christmas light strands (50 lamps per strand) use about 25 watts of electricity and those old C7 and C9 Christmas lamps of your childhood use a staggering 250 watts or more. LED Christmas lights on the other hand, use about 4 watts per 50 lamp strand! LED Christmas lights are more efficient and produce more light output per watt then incandescent Christmas lights do while using less electricity overall. To put that into average dollars and cents, if you compare the electricity cost to run 500 lamps (10 strands of 50 lamps) each of C7 Christmas lights, miniature Christmas lights, and LED Christmas lights for 5 hours a day for 30 days, assuming $0.09 per Kwh (kilowatt hour), it works out to be about $33.75 for the C7 Christmas lights, $3.37 for the miniature Christmas lights, and $0.54 for the LED Christmas lights! That adds up to a lot of money saved and what brings more holiday cheer than saving money? Of course, it's not all about saving money at Christmas time it's also about giving and in a way you'd be giving all that electricity back for others to use. It's a win-win situation!

If you're cynical, and I bet you are, you're likely wondering why else you should switch, as if saving money wasn't enough. Well here's another good reason: LED Christmas lights will last for 20 or more years on average! You'll be lucky to get 3 or 4 years out of traditional Christmas lights. Also, if you have any experience with traditional Christmas lighting, you'll remember having to swap out bulbs, hunting for the elusive one that burned out high up in your front yard tree that now has the entire strand of lights out! Fun stuff especially at night in the cold! Even with the advent of modern Christmas light strands that don't all go out if one light blows out, it's still a pain having to exchange out lamps that have gone out to maintain your holiday displays. Little to nothing prevents lamps from falling out and with a missing bulb any Christmas light strand will go out, LED or otherwise but in many cases, LEDs are actually permanently fixed in place so they can't fall out. Incandescent lamps have to be changed frequently so they have to be removable. LED Christmas lights very rarely blow out at all. It's more likely that something will damage the connecting wires than the LED failing. Even when LEDs do fail, they often dim, not burn out altogether. So you can save tons of your time and more cash on not having to buy lots of replacement bulbs.

What else you ask? LED Christmas lights can be turned off and on at will many times over (you know if you plugged it into one of those awful devices that chimes out a Christmas song like a doorbell while flashing all your Christmas tree lights to the song) without any damaging effects to the LEDs which is not the case with traditional Christmas lights. An incandescent Christmas light bulb will have its life shortened by flashing it. Since LEDs don't have a spindly filament that can easily break, they're not likely to stop working from being bumped around while in storage or while you're putting them up. The LED Christmas lights put out little to no heat so they're cool to the touch and not a fire hazard like the old C7 or C9 Christmas lights which you could toast marshmallows on.

Well, now that I have heard all about saving money with LED Christmas lights and how much longer they will last and how less aggravating they can be, are there any negative things about LED Christmas lights I should know about? Well, the only really negative thing I can say about them, which is probably obvious to you if you're looking at them in the store is that they cost more than an equivalent strand of incandescent miniature Christmas lights. Sometimes two or more times the cost and they're not always available in the gigantic length strings you may be used to. So the money savings gets tempered a bit in the beginning but that cost to purchase them is but a small investment that will pay itself back in the first season or two in energy savings alone. Of course, you can save all that money by just not putting up Christmas lights at all but that would be a big "bah, humbug!" Happy holidays!