LED holiday lights have slowly been filling up the shelves over the few years. Many of you may have already made the switch to the energy saving Christmas staple. LED lights cost more than conventional holiday lights, but they're touted as saving you money on your energy bill and as being more environmentally friendly. 

How much energy & money exactly are you saving by making the switch to LED?  

According to MyMoneyBlog, you can easily figure out how much energy and money you save with your LED's. You can look on the box of lights to see how much energy they use. A regular box of incandescent lights use 40.8 watts per 100 light strand (0.0408 kW). A 100-strand of LED's uses 8 watts (0.008 kW). In California, the average retail price of electricity is 15.73 cents per kilowatt hour. 

In my house we will have our Christmas tree up with lights for about 2 weeks, with the lights on about 6 hours a night, + about 8 more hours on Christmas day since we leave them on all day and into the evening. So that's (6x14)+8=92 hours. Let's round this number to an even 100 hours of lights-on time. 

LED Lights 0.008 kW x $0.16 per kWh x 100 hours = $0.13 total energy cost
Regular Lights 0.0408 kW x $0.16 per kWh x 100 hours = $0.65 total energy cost

This is not big savings! Even if you're using more than one string of lights, you're not saving the world by switching to LED's. And you're not making your money back with the higher cost of LED's. Our conclusion is to re-use those conventional lights until you wear them out, and save them from going to the landfill. The price of LED lights has been coming down so by the time you need new lights, it could be economically feasible. 

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