Thanks to all of you that spared us the grievous annoyance of xmas lights before Thanksgiving. An additional thanks to all of you forgoing lights all together because you can't fathom tremendous waste of energy.

Sorry to be a naysayer... but just stop and think of all that energy going nowhere.

FWIW, The LED lights use less energy, and the 'bulbs' will likely last longer than the wires that connect them... Haven't done the payback analysis, but they should at least reduce your energy usage.

Maybe we need one of those "Leave the lights out, and save a Soldier" posters?

Anyone who honestly believes hanging lights to cheer up the darkest season of the year is "a waste" and that we're all better off sitting home alone being as miserable as they are should probably kill themselves now, to avoid the inevitable pain and disappointment of seeing the rest of the world enjoy a holiday.

Sheesh, sveden. Your comment caught me off-guard - "energy going nowhere." How can I possibly enjoy Christmas now when all we're doing is celebrating one particular religion's holiday with colorful PAPER (gasp!) and trees which have been CUT DOWN (horrors!) and lights which are meant to be LEFT ON during the night (egads!) and perhaps even the BURNING of a yule log (*shudder*) and caroling around the neighborhood which expels CO2 GAS en masse with every harmonized STANZA (say it ain't so!).

I mean, really. We all ought to sit in our basements with the lights off and the heat down while we eat corn flakes with soy milk - sort of a pantomime performance of "Silent Night." All except for the corn flakes. Those suckers are crunchy.

Apparently, celebrating serves no purpose for the human spirit and is therefore simply energy going nowhere. This would, of course, imply that one believes in such a thing as the human spirit.

I bought the COSTCO LED lights for energy savings and they are great in that regard. However, the frequency of the LED is 60HZ, which means average eyes pick up a flicker effect, 75 to 85HZ would be less noticeable (I know it is geeky sounding but, I just want to point out that the flicker you may have noticed can be fixed.)

So, I am only using the LED lights outside. Indoors the flicker would trigger epileptic fits in small children. Hope they fix this someday.

As for they wasted energy talk, if you set up your outdoor Christmas lights right, you can turn off some of your regular outdoor light to offset the energy usage.

I find lots of places where the evil moneygrubber syndicate has lots of lights stashed. maybe it's just the company I keep. but the Home Despot is sitting on a pile of lights, Chinese lead filament types and arsenic-doped silicon LED both. Menards has a ton. Beisswengers has pegboards full of lights in sacks. your local botique, the Ground Zero stores suitably marked for pilots with bad eyesight, has lights.

at Costco, you bring your wallet to buy stuff and your cube truck to haul the pallets out. elsewhere, you bring your cube truck to carry pallets of money, and take your stuff out in a bag. your choice.

I got the lights up two weeks ago... the main batch. due to horrific colds, we are putzing along with the little accessories, and no trees up yet outside or in.

I've about given up fixing these imported light junkers, because the bad bulbs you can find and fix have given way to bad jumper wires between sockets you have no hope of divining. the "wire" in these wires is so thin and spooky you can't find it with a metal detector, or even a chemistry set. when something fails out on half a string (or worse,) and it's not a fuse or not fixed with a wiggle, I'm dumping them now.

besides, the plastic is full of lead in the things, it's on the label now, and every time you touch 'em, you get dumber. before long, I'll be so hopeless I'll be running for office.

"Darkness was cheap-- and Scrooge liked it."

Christmas lights do serve the purpose of making people cheerful, which generally leads towards a nicer existence for everyone.

This was always a topic in Norway, where people shoot off firecrackers on New Year's Eve. Every year, there would be an editorial about how wasteful it was and how the money private citizens spent on fireworks could have gone to the elderly and sick (who statistically have more disposable income than young healthy people with children, etc in Norway). Never mentioning that these were some of the very few public and totally free sources of pleasure available to everyone with a window or the ability to crawl outside.

I suspect that if everyone reused carboard mailing boxes, bubble wrap, and packing peanuts we could make up for the waste of Christmas light energy.

Just because I think xmas lights and xmas in general is a wasteful stupid holiday doesn't mean you have to cry. If you believe in something than say so. Don't go crying to me about this and that and completely ignore my point. The point being that it *is* wasteful. There's nothing you can say to dispute that.

Does it cheer some people up? I believe it does. Just not me. But this is coming from a guy who loves winter and is outside a lot in it. I don't sit at home on my ass watching TV because its "dark and cold" outside.

