Christmas is coming and it has been customary for most of us to put up Christmas decorations right after Thanksgiving day. For a few communities here in southern California, it has been a customary to put up a lot of Christmas lights around the house, thus, creating a festival theme in the community. We visited the communities in Glendora and the city of Carson last year and notice that these homeowners were really outdoing each other eventhough there were no awards involved. The drawback with these decorations is the cost of the energy bills. Some household have paid as much as $1,000 in electric bills from these Christmas decorations.

To save on energy, consumers need to start switching to LED Christmas lights and dispose their incandescent ones. Below are the advantages of LED from their incandescent counterparts:

  1. LED Christmas lights use 1/10th of the energy of standard incandescent Christmas lights and will last for more than 50,000 hours compared to about 1500 for an average incandescent light.
  2. LED lights are very durable because they do not contain a fragile filament and the bulbs are constructed of a durable epoxy plastic no breakable glass.
  3. LED lights create virtually no heat so they are safer for use on Christmas trees and other combustible materials. A recent EPA report determined that if only 20% of American households switched to LED Christmas lights for the average 30 day holiday period it would conserve enough energy to power 200 households for an entire year.