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Old 12-03-10, 02:01 AM   #1
mathewrobert
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Post Save Energy While Using Holiday Lights

We pay more money on electricity bills,heating,cooling bills. Now a days various energy efficient appliances are available which use solar power as a source.
One of the major consumers of electricity during the holiday season is holiday lights that are used to decorate the house and the Christmas tree.

So,how we reduce our holiday light expenditure?
A solution to this is to opt for newer miniature lights. These bulbs use 70 percent less energy-consuming as compared to traditional strings of bulbs. For more luminance, look at 5-Watt bulbs as they are more economical than the 7-Watt varieties even though initially a little more expensive.

How to save energy in energy saving LEDs?

Make use of a timer to switch off the lights automatically. This is especially true for all lights that are strung outside the house. When selecting a timer, check to see that it can handle the total wattage of bulbs on the string.

There are many solutions available on energy efficient holiday lighting.For more tips on energy saving visit our website.

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Old 12-03-10, 08:25 AM   #2
Ryland
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I was really impressed to see that for about $10 you can get a light sensing timer, turns on at dark and turns off after a set amount of time (2, 4, 6, 8, hours, or off at dawn), seem like it would take care of the problem that alot of people seem to have with their lights being left on all day.
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Old 12-04-10, 07:23 PM   #3
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I posted about this somewhere on here last year. I tested LED lights and an outside timer against just LED lights with my kill-a-watt. It turned out that leaving the lights on all night and unplugging them in the morning used less electricity than using the timer. IIRC, the lights used 7 watts and the timer used 5 watts.

Which brings to mind an interesting question. How much energy does a kill-a-watt use?
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Old 12-04-10, 08:53 PM   #4
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I plug my christmas lights into plugs that screw into the outside lights and then the light goes in the bottom. So at dark I just flip the switch and then around 9:00 I turn them back off. Quick and easy. With the new LED's power usage of the lights is nothing. The older rope lights use a bit more but I don't worry much about it.
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Old 12-04-10, 09:15 PM   #5
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I'm glad to see our anti-spam parsers are up and running. Let's ban this guy, but keep the thread, as it seems to have stimulated some good discussion.

How much energy does a KaW use? Very little. If I had two, I'd plug one into the other, but I bet the draw of a KaW is too small for it to measure. Anybody with a DVOM want to test it out?

What I've always been disappointed in is how much energy an electric timer uses. It's so much power that, in many cases, it doesn't make sense to use a timer at all.

Last edited by RobertSmalls; 12-04-10 at 09:18 PM..
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Old 12-06-10, 12:05 AM   #6
Ryland
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The kill-a-watt uses less then one watt, I checked it a while back when I was checking my cell phone charger because the charger wasn't showing up on the kill-a-watt so I hooked it up to my fluke meter, if I remember correctly the kill-a-watt is giving a reading of what it uses plus whatever is plugged in to it, try leaving it plugged in without a load for a week to see what it logs, i think its a quarter to a half watt.

Now back to the topic!

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