How Much Does it Cost to Light Christmas Lights?

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John's Christmas tree uses 269 watts, which, again is about one-fourth of a kilowatt. That much electricity costs 3¢ per hour.

John's stair railing string of lights use 26 watts.

And his desktop mini-trees use 17 watts each.

For a grand total, John's indoor and outdoor decorations use 389 watts, which costs less than 5¢ per hour.

This house, with scores of white snowflakes lit with mini-lights, uses 202 watts. That's about a fifth of a kilwatt, or about 2¢ per hour

A two-story house with simple, tasteful icicle lights. I think this setup is the arrangement that many people perfer for their home. It has a ton of lights, is flawless and beautiful. On the porch, there is a wire dog, outlined in mini-lgihts.

The icicle lights use 430 watts, the dog uses 112 watts. Combined, this house uses electricity at a clip of 6¢ per hour.

The lights below are blue LED icicle lights. There are a staggering number of bulbs. I counted 9 strings of lights.

Without getting permission, I unplugged them for a moment and connected my Kill-a-watt meter.
LED bulbs use just a speck of electricity. This gigantic span of blue lights, probably 2,000 lights, use just 77 watts, and cost just 1¢ per hour to power.

The Wests go all-out with their Christmas lights. They drape icicles down every eave of their two-story home, and run strands of white lights all around the lines of the roof. I think this is what most people imagine when they imagine an abundant amount of lights on their dream house.

This is probably the most lights you can have on your house without having strangers stop to take photos. They are all incandescent mini-lights and use a total of 724 watts. That's about 1 horsepower in energy use, which costs about 9¢ per hour.

In the West's neighborhood is another brightly lit house, Aimee's house. Her christmas lights supplimental fuse box has eight outlets. It is literally an octopus of power cords.

Aimee's house is decorated with tons of lights, and features a small army of motorized elf animations. Aimee is a super-decorator, with every element of the yard illuminated like the Main Street Electric Parade.

This house uses, in total, 2,367 watts. Thats 2.3 kilowatt hours! That's a generous portion of electricity, and she is keenly aware of when the show is on and shuts it off at 11pm. It uses 28¢ per hour.