How much does that cost?

[AAH]

It's the business end of blinky season and I'd imagine that most of you have heard "wow. how much does your electricity bill go up". Most find it very hard to believe that running a couple kilowatts of lights can cost next to nothing. As proof of this I'm planning on recording my actual power usage from switch on to switch off tonight and in a weeks time when the lights aren't in use record my usage for the same period. If anyone feels like doing the same to show how little blink lights use then try to make sure things that aren't running during your show like spa baths, pool filters or air conditioners aren't running again during the time that you record the non-blinky usage. Without recording my usage yet I'd guess that over the 4 hours that my show will be running tonight with close to 3kW of lights when they are all on I would guess that I'd use about 0.7kWhr which will be likely to cost me about 21 cents for peak power usage. As I get off peak power on the weekends it will cost me about 5 cents tonight
Even if all my lights were on 100% of the time they'd barely cost $100 to run for the month of December. That's about 1/2 the cost of a controller, the cost of a few lights from China and about 1% of what 1 wow is worth.

 

[Mike]

I will be in this too
Will log it from 7pm till 11pm

 

[David_AVD]

In last week's paper, some people were bleating about how increased energy costs had caused the demise of their displays.

Mind you, their calculations were a complete fabrication, with a quoted run time of 12 hours a night for 6 weeks!

 

[Superman]

Rhonda came into the my dungeon 2 days ago with the power bill and I quickly hid under the desk,But to my surprise it was $20 cheaper. Must be because i unscrewed the heater Lamp in the kids bathroom because it's the middle of Summer.

 

[fasteddy]

Reality is if your worried about the power bill then this isnt the hobby for you. Im actually using 2 less power circuits compared to what i used in 2009 as i was all incandescents. The power usage is really not much at all

 

[Benslights]

How Much Does a Smile on a Kids face cost? i think it is priceless. when i was a kid all the streets in our area were covered with lights and i loved it. Now i want to have the same for my Kids. as you are all saying the little extra on the power bill is the cheap part of the Christmas light display.