**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?

Calculating LED Decorating Savings:
Lets assume the incandescent bulbs use about 6 watts per bulb, the LED replacement bulbs which will allow reuse of all the cabling can run at just less than 1 watt per bulb;

Quote from HolidayLEDs.com: Both the C7 and C9 retrofit bulbs use only .96 watts per bulb and will last for 50,000 hours or more. Our retrofit replacement bulbs can be used with any standard C7 or C9 socket wire.

Now lets also assume the lights are lit up from 8PM till midnight, i.e. 4 hours of use each night.
Now lets assume the cost of electricity is $0.10 per kilowatt hour.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_gray/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Let's assume 1000 bulbs to decorate a typical roofline

In my original post I quoted 1000 bulbs to light up the typical roofline, after some of the comments we received I went out and counted the number of bulbs we used to line our house last season, our home is 2600 sq ft and we used approx 400 bulbs… We can start our energy calculations from there;

Energy Used and Cost for Incadescent Lights:
400 x 6 watts = 2400 watts or 2.4 kilowatts. This equals 9.6 kilo watt hours which would cost $0.96 per night of illumination. (This is much less than I had originally quoted and is much more realistic for the typical home)
Let’s say the lights are lit for 30 nights over the holidays, that would be a total energy usage of 288 kilo watt hours at a total cost of $28.80 in electricity for a month.

Energy Used and Cost for C9 size Screw in Replacement LED Lights:
400 x 1 watt = 400 watts or 0.4 kilowatt. This equals 1.6 kilo watt hours which would cost $0.16 per night of illumination!
Let’s say the lights are lit for 30 nights over the holidays, that would be a total energy usage of 48 kilo watt hours at a total cost of $4.80 in electricity for a month.

I was amazed, the grand total using LED lights on a house in place of incandescent bulbs for the above example would realize a saving of $24.00 for the month of December.

The savings would be even bigger for larger homes, imagine how much you could save if you lived in a castle! The picture below is of an energy efficient sleeping beauty castle which Disney has decorated completely with energy efficient LED lights.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masteryofmaps/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

The Savings Can Be Huge Especially for Larger Homes

LED bulbs save so much energy, they could save you around 60 kilowatts for a typical holiday season of illumination!

To put this in perspective, the 60 kilowatt saving (240 kilowatt hours over the 30 days) would be the energy produced by burning approximately 7 gallons of gasoline. So with the energy you save using LEDs over a single holiday period you could drive a 50 mpg Prius 350 miles!
So this holiday season, if you walk around a local parade of lights, make sure you give extra praise to families who have invested in LED decorations, they’re saving energy and the planet.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who commented on this post, it made me take a hard look at my calculations and the above post reflects multiple corrections!

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…

Here are the steps we have taken so far in 2009 to reduce our average ecological impact;

1. When we first bought the house we immediately replaced all of the old incandescent bulbs in the house with  new high efficiency compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs and extremely efficient LED bulbs.
   • Read more about our lighting upgrades here;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/04/12/led-flood-light-a-cool-find-for-energy-savings/
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2. Purchasing recycled materials such as bath tissue and kitchen paper all made from recycled post consumer content is something we have done for a long time but we also switched to using biodegradable trash bags for all of our garbage disposal.
   • Check out our favorite green trash bags here;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/03/22/go-green-biodegradable-kitchen-bags-making-our-trash-greener/
   • 
3. The next big upgrade for us was to replace all of the outdoor lighting with two stage security lights, the new lights run at low power until motion is detected then they switch to high output for a minute or two if motion is detected.
   • 
4. Here in Texas the sprinkler system is a very important part of keeping the yard looking good and maintaining constant moisture in the clay soil. We upgraded our entire sprinkler system to add more efficient zoning as well as a rain and freeze detector. The system knows if it has rained and prevents the system from running for 48 hrs after a good rainfall. This saves lots of water, the system also shuts off when the temperature drops below freezing.
   • 
5. The addition of a compost bin outdoors has helped us greatly reduce the amount of trash we have collected, all of our fruit and vegetable waste goes into the compost bin and we are looking forward to the rich compost in spring 2010.
   • View our compost bin install here;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/07/07/home-compost-bin-a-self-assembled-solution/
   • 
6. The next change was forced upon us! Our antiquated air conditioning system finally broke down and our home was over 100 deg F for several days, we quickly arranged to get a completely new system installed and we noticed an immediate drop in our electricity bill.
   • Check out the air conditioning system upgrades here;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/07/19/our-upgraded-cooling-systems/

   • 
7. I finally purchased a new truck which both increased my miles per gallon and decreased my monthly bills!
   • You can read more about my new vehicle purchase and my green dilemma surrounding it;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/07/28/green-truck-maybe-just-green-thinking/
   • 
8. Our clothes dryer also broke and it gave us another opportunity to upgrade, we purchased an energy star front loading washer and dryer and we hope to see large savings in both water and electricity consumption.
   • Our new washer and dryer should save us water and energy;
   • http://www.oureverydayearth.com/2009/11/15/upgrading-to-a-high-efficiency-washer-and-dryer/

   • 

     Our New High Efficiency Washer and Dryer Installed

9. The most recent change we have made is a new energy star fridge freezer which will again help us cut down on our electricity consumption.

So with all of the above changes we implemented what impact did it have? I repeated the impact assessment with the Berkeley Institute of the Environment eco-calculator and here are the results;

Our Current Carbon Footprint is shown below…

Our Improved Carbon Footprint - Still A Long Way to Go!

As you can see, we greatly reduced out housing impact but we’re still not below the U.S. average which got me thinking;

As a family, we’re still consuming too much energy, but we’ve made significant changes and our carbon footprint is rapidly reducing – We’re looking forward to a much greener 2010!

Our plans for next year include upgrading our dishwasher and the other remaining appliances to energy star rated, we also want to improve our homes insulation and install radiant barrier in our attic spaces to reduce heating and cooling energy consumption.

What are your plans for 2010? Let us know by leaving a comment today…

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;

• LEDs are brighter and can be seen in bright sunlight as well as foggy conditions and through heavy rain.
• LEDs don’t have to be replaced as often as the old incandescent or halogen style bulbs.
• LEDs use far less energy saving big cities lots of electricity and money!

How to Spot an LED Traffic Light

So how much electricity does a new LED traffic light system save?
In a traffic light group (normally three lights) one of them is always on, 24 hours a day, 7 days week! The old 100 watt incandescent bulbs used 2.4 kilowatt-hours per day. Lets assume power costs 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, this means that one traffic signal costs about 24 cents a day to operate, or about $87 per year. There are perhaps eight signals per intersection, so that’s almost $700 per year to supply traffic lights to a single intersection!
LED bulbs might consume 15 or 20 watts instead of 100 so a big city can easily save a million dollars a year by replacing all of the bulbs with LED units.

So next time you are driving home and get caught at a red light, take a look and see whether it is made of lots of tiny red (but green) LED lights and give your city a virtual pat on the back for saving money and more importantly, energy!

If you want to learn more about LED traffic lights check out this “enlightening” video!

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.

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…