Planning Ahead

[Papa_Christmas]

A plan sounds like work. Christmas decorating to me is a labor of love, I wait the whole year for it to arrive.
It is very labor intensive,but fun at our house and we will do what we can do and sometime not long after Thanksgiving we will declare it finished.
Then I will pour a couple of glasses of Christmas cheer for my Good Lady Wife an myself and we will sit and enjoy our efforts until it's time to clear it all away for another season.

[wstaple]

I spent a couple of hours yesterday switching out the incandescent C9 bulbs with LEDs. I priced getting two new breakers installed to handle the strain of the lights, but buying new bulbs cost less than 1/3 of that cost.

Since I'm a Christmas nerd (my wife said she loves that about me, by the way), I tested the wattage on both incandescent and LED strings. I went from 175-181 watts per strand to 15-16 watts per strand. Huge difference! While the cost savings will be nice, the main reason I switched is because my wife couldn't dry her hair if the outside lights were on. For those of you old enough to remember the show Green Acres, it was a lot like that. So now I can basically run 12 strings of LED lights for the same wattage as 1 string of incandescent lights.

[Mistletoe]

I spent a couple of hours yesterday switching out the incandescent C9 bulbs with LEDs. I priced getting two new breakers installed to handle the strain of the lights, but buying new bulbs cost less than 1/3 of that cost.

Since I'm a Christmas nerd (my wife said she loves that about me, by the way), I tested the wattage on both incandescent and LED strings. I went from 175-181 watts per strand to 15-16 watts per strand. Huge difference! While the cost savings will be nice, the main reason I switched is because my wife couldn't dry her hair if the outside lights were on. For those of you old enough to remember the show Green Acres, it was a lot like that. So now I can basically run 12 strings of LED lights for the same wattage as 1 string of incandescent lights.

Wow, that's quite a wattage difference. Is the richness of the colors greatly diminished?

Though I see why you had to switch over, I will observe a moment of silence for the loss of the incandescents.

[Mistletoe]

A plan sounds like work. Christmas decorating to me is a labor of love, I wait the whole year for it to arrive.
It is very labor intensive,but fun at our house and we will do what we can do and sometime not long after Thanksgiving we will declare it finished.
Then I will pour a couple of glasses of Christmas cheer for my Good Lady Wife an myself and we will sit and enjoy our efforts until it's time to clear it all away for another season.

When do you start taking things down?

[Papa_Christmas]

When do you start taking things down?

It takes so long to put up and we love the decorations and the house looks so bare after it's all put away that we don't get in a big hurry to take down the inside decorations.I would say it's usually all cleared away by the end of January.

[wstaple]

Wow, that's quite a wattage difference. Is the richness of the colors greatly diminished?

Though I see why you had to switch over, I will observe a moment of silence for the loss of the incandescents.

One of the reasons I was hesitant about switching to LED was the light color. These bulbs are very warm and very similar to the incandescent lights. Hope to start getting them out later this week.

[Mistletoe]

It takes so long to put up and we love the decorations and the house looks so bare after it's all put away that we don't get in a big hurry to take down the inside decorations.I would say it's usually all cleared away by the end of January.

That's when I take down the inside decorations, too. It's so true that everything looks bare when they're gone, after all that abundant festive coziness.

[Mistletoe]

One of the reasons I was hesitant about switching to LED was the light color. These bulbs are very warm and very similar to the incandescent lights. Hope to start getting them out later this week.

Thank God for advancing technology!

[jonnybill]

Our Happy Christmas Home.

[Mistletoe]

Our neighbor has some of the new colored LED C-7's this year and they look like rich colors. I'm considering working them into my outdoor light rotation next year... The mini lights are pretty, but the C-7's are fun.

Does anyone know if the LED strands have the same problems as the mini light strands of half a strand going out periodically?