If you need a reason to economize as you plan a holiday light display that outshines the sun, consider these inconvenient truths:
Our holiday lights burn so bright, you can see them from space. Americans use more energy to power their holiday lights, by one estimate, than the nation of El Salvador uses for everything in a whole year. The juice that animates our 15-foot, inflatable blinking Rudolphs and our 20-foot, 1,200-bulb flagpole trees could cool 14 million refrigerators.
Many Americans – and some entire neighborhoods – are expending more energy than ever on their holiday yard displays: Staging them earlier, running them later and leaving no patch of turf unilluminated.
“People start decorating, like, right after Halloween now,” said Bianca Soriano, a spokesperson for Florida Power and Light. “If you start on November 1st, and let’s say you keep them on till New Year’s, that’s two months of extra energy.”
Want to know how much power those holiday lights use? There’s a formula for that
The average household spent an estimated $16.48 powering holiday lights in 2022, nearly two dollars more than in 2021, according to an analysis by the Today’s Homeowner website.
There are ways to predict those costs. Kiplinger, the personal finance site, offers a wonderfully geeky formula to calculate a holiday power bill:
[wattage/1000 x time in hours] x cost per kWh in cents = cost to run Christmas lights
For those who find formulas off-putting, Duke Energy provides a less…