Sveden, I could dispute what you're saying with one simple phrase:

It's not wasteful when it serves a purpose.

What you're not agreeing with is the purpose - the celebration of Christmas. That's a shame.

Obviously, we could argue in circles about "who is responsible for defining 'purpose,'" but I fear I would just be wasting words and you wouldn't appreciate that.

and whether it's wasted in twinkle lights, but that line about the Vibrating Chair Department was freakin' hilarious!

Changing the flicker frequency would involve actually building some sort of switching mode power supply, which would cost more money - seems unlikely to me.

BTW, the old incandesent ones also flickered at 60hz (as do flourescents), because that's the frequency of the AC delivered to your house. You may not notice it as much, but it's there just the same.

I haven't heard of any epileptic fits triggered by LED Christmas lights...

Thanks for catching me on my broad humour regarding flickering and epileptic seizures, kind of a South Park and Pokemon joke.

Yes, they are using direct current with no transformer that leads to the noticible flicker.

BTW, the old incandesent ones also flickered at 60hz (as do flourescents), because that's the frequency of the AC delivered to your house. You may not notice it as much, but it's there just the same.

The difference in incandescent lights is that the bulb filament does not immediately cool off, and does not instantly stop emitting light. LEDs start and stop almost instantly.

Apropos of that, when I was a kid we spent a night in Niagara Falls, Canada. In those days (just after the Jurassic period) the part of town we stayed in was served by an ancient generator operating at, I think, 25 Hz. You could really see those lights flicker.

Just because I think xmas lights and xmas in general is a wasteful stupid holiday doesn't mean you have to cry.

They're not crying. They think you're ignorant and intolerant but they are more polite than you are.

Thank you.

is now illuminated for the Holidays, both inside and out, with LEDs. The outside ones, I believe, need to be doubled up, as they are small, but still quite bright. The inside ones on the tree are C6 size, and they light up the tree brilliantly, I am very pleased with them. I just wish that the Westinghouse ones on the tree and outside, were like the Federal ones on my truck, with 24 flash patterns.

Hyper Costly? Costco had strings of 100 LED lights for $10 each. I bought three.

Thanks, anthrid, for reminding me of that wonderful line from "A Christmas Carol" - I am going to go re-read it right now!

I'm not an expert in holiday lighting but I've got a fair number of years working on various electronic projects involving LEDs, and this flicker has me confused. I'm sure it's real, and it sounds very annoying, but since LEDs run on direct current I'm not sure how they can be picking up the 60 Hz flicker from the house mains. They current has to be converted to DC through a rectifier, and even without a smoothing capacitor the flicker would become 120Hz as the "return" negative current was moved to positive.

Does anything else in your house flicker? I would bet you've either got a bad power supply on your new bulbs or some weird power issues.

Best of luck, and keep us posted! I want to try some LED lights this year, but not if they're going to be all flickery...

If you string the Christmas lights indoors, they heat the house every bit as efficiently as eletric resistive heat from the furnace.

In fact, if you heat electrically with resistive heat, you can leave on the TV, the lights, and anything electrical without it costing you a penny. Each watt
consumed conspicuously in such a manner simply reduces the furnace's usage by the very same watt.

The effect is the opposite in air conditioning season, so cut back on the Independence Day lights.

If I'm guessing right, they don't bother with capacitors or rectifiers. Being diodes, LEDs are rectifiers in their own right. Put enough of them in series, and you can run them fat, dumb, and happy off a wall outlet. And without the cost of a rectifier or a capacitor. But you get a 60 Hz flicker.

Brian is right, although you usually see LEDs connected to DC current (like with batteries), the LED Christmas lights are running on the house AC giving the 60HZ cycle "flicker" and saving on the manufacturing.

(was that the sound of most Buzz readers falling asleep?)

I think it best to just find a set at a store that is plugged in for display a see if you can see anything that bugs you about them.

The LED Christmas lights don't flicker like they are blinking on purpose, they look steady, at first. You notice it most when you are moving your head or moving the set when it is plugged in. That is why I prefer them outdoors, if I had them on the tree indoors, I think I would get to me if I was next to the tree and moving around.

Haven't done lights much the past few years, but this year we got 13 strings of 35 green LED lights from Fleet Farm. The box says 5 watts for a string, so those strings plus the string of standard mini-lights in a globe puts us at about 75 watts, I guess. That doesn't seem horribly wasteful to burn the equivalent of a 75 watt bulb for a few hours every night.