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LED Christmas Tree LightsThe old scenario of temperamental Christmas tree lights is now over with the prominent entry onto the market of LED lights tree lights. They're dazzlingly white, or blue, or green or red, and what's more, they happen to use less energy. However, be warned. The saving you'll
make personally over the Christmas period will most likely be less than
a nice glass of mulled wine. If the nation switched over to LED, it would
be quite a different story! |
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LED Christmas Tree LightsWhere would we be without Christmas tree lights draped over our tree
in the corner, and increasingly all over our garden bushes, trees and
roofs? Well if we all switched to LED lights instead of the old filament
bulb garlands, we’d be much better off as a nation. LED stands for light-emitting diode. The main difference from our point of view as consumers is that light is not created in the same way. Old-style bulbs run electricity through a fine wire (filament) which whilst producing light, also produces a large amount of heat. This is essentially why these lightbulbs waste energy, because they use the energy to produce both heat and light. Grossly speaking, LEDs work by having electricity flow over a semiconductor, in such a way as to produce light energy (photons). They do this without producing any heat. This means that less total energy is required to give out the same amount of light. Click here for more info on how LEDs work. So typically, whilst a string of traditional Christmas tree lights might consume around 40 watts altogether, 80 LED lights typically only use about 6 watts. If you have your Christmas tree lights on for 30 days, and for maybe
8 hours per day, that’s 240 hours. Using old-style bulbs, that will
generate 9600 watt hours, or 9.6 KWh. Agreed, it hardly breaks the bank, but if you were using LEDs, it would use only 1.44 KWh, and cost you only 13p for the whole of the Christmas period!!! So, that’s arguably a saving you could make of 73p. Multiply that by 22 million households (not including businesses, and public spaces), and allowing only one set of lights per household (which is getting increasingly rare!), then you’re looking at a saving of just over £16 million pounds. More importantly though, by everyone switching to LED Christmas tree lights, the national power requirement in the UK at Christmas would drop by 8.16 KWh x 22 million households = 180 million Kwh. These 180 Megawatts, if generated from coal-fired power stations, will produce approximately 180 000 tonnes of CO2, all of which, theoretically at least, could be avoided! On the other hand, what cost to send 22 million sets of old Christmas tree lights to landfill and what cost to bring in 22 million new sets to the UK from overseas, not to mention CO2 and other raw materials used in their production? Not easy, is it? Happy Christmas from Green Nouse!
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