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How Much Electricity Do Christmas Lights Use?

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Christmas is a festival that everyone wants to celebrate. Energy bills or lighting aren’t much of a concern for most people as they are up for even less than a month.

If you want to strive towards a carbon-neutral approach and are in search of better alternatives (that work longer with lesser electrical consumption), then you should find out more about your Christmas light consumption.

Current variety of lights:

If you have old incandescent lights from decades and are still using them, the above “introduction” isn’t correct. You’ll have to worry about your energy bills for sure.

We are not talking about a single incandescent bulb here. Christmas lights are usually in string form. According to estimates, a 100-string of incandescent mini light will take around 40 watts to light. The higher the wattage consumption is, the more the electricity bill you can expect.

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Latest variety of Christmas lights and their electricity consumption:

Mostly, the latest Christmas lights you get in the market are LED-based. A 70 small light string with LED bulbs consumes electricity of 4.8 watts.

We understand that we are comparing 30 bulbs lesser than the incandescent string, but this is because the light emission or brightness of the 70-lights long string and the 100-light incandescent string will be similar.

Even if you don’t buy that, the difference in the wattage consumption is enormous, so even by adding more LED bulbs to the string the answer will not be much different.

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How much does it cost?

To find the electricity cost of these lights, you have to follow the steps below:

  1. Calculate the exact wattage your Christmas lights consume
  2. Multiply the wattage by 0.001. It will convert the watts into Kilowatts so you can make further calculations easily.
  3. Multiply the answer from the above step by the number of hours you switch your lights on. You’ll get the answer in kWh/day.
  4. Now multiply it by 30 or the number of days you intend to keep these lights on to find the wattage consumption per season.
  5. You’ll find the electrical cost per unit on your bills. Multiple the per-unit cost with the answer from step 4; it will be your estimated cost to put up the Christmas lights for the season.

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Summing up:

With the calculation procedure mentioned above, you can find the wattage and the amount of money you are paying for the specialized Christmas lights alone. You can follow the same process to see the cost of each gadget or electronic. A professional electrician might also be able to help you in this situation.