It’s that time of year again when the Christmas tree lights come out of storage and houses all across America are aglow with festive decorative lighting. This year with advances in LED lighting I wondered how much energy could be saved using LED decorating.

**Note: This post sparked some debate so I have edited it to include some real world numbers from our own holiday decorating last year. We used incandescent bulbs last year and I had no idea how much energy they would be using. I will be using figures for LED bulbs from www.HolidayLEDs.com for my calculations.

LED Decorating Can Equal Huge Energy Savings

I found myself asking… How much energy could we save using LED lights for decorating our house?

We have been using the Berkeley Institute of the Environment carbon footprint calculator to track our average ecological impact and our progress is shown below. When we started tracking our carbon footprint back in March 2009 we assessed that our household produced a shocking 68 tons of CO2 per year, this is equivalent to 158 barrels of oil in energy and would require managing 13 acres of forest to offset!

This was simply un-acceptable in our eyes. We purchased our current home 2 years ago, it is an older home and needed lots of upgrades to make it more energy efficient.

Our Carbon Footprint Back in March 2009 shown below…

Our Carbon Footprint in March 2009

Back in March when I saw these results I decided to really commit to reducing our household energy consumption and check our progress at the end of the year… (more…)

As I was sat at yet another red light on my way home last night I noticed that the annoying red light was alot brighter than usual, and it seemed to be made of lots of tiny lights instead of the usual single bulb… I remembered seeing some stories about new traffic lights which use light emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of power hungry incandescent bulbs and the one I saw looked liked a group of LEDs.

Once I realized that the red light stopping me from getting home was in fact a new super efficient traffic LED light system I suddenly didn’t mind staring at a red light!

I Love Traffic LED Lights - Red but Green!

This new breed traffic lights is made from groups of LEDs which are literally electric diodes that produce light! They are extremely energy efficient and have a very long life. LEDs are very small (smaller than your little finger tip) so in order to get the required brightness for a street light there have to be lots of them grouped closely together. The old incandescent traffic lights were typically 50 – 150 Watts which means they consumed alot of electricity! There are numerous advantages to using LED traffic lights including;
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Did you know that a whopping 46 percent of home energy use is actually energy loss! In other words, there is no productive energy use at all! Here are 10 simple ways of reversing this energy lose, by changing some old habit and starting some new ones! Check out this list, these are some very simple solutions to save energy and reduce carbon emissions for the planet. Some of them will even save you money!
Thanks to climatecrisis.net and The Home Energy Diet (New Society Publishers, 2005), for many of the carbon savings figures.

10 Tips to Save Energy (and Money) in Your Home

1. Each degree you turn down the heat saves 3 percent of heating costs, while each degree you raise the temperature of your air conditioner saves 3-4 percent of cooling costs. By changing the temperature by 2 degrees all year, you can save about 2,000 pounds of C02 a year.

2. Cook with a slow cooker or a toaster oven (or even a solar oven!) to reduce electrical use from kitchen appliances. For a meal that requires one hour to cook in an electric oven, and which uses 2.7 pounds of C02, a crockpot uses 0.9 pounds of C02 for seven hours, a toaster oven takes 1.3 pounds of C02 for 50 minutes, and a microwave only 0.5 pounds of C02 for 15 minutes of cooking. A solar cooker requires NO C02!

3. Switch to a laptop instead of using a desktop computer and cut three-quarters off your electrical use. Turn off the laptop at the end of the day.

4. Switch to cold water washing and save 80 percent on energy used for laundry and save an estimated $60 a year. Hang dry your clothes instead of using the dryer and save 700 pounds of C02 a year.

5. Plug anything that can be powered by a remote control or that has a power cube transformer (little black box) into a power strip, and turn it off, and/or unplug, when not in use. (Power cubes are 60-80 percent inefficient.)

6. Turn off the lights when you aren’t using them and reduce your direct lighting energy use by 45 percent. Stop using heat-producing halogen lamps (they can also be fire hazards). Install occupancy or motion sensors on outdoor lights.

7. Switch to compact fluorescent from regular incandescent bulbs and use 60 percent less energy per bulb and save 300 pounds of C02 a year.

8. Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket and save 1,000 pounds of C02 a year. Insulate your hot water pipes.

9. Use public transportation whenever possible, carpool, shop locally, and ideally switch to a hybrid or energy-efficient car (if you haven’t already).

10. Keep your tires inflated to improve gas mileage by 3 percent. Every gallon you save also saves 20 pounds of C02 emissions.

Well it isn’t exactly the most exciting way to save the planet but I decided that I trust the internet enough to handle as many of my utilities and regular bills as possible. I recently noticed that our online banking service bill pay center had small eco friendly green icons next to several of our regular utility bills. Well to cut a long story short, I signed up for the e-bill services and most of my paper bills will stop within two billing cycles!

Save Some Green While You Spend Some Green!

Granted, it may not make a huge difference right away but over several years I figure the reduction in paper products entering our household will be substantial.

So what are you waiting for? Get online today and see if you can save some green while you spend some green…