Green is certainly a traditional Christmas color. Have you considered going all green with your Christmas lights this year? Not the color green, but the earth-healing, environment-friendly ‘green.’
That kind of green has become very popular of late. And as it turns out, you can very easily incorporate that kind of green with your traditional green-colored Christmas lights – and all other colors, too.
You can go all green with your Christmas lights by switching from the old-fashioned incandescent lights to the new-fangled LED lights.
Just What is an ‘LED’ Light?
Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb has served us well for most of a century and a half. But that’s a long time for any type of technology to remain dominant, and it appears that the incandescent bulb has just about had its day as the go-to technology for light bulbs.
LED lights are a relatively new type of light bulb that represents a radical departure from the old style incandescent lights.
Incandescent bulbs generate light by running an electrical current through a filament, setting the filament aglow with the energy from the current. But LEDs generate light in a radically different manner.
The acronym ‘LED’ is short for Light Emitting Diode. Diodes are semiconductor devices that emit light when excited by an electrical current. This method of generating light is far more efficient than the old-fashioned method of ‘burning’ a filament with an electrical current.
How much more efficient are LEDs? The difference in the amount of energy consumed between LEDs and incandescents is rather dramatic.
In terms of Christmas lights, if you replace your incandescents with LEDs, you can expect to consume up to 90% less energy. (And that will help you hang on to more of that ‘green’ in your bank account!)
Some Fringe Benefits to Go Along With the Green…
LED lights are exploding in popularity because of their energy-efficiency. But LEDs also offer some nice fringe benefits to go along with the energy savings, including:
- Durability. LED bulbs are extremely long lasting, with rated service lives of anywhere from 25,000 to 75,000 hours. And that durability could actually be considered another ‘green’ benefit of LEDs. Because within the lifespan of every LED bulb that you use, you’d likely go through dozens of incandescent bulbs. So all the environmental costs of those incandescents – the manufacturing, shipping, disposal, etc. – are eliminated by replacing those many incandescent bulbs with a single LED bulb.
- True colors. All of your multicolored incandescent Christmas lights? They’re frauds in a sense. Because at the heart of each of those lights is a filament that glows with the natural color of the electricity burn on the filament. The different colors are created by ‘dyeing’ that whitish glow by covering it with a colored bulb.
But LED bulbs generate true colors. A green LED bulb generates a true green color: the green wavelength on the color spectrum. The same is true for red, and blue, and all other colors. Does it really make a difference? Do a side-by-side comparison between LED lights and incandescents, and you’ll agree that it makes a striking difference.
- LEDs are cool. Yes, LEDs are way cool. But they’re another kind of cool, too – cool to the touch. LED bulbs simply don’t generate lots of heat like incandescent bulbs. With LED Christmas lights you’ll have no worries about kids, plants, pets, or you being burned by blistering-hot bulbs.
You Don’t Have to Switch to LEDs, But…
As you likely know, the government is phasing out the use of incandescent lights for lots of purposes. But in its magnanimous beneficence, the government has decreed that incandescent lights may continue to be used for Christmas lighting.
So the choice of switching to LEDs for your Christmas lighting is entirely up to you. You can stick to your old incandescents, or switch to ‘green’ LEDs. It’s really not a difficult decision, is it?