Greener Holidays: LED Lights (and Recycle Your Old Ones)
As we decorate our homes, offices, and trees with lights, it’s a good opportunity to explore another way to make Bloomfield greener by making the switch to LED holiday lights instead of the traditional incandescent lights. You’ll save up to 90% in electricity use, they’ll last at least four times as long as traditional bulbs, and because they run cool, they’re much less of a fire hazard. You can even recycle your old lights!
Let’s look at the numbers. Based on the national average cost of electricity (and Bloomfield’s is higher than the national average), it will cost $9.00 to illuminate a single Christmas tree with 5 strings of 25 lamp incandescent string lights for a 30 day holiday season. With LED string lighting, it would cost just $.90. More lights outside? More savings! LEDs also last about 10 times longer than traditional light strings, saving you the cost to replace them more frequently.
You can get LED holiday lights at Home Depot and most other places lights are sold or get them online from Amazon.com and lots of other sites. They come in large and small sizes, strings or icicles, colors or plain white (if you like white lights, you might want to get “warm white” or “soft white” to get a color similar to your old incandescents — bright white LEDs look blue-ish).
If you still have incandescent holiday lights, either the big ones or the mini-lights, and don’t want to just throw them away, you can recycle them! Just send them to HolidayLEDs.com, they’ll recycle them responsibly, and they’ll send you a coupon for 15% off anything on their site.
