I've got a bright Idea for the holidays and it's spelled LED

I spoke about putting my LED lights on my tree. It's been brought to my attention that some people might not know why I chose them over conventional Christmas Lights. I will also talk about incandescent lights (conventional bulbs) vs CFL's (Compact Fluorescent Lights) vs LED (Light Emitting Diodes) a bit.

There are many reasons to choose LED lights over conventional Christmas lights. LED light are much cheaper to burn, they are not fragile and can withstand bumping and jarring, they do not get hot so less fire hazards and can withstand a lot of weather conditions like humidity and extreme cold specifically and they will last approximately 50,000 hours. That's an amazing 33 times longer than conventional Christmas lights!!! Their price has really come down this year so your initial investment is much lower now. Still take caution not to injure the wiring IE stapling it, closing it in a door for instance.

The energy that it takes to light an LED light is almost solely to make light not heat. An incredible amount of energy that an Incandescent light makes goes to heat instead of light. That's what makes it so inefficient and so hot when its on. Like we would all fill our houses with incandescent light bulbs to heat it. Kind of like an Easy Bake Oven. We have furnaces and heat pumps to heat our houses our light bulbs are just supposed to light our houses. I can't believe I ever tried to bake a cake with a light bulb.

Another point to make is that LED lights do not contain Mercury unlike their competition CFL's. They are supposed be making a new kind of CFL without Mercury but I haven't seen it yet just a lot of programs to collect burned out CFL's at places like Home Depot where they dispose of them properly. It also unnerves me that all CFL's are made in India and China what's up with that?

I am surprised that it's estimated that 90% of households still use incandescent light bulbs. Given the average house has about 30 light bulbs the average cost of running those incandescent bulbs is $330.00 per year versus $77 dollars a year for CFL's. That's a huge savings and in this economy the savings is what counts. I switched over to CFL's as my bulbs burned out so it wasn't so expensive. They were pretty expensive when I switched over almost $8 now they average $2 a piece. So if you consider that the average life span for a CFL is 8,000 hours, an incandescent bulb lasts about 1,500 hours and the LED's lifespan is 50,000 hours and if used in the whole house (30 bulbs) would cost about 33.00 a year to run you can imagine how much you would save. So even if you just switch over to LED Christmas lights you could save a bundle especially if you are a deck the halls with boughs of lit up holly kind of person.

I think too many people think being environmental is cost prohibitive and folks don't realize that being green can save you a lot of money.

So here's a jumping off point for you. You can just switch over to LED Christmas lights. Maybe just replace the light in a hard to reach or long burning location since CFL's last about 10 times longer than conventional bulbs. It's simple. You can do it yourself at your own pace in your own time or switch them all at once and assume the savings immediately. You can do this.

Check this website for a side by side comparison regarding light bulbs:http://www.designrecycleinc.com/led%20comp%20chart.html