December 8th, 2007

By John DeFore

Christmas is the season when all we know about conservation conflicts with our notions of festivity and warmth — when the guy down the block whose house boasts more colored lights than Broadway is viewed not as unconscionably wasteful but as a supplier of good cheer to the neighborhood.

One of the most painless ways we can adapt traditions to green concerns is by switching our decorative lighting from incandescents to LEDs, saving energy without requiring any change in celebrants’ expressions. While eliminating wrapping paper from gift-giving or abandoning freshly cut Christmas trees changes the look and feel of the holiday, your decision to go LED lights might not even be noticed by Yuletide guests.

The most obvious advantage of LED lights is their vastly reduced power consumption. Consumers may be skeptical of advertisers claiming a 98% reduction in energy use, but independent tests have backed up similar figures up for some sizes of lights; in other cases, LEDs have used about a quarter of the juice a comparable string of incandescents did. Even in the worst case, the savings is enormous.

I put some lights to the test myself, using a Kill-A-Watt meter to see how much power was used by 140 mini-incandescents versus 140 mini-LEDs. The savings was well over 90%; in fact, it took quite a while for the LEDs’ consumption to even register on my meter.

According to Keith Toomey, director of communications for the Lighting Research Center at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the environmental benefits stretch far beyond December’s electric bill. “Not only do they use less electricity,” Toomey says, “they last longer.” For every string of lights that hits the end of its life span (and holiday decorators know how quickly that can come), “think of the plastics — that’s going to sit around in landfills for a long time.”

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