Selecting the right decorative lighting can make for a happy holiday season in more ways than you might think. Depending on which lights you choose for indoor and outdoor lighting, you can decrease their electric bills, reduce your spending on decorations, shrink your carbon footprint and lower the risk of fires.
Save Money with New Lights
Switching from incandescent lights to energy efficient LED bulbs to light a six-foot tree 12 hours each day for 40 days can reduce your energy cost from more than $27 to less than .61 cents! When you add the cost of lights in other areas of the house and outdoors, the savings can add up to one more present or a dinner for two during the holiday season.
Look for lights with the Energy Star seal, which use up to 70 percent less energy than traditional bulbs.
New Lights Are Less Dangerous
Anyone who’s ever accidentally burned herself on holiday light bulb knows how hot they can get. To protect children and animals from burns and to reduce the risk of a fire, use energy efficient lights, which remain cool to the touch even after they’re on for hours. Because they use less energy, eco-friendly lights also reduce the risk of circuit overloads.
This lets you use more lights per wall socket without danger of an overload, which can trip a circuit breaker, blow a fuse and shut off power.
Get the Same Quality
Energy efficient bulbs provide the same brightness as older bulbs and come with features such as color shifting and dimming. Lower energy costs means newer light strings can contain more bulbs than their older counterparts and still cost less to use.
New Lights Last Longer
Because of the way they are made, new bulbs don’t break or burn out as easily as older bulbs. This leads to longer lifetimes, with these bulbs lasting up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
Help the Environment
The less electricity light bulbs use, the less energy utility companies are required to produce. If millions of homes, businesses, schools and government buildings use would use more energy efficient holiday lighting and reduce the hours they’re on, this would significantly decrease the demand on power plants. Add a programmable timer to holiday lights to prevent leaving lights on overnight or when people are out of town and forget to turn them off.
Watch for Knock-Offs
One thing to remember when shopping for holiday lights is that just because they’re new, it doesn’t mean they’re energy efficient or completely safe. With the influx of illegal goods that make their way into the country each year from countries like China, consumers should look for the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) label for maximum safety.