Christmas Without Wasting Energy Case Analysis

Decorating for Christmas Without Wasting Energy

A few weeks ago, my wife and stepson were going through our collection of holiday movies and we ended up watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. One of my favorite scenes in that movie is where Clark Griswold is standing in his front yard admiring his decorating handiwork. He must have spent days, maybe weeks, stringing all those light. He did such a beautiful job too but the moment he plugged those lights in the whole neighborhood went dark. That had to have been one heck of a power surge. If he had not blown all the fuses, can you even begin to imagine what his electric bill would have been for the season?

I have always been something of a Clark Griswold in the sense that I go all out

A single string of 50 conventional lights consumes 300 watts or 0.3 Kw (Kilowatts). With the national average energy cost at $0.0981 per KWh, 300 watts per string equates to $0.03 per hour. If that single string is lit for 5 hours a day for 30 days, it will cost you $4.50 for the season. Now multiply that by the total number of light string used, which, in my case was 35 strings, my seasonal energy cost was somewhere around $160.00. This year I am going to cut that expense by roughly 98 percent without cutting back on my decorating. Light Energy Designs has come to our rescue. They have designed a completely new kind of Christmas tree light strings and other illuminated tree decorations employing Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). A string of 50 LEDs consumes a mere 4 Watts. Running a single string of LED lights for the whole season would cost a mere $0.06 as opposed to $4.50 for a conventional string. With LED lights, it would be possible to connect up to 120 strings together and connect them to a single outlet without overloading the circuit. Another advantage of the LEDs is that they generate no heat so there is less chance that they will cause a fire. In the long run, LEDs will also save you money because they have a burn life of 10,000 hours, which equates to 11 years of use. The lamps do not break either because they have a solid epoxy lens instead of glass. Light Energy Designs also make animated decorations, rope lights, novelty lights, etc. using the same energy saving LED