LED Light

One of the best part of the holidays is all the lights everywhere. They are so pretty and festive, but if you’re like me you can’t help think about all the energy they’re wasting. Christie Matheson, author of Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style, has a solution.

According to her book, if you’ve decorated a tree with a string of about 300 mini-incandescent lights, you’ll use about 30 kilowatt-hours of energy (emitting about 45 pounds of extra CO2) over the holiday season.

If you use those big fat holiday lights, we’re talking more than 450 kilowatt-hours and close to 700 pounds of CO2. The mini lights are the preferable choice, and even better is a string of LED lights.

They’re available at Target, Costco and Lowe’s, and even though they cost more than incandescents (a string of 100 LEDs will run you $10-15), they last forever. OK, not forever, but 50,000 hours. And they use about 10 percent of the energy of the mini incandescents–less than 3 kilowatt-hours throughout the holidays.

Plus, they don’t get hot so your fire risk goes down.