Christmas Lights

2023 was the first year where I had multiple smart plugs to help schedule our Christmas Lights. This had the added bonus of keeping track of just how much electricity they were using. I'd always been interested in just how much our lights actually cost us over the month and a bit of Christmas. We have put up our decorations just before the Late Late Toy Show at the end of November and then take them down in or around the 8th of January.

We have LED string lights on the tree, a light up star for the top, battery powered net lights for the front window, battery powered candles, a light up Santa, and this year we also had an inflatable Santa. The schedules I had set were to have them come on around 4PM and then turn off around midnight. The battery powered lights had internal timers of 6 hours and I used rechargeable batteries in them all.

The inflatable Santa only stayed outside for a few days as we nearly lost him on those days that we had the wild winds. So it was put on the same smart plug as the light up Santa instead. Next year we might get it to stay outside a bit longer.

The table below shows the totals over the few months with the grand total being 9.133kWh. At the rate of 36c per kWh (my current tariff) this would have cost €3.29. December was obviously the most expensive but I was surprised at how much the LED fairy lights cost. Seemingly these string lights need a comparatively high power input to light them all up. It's probably a rare case of where the LED equivalent ends up costing as much as the old style bulbs.

Anyway, this would be interesting to see if anything changes next year.

Paddy