![]() ![]() 5 x 25 watts x 7 hours (mini lights) = 875 watts.If you are all out and lit up all of these for 10 hours a day, this would be your daily energy usage: 10 strands of Outdoor String Lights (with 100 bulbs each).5 strands of mini lights for your Christmas tree (with 100 incandescent mini lights each).Let’s say that these are the lights you are using this holiday season and they are all incandescent bulbs: That’s assuming that he hadn’t already switched electric suppliers, so he’d have to pay the average national electric rate of approximately 13 cents per kilowatt-hour.Īre you wondering about how many watts do Christmas lights use at your home and what’s the total cost? Let’s use our Christmas light energy cost calculator to compare the cost of LED Christmas lights vs incandescent below: Incandescents If Clark Griswald in Christmas Vacation wanted to decorate his house, his Christmas lights electricity for the holiday season would cost him $1,600. The average life expectancy of an LED lightbulb is 50000 hours, which means that you will likely use your LED Christmas lights forever. Unlike incandescents that produce light by heating the inner filament, LEDs light up using conductors without generating heat, so they use at least 75% less energy, and last 25 times longer, than incandescent lighting. Remember the 175 watts big plump outdoor lights we talked about in the previous section? A strand works out to a whopping $15.12 to run over a season (assuming 12-hour-a-day operation for 45 days).Ī comparable string of C9 LEDs, by contrast, uses just 2.4 watts and costs 21 cents to run over the same period. The old-style incandescent bulbs are expensive to run- and this is especially true for the larger bulbs. Let’s compare the LED vs incandescent Christmas lights: Incandescents LED lights are your most energy-efficient option. LED lights to use six times less the wattage of incandescent lighting which translates to about six times less cost. If the previous session got you worried about how much does it cost to run Christmas lights, there is a bright side too (pun intended). ![]() Although icicle lights decorations are undeniably fun and can be used in many creative ways after the holiday season, they will come with a high running price tag. Icicle LightsĪ strand of 100 icicle lights will use about 5500 watts of energy. Though the actual usage will depend on the decoration, you can assume an average consumption of 120 watts per decoration. We are talking about sparkling snowmen, bright Santas and reindeer, and others. I don’t own any special tools, so the solution isn’t very elegant, but by going through the light strand and replacing all of the bad bulbs, I eventually hit on the one (or two) bulbs that were causing the whole strand to fail.Christmas Decorations/Accessories Requiring ElectricityĪny other lit-up decorations you might want to display in your front yard will consume electricity. If you have a problem with a set of three-wire Christmas lights that aren’t working, I hope this solution is helpful. It seemed like a lot of work initially, but I found the problem bulbs in less than twenty minutes. The keys for me were (a) knowing that the bulbs could be in one of those three states, and (b) just taking the time to test and replace all the bad bulbs until the strand started working again. I assume this bulb was paired with the first bulb in the strand that was out, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. I replaced about four bulbs until I replaced one light bulb and the entire strand came to life. The bulb didn’t work, and it caused the rest of the light strand to fail.The bulb didn’t work, but the rest of the light strand worked.We found several bulbs that were in one of three states: We didn’t have any special tools for this, so what we did was just start at the first bulb that wasn’t working, and then we tested every other bulb in the strand after it by removing it and testing it with another strand. Once we replaced both bulbs, the entire light strand lit up. For us, the “pair” part was a key, and through a little trial and error, we found out that the bulb where the light strand stopped working had indeed burned out, but it was also joined up with a second bulb further down the line that had also gone out. The short version of that article is that the way these light strands work is that the light bulbs are connected in series and in parallel, and the most important thing to know is that the bulbs seem to be connected in pairs. We couldn’t fix it by replacing the bulb right where the light string stopped working, so I looked into it and found this helpful (but a little too technical) article. Yesterday we had a three-wire Christmas light string where the first half of the string was working, but the second half of the light string wasn’t working.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |