Silent Light
I’m dreaming of a Green Christmas 2.
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Silent Light
Hi folks, and welcome to Make-It-Green Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for an Earth Friendly Life. It’s that time of year again. That three month long holiday we in America call Christmas. While marketers scheme new ways to get you to buy more Christmas carol CDs, gifts for everyone we’ve ever known, and enough Christmas dinner to feed the Army National Guard, you too can be scheming new ways to make your Christmas celebration an earth-friendly one. In this episode, I’ll talk about the many options for those who want their holiday season to bring peace on earth, as well as their pocketbooks.
This week we’re going to talk about Christmas lights.
Putting Up (with) the Lights
We’ve already started digging out the bins full of those festive sparkly lights at my house. The day after Thanksgiving in my family is used not for shopping but for Christmas decorating. What better way to work off all that pie than to climb ladders, string lights, and haul out Christmas ornaments from the garage?
Invariably, of course, the strings of lights have somehow by the sheer force of entropy tangled themselves into a spaghetti-ed mess, even though you arranged them perfectly neatly and wrapped them up with zip ties the year before. And how old are all those lights? How long will it take you to find out if they all work?
If you are thinking about giving up on the strings you dig out of storage, you’re not alone. Every year, someone will get the unenviable task of unraveling, electrical troubleshooting, and wrapping the tree with lights. It’s always me, because I’m good with electronics. Oh, how I wish we could just throw these away and get new ones. “But wait, isn’t that wasteful?” I ask myself. “Why should I throw away perfectly good lights?” OK, maybe not perfectly…
Cool New Christmas Lights
As it turns out, there is a good reason to have out with the old, and in with the new. Older Christmas lights tend to take up more energy and waste more electricity as heat instead of producing light. So if you’re looking to give up on detangling and find some new bulbs, head over to your local hardware or drug store and find yourself some LED Christmas lights.
LED stands for light emitting diode, and they work because of the photoelectric effect, the same principle that governs solar cells, only backwards. In solar photo-volatic cells, sunlight (the photo part) hits the cells and causes electrons to become excited and start running around, producing electricity (the voltaic part). In an LED, the opposite happens. Electrons are excited by the electricity running through the diode and emit energy as light so they can calm down.
LEDs only emit light in one wavelength (say about 510 nanometers, which is the green light blinding you in the middle of the night at intersections these days) so white lights are a bit harder to come by. White is actually a combination of all visible light wavelengths.
However, since Christmas light are those lovely candle-yellow, or multi-colored, you have lots of options in many parts of the spectrum. LEDs are being used in hundreds of applications already, such as cycling lights, traffic lights, and portable flashlights, so they are pretty technologically mature.
Not Just for Gadget Nuts
So what is so cool about LEDs, besides the fact that they are so bright and beautiful and mono-chromatic? Why are we using them everywhere from streetlights to camping lights?
Well, compared to an incandescent bulb (which are those old school bulbs with the filament), they emit 90% less heat, and use a fourth of the electricity. They may be the last ones you ever buy, too, because they can last between 50,000 and 100,000 hours.
Plus the available styles for Christmas bulbs have exploded this year, so it’s a great time to get those nice icicle lights you’ve been eyeing. LEDs mean less money out of your pocket for your holiday decorations, less electricity demand from your home, and less fire hazard for your family’s safety.
“OK,” you say. “What’s the downside?” While incandescent bulbs burn out suddenly when the filament breaks, LEDs gradually put out less light as the diode degrades. Your lights will never be as bright as when you first plugged them in. However, most LEDs will reach 10 years of typical use before 40% of the light is gone. With LED Christmas lights, which we use only a few days a year, you many never have to buy replacement bulbs again!
It will in fact be more likely that the string will tangle beyond recovery before those bulbs die on you. So not only will you save money on electricity, you will save yourself the capitol investment of new lights every few years and keep those old strings out of the landfills.
Or you could just become an electrician, write a book called The Christmas Light Whisperer, and go on tour each holiday season making millions telling everyone how to fix their old busted light strings.
Hey, anything can happen at Christmas…
References
Too Many Lights!