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| Image from Wikimedia Commons |
Next Friday will be my Husband's and my very first Halloween in our new home. We're rather excited. Apparently Halloween is a big deal in our new neighborhood. When we first heard this we made plans to buy and carve a pumpkin and bought one big sack of candy from Wal-Mart. As October wore on we saw other houses on the street get decorated and I started feeling we weren't festive enough. Then our neighbor explained that we were laughably under stocked in candy. So I bought more candy (we now have 5 giant bags), some fake spider web, and 10 sparkly plastic spiders. But something was missing, our spooky decorations could only be enjoyed during the day. We needed twinkle lights. Purple twinkle lights.
Being a Clemson alumna, I am something of a connoisseur of purple things, if I do say so myself. So I set off to all the big box stores in town to buy purple twinkle lights. I came back with several boxes of lights that could be sorted into two main categories: incandescent and LED. Have you seen the new LED twinkle lights? They are a bit funny looking; short little plastic nubbins instead of the longer blubs I was used to seeing. They were also more than twice as expensive. But were they worth the extra money? That was what I was about to find out.
The contenders
Incandescent
Target 100ct Purple mini lights $3.50 (in stores only, apparently)
Lowe's 100ct Purple holiday lights $2.98
LED
Lowe's 50ct purple Halloween lights $5.49
Home Depot 100ct purple holiday lights $10.98
First question: How many strings of lights would I need to decorate my 36ft porch?
Answer: Both incandescent strings were about 20ft long, so I'd need 2. The LED lights from Lowe's were 12ft, so I'd need 3. And the LED lights from Home Depot were 35 feet, so I'll squeak by with 1.
Second question: How much do these cost to run?
Answer: the incandescent strings were 45watts each, so 90watts for the two I'd need. The LEDs from Lowe's were 4.5watts each, so 13.5 total. And the LEDs from Home Depot were 7.2watts. So let's do some math and assume that you will run these bad boys 12hrs/day (from dusk until you leave for work) every day for 30 days and that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt hour.
For the incandescent lights that's
90
Third question: So is it actually cheaper to go with the LEDs?
Answer: Depends on time scale. Sticking with my assumption that I will run the lights for 360 hours each fall and electricity prices don't radically change, if I choose the incandescent lights I will spend $9.20 this year. If I choose the Home Depot LED lights I will spend $11.24. That's a lot closer than it initially seemed! After year 2 I will spend $12.44 or $11.50. I end up ahead on the second year! After that it's all gravy!
Fourth Question: Is there any other reasons to consider one type over the other?
Answer: YES! All this talk about electricity costs is just post-hoc justification on my part. The real reason I spent way to much time buying and returning twinkle lights (and wasting gas, thus offsetting any savings or environmental benefits of LED lights) is that the two types are completely different colors! Remember how I said I was a connoisseur of purple, well in my opinion the LEDs are a much purple-y shade of purple. Take a look at these two pictures, one is a close up of my house with LED lights (left) and the other is my neighbor's house with incandescent purple lights (right). I know the pictures are really blurry, but do you see how pink their lights look? Really the camera made mine look pinker than they are in person! Though I will confess, there is no perfect twinkle light, if you get too close to mine (within say, 4') or view the lights through glass (window or windshield) you can see the color comes from a tiny blue LED next to a tiny pink LED inside each little bulb, but from a distance, they look great!
So the winner is...Home Depot's Home Accents Holiday 100 light LED purple dome light for $10.98.
This was not a sponsored post. I kinda wish it was.
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