It’s early December, so it’s time to get the Christmas lights up on the home if you’ve not done so yet. At LawnAmerica, we’ve been installing Christmas lights for over 13 years now. As with everything else, even the Christmas light business has changed, with LED lights replacing incandescent lights for example. While the price for LED lights is much greater, the advantages of these lights makes them your best choice for Christmas lighting.
Most of our installs are now LED lights. We’ve actually ran out of supply due to demand, so we are now using some regular bulbs and lights though. The advantage of LED lights are:
- 90% less energy use and savings on electric bills.
- Safer and easier to use, with more lights able to run off each circuit.
- Much more sturdy and longer lasting.
- Less problems with lights burning out during the season leading to a poor display.
- This is one of our animated displays.
With incandescent lights, it’s important to follow these general guidelines in powering up your display:
- Run no more than 200 C9 bulbs or 3,000 mini-lights on on 15 amp circuit.
- Run no more than 75 C9 bulbs in one continuous strand.
- Connect no more than 3 X 100 mini-light strands together.
- Split your power using a 3-way plug with lights going out in three different runs to be efficient with power.
With LED lights, you can basically ignore these rules, since they pull so much less electricity. And you don’t have to worry nearly as much about breakage with LED lights.
The lights at T.U. are on of our LawnAmerica creations.
Most of our competitors still use the incandescents, since they charge such a cheap price. Yes, you get what you pay for with Christmas lights as with everything else! I know our guys are so glad to be using LED’s, since the hassles of broken bulbs, lights going out, service calls, power problems, and other issues are long gone.
There is still time to enjoy a professional installation, so contact us soon if you need more information.
And if you are doing your own lights, pay attention to ladder safety. Don’t be so concerned about being the Clark Griswald of your neighborhood at the expense of an accident.
