The Ownage

• Ever get tired of, every year when you dig out your holiday lights, going through them all to figure out which sets inevitably stopped working since last year?
• What about going through dead sets, fiddling with all of the bulbs, trying to find that one bulb that is causing the problem?
• Ever been putting up lights and you step wrong and hear a *crunch*, and know that you just ruined a set?
• Ever turn on your holiday lights and see your house lights dim or pop a breaker?
• Ever had to buy or round up extension cords for the holiday lights, and figure out which outlets to use so you can spread the load around?

ME TOO! BUT NO MORE! This year I am switching to all LED lights. Here are some advantages of LED lights:

• 98% power savings! That’s right, 98%! Even if you covered your yard with LED christmas lights, they would only draw a fraction of the power that incadescent lights use.
• No heat! The LED light’s do not put off any heat, so no more worrying about the Christmas tree, your house, or the bushes catching fire.
• Waterproof. The LED lights are totally self-contained…you can literally submerge them in water with no problem.
• Crushproof. Unlike fragile glass bulbs, the LED lights are solid plastic. One of the sites that sells them has a video of a dump truck full of gravel running over a lighted string, and they came out unscathed.
• Super low power draw. You can literally plug ALL of your lights end to end, and into a SINGLE outlet! How many? How about 150 strings of lights plugged into a single outlet? No more tripped breakers and crazy extension cords!
• Long life. Since LED lights don’t get hot, they do not have filiments to expand and contract (metal fatigue), which is what kills normal lights after a time. So the LED lights last years with no problems.

But what about the “flicker effect” you get with LED lights? Apparently little known, is that there are two types of LED lights. Mostly all of the ones you would buy at places like Target, KMart, etc, are what are called “half-wave”. These basically get power at 30Hz instead of 60Hz, so your eye can see a slight flicker effect as the bulbs pulse 30 times a second. The higher quality lights are “full-wave”, which pulse at 60hz (like a florescent light), which most people do not see or notice. This all has to do with LED lights being DC power instead of AC.  (For a technical description, look here.

I know this post probably sounds like a commercial, LOL. But I wanted to share what I believe are excellent reasons for switching to LED lights. The place I buy mine from is http://www.foreverled.net/. They have many styles of lights, including ones I never even knew existed. You can even buy special bulbs to retrofit your existing light strands. They do cost more than the Kmart special $2.99 incandescent lights, but don’t forget about the 98% power savings and all the other benefits.

I think it’s worth it…if not for all the other reasons, the extra benefit of not getting aggravated dealing with broken bulbs and light sets that stop working.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 8:01 am and is filed under Holidays, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.