Brightening your home with lights and decorations is the only way to make it look truly magical at Christmas. But with energy costs reaching a record high this year, many people are understandably reluctant to give their home the usual festive glow.
What they may not realise is that most lights nowadays are illuminated by LEDs rather than traditional incandescent bulbs. As a result, they’re surprisingly inexpensive to run.
In fact, the cost of powering our largest Christmas light is just £0.0044 an hour. That’s less than half a penny! What’s more, if you were to leave it on for 6 hours a night for the whole of December, it would set you back just £0.82. Pretty impressive, right?
Also, there’s no need to worry about using the flash setting on your Christmas lights. Although you might think they use up more energy when they’re flashing, they actually use up less.
LED Bulbs vs Incandescent Bulbs
The amount of energy a bulb uses depends on its wattage. Put simply, the higher the wattage, the more energy it consumes. LED bulbs are considerably cheaper to run than traditional incandescent bulbs because they consume up to ten times less energy.
For example, whilst a 100W incandescent bulb will consume up to £0.045 (4.5p) of energy an hour, an equivalent 10W LED bulb will use up just £0.0045 (less than half a penny). Because the LEDs used in our lights are small, they use up even less energy. Less than 0.1W per bulb!
Running Cost of Christmas Lights
If you’re still reluctant to go all out this Christmas, we’ve hand-picked a selection of our lights to highlight how cheap they are to run. Although we haven’t selected every light, we’ve chosen lights that contain different numbers of LEDs. Hopefully, this will give you a clearer idea of how much it costs to power other Christmas lights in our collection.
What's more, we’ve highlighted the cost of powering our Christmas lights for an hour, so you can easily calculate the running cost for the number of hours you leave them on. Also, assuming you leave your lights on for 6 hours a night, we’ve calculated the cost of powering our lights for the entire month of December – a total of 31 nights.
We’ve used the October Energy Price Cap to calculate the cost of powering our lights. This is measured in kilowatts per hour (kWh) and equates to 34p.
