Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Holiday magic not free

Idaho Power provides formula to calculate power costs


Holiday lights strung on Ketchum city trees make the street aglow with cheer. Although the city doesn?t use light emitting diode, or LED lights, it hopes to by next year, said Jen Smith, city arborist. LED lights can use up to 90 percent less energy than regular bulbs. Big C-7 bulbs use between 4 and 10 watt-hours per bulb, approximately 10 times the electricity used in an hour by 0.4-watt mini-light bulbs. LEDs are more costly to buy, but use even less energy. Photo by Willy Cook

The stockings may already be hung by the chimney with care, and so may the Christmas lights, but it's never too late to assess how much energy holiday decorations consume.

Idaho Power offers a method to compute what holiday lighting, or any electrical device, costs to operate.

First, add up the watts of all the lights, inside and out. Take the sum of all the watts and divide it by 1,000. Multiply that by the number of hours you plan to operate your lights per day.

Take that answer and multiply it by the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity. For Idaho Power residential customers in Idaho, that's about 5 cents.

For example, if the total amount of watts for lights are 200 and they'll be operated for four hours a day, they'll cost about 4 cents a day (200 divided by 1,000, times 4 hours, times 5 cents equals 4 cents per day to operate).

As a general rule, bigger bulbs use more electricity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. For every hour they're on, the big (C-7) bulbs use between 4 and 10 watt-hours per bulb. That's at least 10 times the electricity used in an hour by 0.4-watt mini-light bulbs.

LED, or light emitting diode, Christmas lights are even cheaper to run, but they're a lot more expensive to buy. Depending on how long you keep them, they may save money in the long run since LED holiday lights use only a tenth as much electricity as mini-lights, at 0.04 watts per bulb, according to the DOE.

LED lights don't get hot so there's less fire danger.




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