Instead of filling your house with battery-operated lights or animated gadgets, consider simple wreaths, along with ribbons and bells. To further reduce my impact, I can decorate indoors with low-tech pleasers like beeswax candles, evergreen boughs, and garlands, which smell great and use no energy. What does this mean? By choosing carefully, I am using far less energy than previous years, and I can have more decorations at less cost to me and the planet. In contrast, if I choose a laser light show AND LED snowflake projection AND a glowing Yeti, I’ll be using only 96 watts per hour, or 768 watts per day-around half the energy used to run my dishwasher. My traditional house lights combined with my traditional tree lights previously added up to 1000 watts per hour, or 8000 watts for an eight hour day if I was strict about turning them off regularly. Is it possible to do this and still be ‘green’? However, since you are only using one of these rather than a whole string, they still cut back substantially on energy usage.īut, perhaps, like me, you have a secret desire to be that one house in the neighborhood that gets oohs and aahs for its extreme light display. These devices do make white light and generally have four bulbs using around 6 watts per hour. If you really want a classic look, there are now LED projectors that will project a large image onto a wall, such as snowflakes, reindeer, and stars that move in a rotation. While LEDs and some of the options listed here use far less energy than lights of years gone by, bedecking your house in a plethora of lights will translate into higher energy consumption. Lasers always come in red, green, blue, and other bright colors, so keep this in mind when planning your holiday display. The one thing lasers can’t do, however, is make white light. You can also purchase laser lights with programmed patterns and a variety of twinkly designs, eliminating the need for other decorations. Not only are these very easy to install, because you simply stab them into the ground and point them at your house, but they only use approximately 0.005 watts per hour. How convenient to have these lights on the house ready to go-we can just plug them in, right? Unfortunately, each of those bulbs uses around 6 watts every hour, which means my 100-light string may be using 600 watts per hour! Our laziness is not only costing us money, it has big energy costs as well.īesides LED Christmas lights and automatic timers, there are new alternatives to string lights that are even better for outdoor use. What is Christmas without beautiful holiday lights brightening up the neighborhood? I thought that the old style, large-bulb outdoor Christmas lights don’t exist anymore – but, wait, they do?! Not only are they surprisingly still available in stores, the house I live in came with these lights pre-installed and we have yet to take them down. This year we’re looking at a programmable timer to make sure our tree is only on when we are around to enjoy it.Īlternatives for Your House: Outdoor Lasers and LED Projections At our house we previously asked a child to crawl under the tree and unplug it every time we left the house or went to bed, but we often forgot. By my calculations, my tree of 400 watts per hour is now using only 80 watts instead!Īnother way to save energy is to keep your tree on a timer. LEDs are also cool to the touch, which will help prevent live trees from drying out as quickly, and are less of a fire hazard. It’s important to note that the mini lights are the ones that look like incandescent bulbs-not all LED light strings are created equally. They also last for 30,000 to 50,000 hours and cost almost the same as incandescent lights in many places. Thank goodness there are now warm white mini-LEDs that mimic the light of a traditional bulb while using 80%-90% less energy. I initially resisted the switchover to LED lights because they didn’t have the same bright twinkle that traditional lights have, and I’m not a fan of colorful lights. The simplest way to reduce your tree’s energy consumption is to make sure you are using LED Christmas lights.
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