I know what everyone usually says;
“Oh it’s just nice to reunite with family and friends, enjoy good food and open presents around the tree”.

But what late November really means is at least two weekends of untangling Christmas lights, climbing ladders, missing extension wires and burnt out bulbs.

As if catching elbows on rusty nails wasn’t enough, the real kick in the pants comes at the beginning of January when your electricity bill shows up. Invariably those 12 strings of 200 bulbs have been left on 24 hours a day (because they are invisible during daylight!) and the rates are at an all-time high. Of course every year is a new “all time high” for energy rates but hey what’s a guy to do; can’t let the neighbor’s shoddy work represent for the street.

Well I have found a solution for that.

Every day there is more and more hype about how great these new LED bulbs are and how they save you huge amounts of money, but the problem is always the same; light quality. It’s pretty obvious when you go to sit down with a magazine or a book (people do still use those?) and right away you can see a slight blue or red, or green tone to the light, for some people this is a huge annoyance making LED’s still just out of reach for true home lighting.

For Christmas lights, however, LED’s are so damn smart.

LED’s use a fraction (no literally, about one-tenth) of the energy of bulbs, they do not burn out (they last for something like 50,000 hours) and some LED’s are made specifically to be able to produce a huge range of colors.

	Side-by-side Author Bulbs on top LEDs below (insert is the plug meter)

Here let me give you an example; my friend let me run around his house with one of these plug meters (the one I used is the Voltcraft Energy Logger 3500 from Conrad.de) so I could see how much energy the LED string used compared to the bulb string. Both strings had 200 of those small-bulb-size lights so that was convenient.

First, the regular light bulb model cost 40 Euros (300DKK, bought 5 years ago) the bulbs produce a definitely orange light and the string uses 103 watts. The LED string cost the same from a “big box” retailer but the energy use is only 11 watts.

The LED lights also look brighter with a yellow/blue color tone (but the color might have something to do with why they ‘look’ brighter).

This means that fully decking out your home in its usual 12 strings of lights will have about the same running cost of just one string of the old bulb-ed type winking all night. That is a pretty amazing savings.

Now I know what you are thinking with all this…“Hell, why not just use the same amount of energy to run 120 strings of LED’s”. But I’m going to advise against it, I mean really do you want to be known as ‘this guy’?

	You know the type obliterated @ flickr 120 strings of lights!

The way the numbers work out you save 26 kWh a day by changing to LED strings (103w-11w x 12strings x 24 hours). Let’s say you don’t like to mess around and so have your lights up and on only from this weekend to the weekend after Christmas --that is only one month, but 780 kWh and about 210 Euros (1560DKK) in wasted energy.

	Timer Author Costing just 7 Euros this timer is set for 6 hours on, saving 75% compared to just leaving your lights on all the time.

Oh and just for the fun of it, 50,000 hours of run time means your LED bulb string will last you 70 years worth of Decembers; of course you only need 3 of those years to totally ameliorate the cost of trading bulbs to LED’s.

For added cost savings pick up one of these plug-in timers and have the whole show on only when it matters; at night.

If you want to get fancy have a look at RGB LED strings (stands for Red, Green, Blue).

These will come with a type of controller (like what controls the flashing bulb-ed models) that allows you to adjust color and patterns, more expensive but with a virtually infinite color combination pallet defiantly cool.