The time has come to decorate your home with festive trinkets galore, but at what cost?
The cost of living crisis has had us all rethinking our spending and cutting corners to make our money stretch.
These tips and tricks will allow you to decorate your house to your hearts content without worrying about the electricity bill.
Firstly, we have to establish how expensive your Christmas lights are to run.
Thankfully, they’re really not that expensive compared to other light sources in your home.
Speaking to Homes & Gardens, Les Roberts of Bionic explains how you can calculate the overall cost of your Christmas tree lights.
“To find the running cost of your Christmas lights you need to know the wattage and how much your electricity costs per Kw.
“Your Christmas lights should have their wattage on the label, in the instructions, or on the box. LED lights will have a much lower wattage, so will use significantly less energy.”
“If your lights run on five watts, divide five by 1000 to convert to kilowatt-hours, giving you 0.005 kWh.
"If you want to use the lights on your Christmas tree for the evening for, say, three hours, multiply 0.005 by three to get 0.015kW (your lights will use 0.015kW in those three hours).
“If your energy costs 16 cents per kWh, multiply 16 by 0.015 and you will have the cost to run your lights, which is 24 cents for three hours.”
Calculating how much money you spend on Christmas lights will help you cut your costs drastically.
Below are some tips and tricks that will also help you curb extreme spending on Christmas lights this year.
Work out how many lights you really need
Working out how many Christmas lights you really need will help you save money, as you will avoid paying for excessive bulbs.
There is a method to figuring out how many lights you need for your tree, as it depends on the height and density of your tree.
A general rule of thumb is to have 100 lights per foot of your tree, so if your tree is measuring at 6ft, you’ll need around 600 lights minimum.
Don’t worry about doing all the maths, because Balsalm Hill offers a handy Christmas Lights Calculator to work out exactly what you’ll need.
Use newer LED lights
Older Christmas lights tend to use iridescent bulbs. Whereas updating to LED lights can save you money in the long run.
While they may be slightly more expensive to initially buy, the LED lights will save you a lot of money in the future, as they use less energy and last a lot longer.
Use solar power lights outside
This one may seem like a no-brainer, but using solar power lights outside your house will save you money.
While you may have perfectly good lights to use outside your house, it might be worth remembering that solar lights don’t rely on electricity, so you could save a pretty penny by using them this year.
The only issue with solar lights is that they typically need 6 hours of direct sunlight to charge, so make sure to leave them out during the day!
Use battery operated lights for smaller displays
Another electricity substitute, using batteries for smaller indoor and outdoor displays can help cut the cost of your electricity bill.
Using batteries around your house for Christmas decorations will save you money in the long run as well as giving you some more freedom as you won’t have to plug the lights into a power source.
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