The holidays have arrived and neighborhoods have begun to light up the night. Traditional incandescent lights have been illuminating homes for years and people have been untangling strands of colored and white lights at this time of year for some time. Now, consumers have another type of strand to choose from when searching for new holiday lighting: LED lights.
Solid-state lighting, or LED lights, have been in stores for a while and have been touted as the “greenest” option for lighting. But are they really more effective and better for the environment? The short answer: Yes.
The lighting programmer for the Northeast energy company National Grid explained the difference between LEDs and incandescent bulbs. “Regular light bulbs are an incandescent source and the way that regular light works is you have to excite atoms to make their electrons go to higher orbit levels and when orbits degrade, they snap back in and create light photons,” National Grid’s Tom Coughlin told IzzitGreen. “The photons in incandescent bulbs heat a filament inside the bulb and create light.”
Here’s how Coughlin said LED lights are different: “The advantage with LED lights is that they run on an electronic source. It’s a solid-state device, like the processors in yo
ur computer, and you’re running charged particles across the median that makes colors and light . . . You spend less energy making heat [in an LED bulb] and more energy producing photons needed for light.”
Not only do you conume less energy with LED lights, but you spend less money to operate them. ”. . . [I]f a Christmas tree decorated with incandescent lights in a house was on for 20 hours in one month, it would cost a household $4.50,” Coughlin said. “If that same family used LEDs on the same tree and [left it on] for the same amount of time” it’d cost $1.12.
If you’re comparing upfront costs of LEDs vs incandescent bulbs, however, LEDs cost double the price of incandescent bulbs for almost an equivalent light display. For example, on Home Depot’s web site, a GE brand 23 3/4-foot strand with 100 miniature incandescent lights costs $4.48, while Home Depot offers a Martha Stewart brand 16-foot strand with 50 LED lights for $9.97 (though they were recently marked down for sale at $7.98).
How do these LED lights look? LED lights have been criticized for their lack of brightness and bluish color. Consumer Reports rated the incandescent bulbs as five to six times brighter than LEDs. The trade-off for LEDs’ lack of brightness and color is longevity because they’ll last approximately 10 times longer than traditional incandescent lights. “A regular incandescent bulb will last for about 3,000 hours,” Coughlin said. “An LED light will last for anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 hours.”
“LEDs are better for the environment; run much cooler, reducing fire risk; should last longer, and could save money eventually,” Consumer Reports concluded. “But it’s apt to take more than one holiday season for the savings to kick in, and you might not realize any savings if payback takes more than three, 90-day seasons.”
Someone who’s looking to go really green this holiday season could look to further reduce energy costs by purchasing solar-powered LED strands. These lights costs more than other LED strands, but don’t require any electricity. These LED strands use similar technology to outdoor light sets for walkways and driveways, getting power from the sun to light and decorate a home.
The solar-powered sets cost more than either a regular LED strand or an incandescent strand. Home Depot is selling a 33-foot strand of solar-powered Sylvania brand LED lights with 100 bulbs for around $22 (they’re on sale now at $17.58). They are rated to last as long as a regular set of LED lights, but for the price of the strands, it will take many years to make up for the minimum cost that a set of powered LEDs will cost a household.
LEDs’ longevity in the long run will help with waste and landfills. If an LED light strand lasts 10 times longer than an incandescent strand on average, then people won’t toss out as many into the garbage and landfills won’t fill up with glass and bulbs and plastic strands. “For Christmas lights that are on occasionally, [LED lights] could be family heirlooms for your grandchildren,” Coughlin said.
By Kevin Koczwara
Image credit: Amazon.com.
Unless you live in a climate where you don’t heat your house you are not going to save any energy. The fallacy with the above is failure to consider the whole system (the house). During the heating season heat is lost to the outside where the rate of heat loss is determined by the difference in temperature (between the inside and outside) and the insulation value (second law of thermodynamics). To maintain the internal temperature the heat lost to the outside has to be replaced at the same rate that it is lost to the outside. While the heating system supplies the bulk of that energy everything in your house that consumes energy contributes to the energy needed to maintain the internal temperature. The energy that your appliances and light bulbs consume ultimately ends up as ‘waste’ heat. That ‘waste’ heat is energy that the heating system doesn’t have to supply (first law of thermodynamics).