OK – I am not sug­gest­ing that all the hol­i­day lights on your house actu­ally be the color green.  That would just be weird.  But, at my house we’ve been grad­u­ally con­vert­ing over to the LED strings of lights and it’s going really well so far.  We’ve got snowflake ici­cle ones, color strings, and those ones on a net that you can put over shrubs.

First, and really best of all when you’re talk­ing strings of lights, the lights work dif­fer­ently than tra­di­tional strings in that if one breaks, they don’t all go off, forc­ing you to search for that one bro­ken one that is mess­ing it up.  That is really cool.  Sec­ond, the lights are lit­er­ally “cool” to the touch com­pared with tra­di­tional incan­des­cent lights.  Did you know that there are 250 Christ­mas tree fires each year in the U.S.?  I didn’t either.  Accord­ing to the U.S. Fire Admin­is­tra­tion, these fires cause 14 deaths each year due to shorts in elec­tri­cal lights or open flames from can­dles, lighters or matches.  FYI –they rec­om­mend keep­ing nat­ural trees well watered (every day) to make them safer.

Back to LED lights – accord­ing to the Energy Star pro­gram, LED lights use 70 to 90% less energy than the incan­des­cent ones.  They also last 10 times longer.  So if they cost a lit­tle more up front, you should get that money back and then some on energy sav­ings and lower replace­ment costs.  Hav­ing to replace lights less often also reduces the amount of them end­ing up in landfills.

Another easy improve­ment you can make is putting hol­i­day lights on a timer.  For me, this has been huge since I used to have to go out­side in the cold and unplug the out­side lights each night.  Very unpleas­ant.  Now we have our tree and out­side lights on timers.  We’ve been hav­ing them turn on at 6pm and off at 9 pm.  Really, who is look­ing at them past then –but that’s your call.

Sev­eral retail­ers offer dis­counts on LED hol­i­day lights if you turn in an old set.  The old set does not need to be work­ing!  So make this the year that you trade in those old, bro­ken lights for some new energy effi­cient ones.  Accord­ing to the Energy Star pro­gram – “If all dec­o­ra­tive light strings sold in Amer­ica this year were ENERGY STAR qual­i­fied, we would save over 700 mil­lion kWh of elec­tric­ity per year and reduce green­house gas emis­sions equiv­a­lent to those from about 100,000 cars.”

Don’t you love those easy choices!  I do.  BTW, that giant plug-in inflat­able 12 days of Christ­mas for your front yard may look cute in the store, but do you really want to store that bad boy forever?

Happy Hol­i­days!  — Elissa Rei­neck, OES Vol­un­teer Coordinator

Fact sheet about energy effi­cient lights:  http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_product.showProductGroup&pgw_code=DS