Will Your Holiday Decorations Make for a Big Electric Bill? A Cost Breakdown

With Christmas only a couple weeks away, we are well into the holiday light season. Yards up and down my street are filled with inflatables, and some of the houses I swear you could see from a passing plane. As an electrician, I always wonder what my neighbors’ holiday decorations’ electricity costs are — and how they compare to my home’s (rather lame in comparison) garland-and-wreath getup.

So, are you a Grinch or a Griswold? Everyone’s favorite lovable loser, Clark Griswold of Christmas Vacation fame, shut down the electric grid with his outlandish display. Ahead, I’ll walk you through the steps to figure out just how much your holiday decorations’ electricity cost will set you back.

How Much Electricity Will My Inflatables Use and Cost?

It depends on the size of the inflatables and what you pay for electricity, but it’s not much, and you can use a standard formula to find out. You’ll need to know the following:

• The input watts (W) of the motor. Watts are a unit of electrical power.
• How long you keep the motor running per day, in hours (h).
• The price of electricity per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

To find the watts, look on the power adapter or motor nameplate of your inflatable. You’ll see both input and output information. To determine the cost of electricity, use the input numbers. If watts aren’t listed, find the amperes (amps), which measure electrical current flow, and multiply by 120 volts to get the watts.

As an example, a 6-foot-tall inflatable Santa on sale right now at Target draws 0.6 amps (A) at 120 volts (V). So, just multiply the numbers together to get watts (0.6A X 120V = 72W). For comparison, my friend’s 3-foot-tall pink pig inflatable draws a puny 0.3 amps and 36 watts, while a giant abominable snowman will draw more.

How much does it cost to keep Santa inflated eight hours a day? Look at your electric bill and find what you’re charged — we’ll use the November 2024 national average of $0.176 per kilowatt-hour. Divide Santa’s 72 watts by 1000 to convert to kilowatts (0.072 kW). Then, multiply the power in kilowatts, the time in hours and the price of electricity together: 0.072kW X 8h X $0.176/kWh = $0.1014. That’s about ten cents a day, or three dollars a month.

Pretty cheap, right? Of course, if you have ten Santas rather than one, and they’re inflated from Thanksgiving to January 6 (when you’re supposed to take them down), you’re looking at about $45.

How Much Electricity Will My Holiday Lights Use and Cost?

Again, it depends on how Griswold-y you get around the holidays, what kind of lights you use (incandescent or light-emitting diodes, aka LED) and your electricity price. But you can break it down the same way you did for the inflatables.

LED

Light-emitting diodes are extremely energy efficient, as much as 90% more efficient than incandescents. Check the tag on one end to find the watts or amps, then convert to kilowatts and plug in the numbers.

My tiny Charlie Brown Christmas tree holds exactly one 25-foot, 100-bulb mini LED light string, which uses a paltry 6.48 watts (0.00648 kW). Using the same formula as above — power X time X price — my tree costs less than a penny per day to light for 8 hours. Even if you have a normal-sized, 6-foot tree with six strings of lights, it’s still barely a nickel a day.

Incandescent

Incandescent holiday lights are still around, and they’re much cheaper to buy than LED. But they use more energy, and you can’t string as many of them together before you hit the limit listed on the package. (The listing organization UL, which certifies lights and thousands of other products, restricts end-to-end connections of holiday lights.)

A 25-foot, 100-light mini light string uses about 41 watts, which works out to $0.06 of electricity per 8-hour day or $1.73 per month. Larger C7 and C9 strings, at 5 to 7 watts per bulb, drive up the cost: A 25-light string of 5-watt C7 bulbs (125 watts total) costs $0.18 per day for electricity or $5.28 for the month.

How Much Would Covering My Whole House in Lights Cost?

If you use LED lights, and I suggest that you do, it will be much cheaper, but it’s still going to set you back. As a rough example, and because it sounds fun, let’s break down Clark Griswold’s famous Christmas Vacation house.

In the movie, Clark says he put up “two hundred and fifty strands of lights, one hundred individual bulbs per strand, for a grand total of twenty-five thousand individual miniature imported Italian twinkle lights.” (Yes, I do watch this movie often.)

So, how much would 25,000 lights cost to run? In 1989, the year the movie came out, every single light would have been incandescent, so we’ll calculate that first.

Incandescent

Clark says he uses 250 strands of mini lights, and we know mini incandescent lights use about 41 watts per strand.

At today’s electricity price, running 6 hours per night, the cost would be $10.82 per day — 250 x 0.041kW x 6h x $0.176/kWh = $10.82. That’s nearly $325 per month. For mini lights! If you use C7 strands at 5 watts per bulb, the cost skyrockets to $132 per day and $4000 per month.

And that’s not considering all the extra circuits you’d have to put in to make this a safe installation. (Please don’t plug them all into the same receptacle outlet like Clark did.)

LED

JORGE_53/GETTY IMAGES

Your electricity costs will be dramatically lower if you decide to recreate the Griswold home with LEDs. But LEDs are pricier to buy, so you’ll be out a lot more upfront.

As for the electricity? My 100-light mini string from earlier uses 6.48 watts, so plugging 250 of them into the formula works out to $1.71 per day, or $51.32 per month.

For larger C7 lights (at approximately 2.5 watts per 25-light strand), Clark would have needed a thousand strands. Using these lights will set you back $2.64 a day and $79 a month.

Safety Considerations

The electricity cost of your holiday decorations is only half the story. Before you start stapling thousands of lights to your roof, think about safety—not just electrical safety, but ladder safety as well.

Follow manufacturer instructions about how many light strands you can string together on one circuit, which must be protected by a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI). Overloading circuits with too many lights can trip your breaker, damage your lights or even start a fire. This is more of a problem with incandescents because the watts add up quickly. Even with LEDs, you may need extra circuits if you’re planning a holiday light show with music and dancing reindeer.

Examine your lights before putting them up. Replace broken bulbs, and discard strings that have exposed wiring. If half or all of the string doesn’t work, try fixing them with a Christmas light tester or changing the fuse. Clark stapled his lights with metal staples — a bad idea. Use plastic holders to avoid short circuits, and if you have any questions about circuit capacity or other safety issues, call a licensed electrician.

Sources:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics: “Average Energy Prices for the United States, Regions, Census Divisions, and Selected Metropolitan Areas”
• Energy.gov: “Lighting Choices to Save You Money”
• Script Slug: “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”