How To Have A Greener Xmas

CBS' Larry Magid On New Ways To Save $$ On Holiday Lighting

(CBS)  It may get dark early, but we have entered the season of light. Electric light. Many homes are adorned by strings of holiday lights, lawns decorated with illuminated Santas and reindeer and, of course, Christmas trees all decked out with sparkling lights. Yes, this is truly a wonderful time of year until the electric bill comes.

Fortunately, there are some high-tech and low-tech ways to save money on holiday lighting. The low-tech way is to remember to turn off the lights before you go to bed at night. The high-tech method is to automate the process and use holiday lights that consume a fraction of the electricity of ordinary lights.

One way to control holiday lights along with appliances, general house lighting and just about everything else that plugs into the wall is to use X-10 modules that you can get at X10.com or at any Radio Shack Store under the "Plug n' Power" brand.

X10 offers a number of ways to control electrical devices. There is a timer that looks like a clock radio, a hand-held remote control and, the company's most sophisticated controller, the Active Home Pro that lets you use your PC to automate just about anything electrical.

Active Home Pro consists of a controller that you connect to the USB port of a PC, some software and as many appliances, lamp and other modules that you care to buy. The controller itself costs $49.00. Modules range in price but start at $12.99 for a lamp switch. Another route is to spend $99 for the 9-piece Home Automatic starter kit that come with the computer interface and cable, software, an appliance module, lamp module, hand held remote, pocket remote control, motion sensor and a remote wall switch,

Using the software is easy. You install it on your PC, plug the controller into a USB port and then start to design your electrical control world. "Create" a room on the screen and drag in the modules you plan to use.

You can then tell the software what times to turn them on or off or, in the case of lights, whether you want them dimmed or on full. You can even have the software figure out the times of dawn and dusk and turn lights on and off accordingly. There is also a security mode that randomly turns lights on and off to make it look as if someone is home.

I have one lamp module connected to our holiday lights and plan to use another for our Christmas tree lights when we set up the tree in a couple of weeks. I have the house lights programmed to turn on automatically at dusk and off around midnight.

For the Christmas tree, we'll use a remote switch to turn it on and off when we're around or - just for safety - have the computer turn it off late at night just in case we get too caught up in the holiday cheer to remember to do it ourselves.

Of course the same system can also be used to control the porch lights, lamps around the house and even room lighting via switches that replace traditional wall switches. X10 also offers a variety of security devices and remote cameras.

If the name X10 sounds familiar and, perhaps, a bit seedy, it may be because it's the company that used to invade our PCs with pop-up and pop-under ads. I'm not sure if it invented that obnoxious form of advertising but it surely exploited it.

The company also ran some unseemly ads for its spy camera, suggesting that it could be used for voyeuristic purposes. Because of those ads, I boycotted writing about the company for a couple of years but I'm assured that X10 has changed its ways and is no longer engaged in such practices.

In addition to saving energy by turning off lights, you can also save a substantial amount of electricity by using extremely energy efficient LED lights instead of traditional incandescent or mini-incandescent holiday lights.

LED, which stands for Light Emitting Diode, are those tiny lamps (typically red but not necessarily) that were used in some of the early electronic calculators, before LCD screens became affordable. They're also used in traffic lights and all sorts of other applications.

The LEDs light up by the movement of electrons imbedded in a semiconductor material. They produce almost no heat so they also reduce fire risk.

The use of LED lights can cut energy use by as much as 90% according to Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility company that serves Northern California and other locales. PGE's Holiday Lighting web site points out that 300 incandescent bulbs burn 7 watts per bulb for a total of 225 hours (45 days of usage, five hours a day).

At 12.6 cents per kilowatt hour, that comes to $59.45. 300 mini-incandescent bulbs are a lot more efficient at 0.45 watts per bulb or $3.83 usage for 225 hours but the real energy miser are the LED bulbs that burn 0.043 watts each for a total of 2.9 watts for 300 bulbs costing only 37 cents for 225 hours of use.

Lights come in red, green, white, blue, yellow and amber, according to PG&E.

Prices on these LED lights are all over the map but I bought a 67-foot string of 100 bulbs at my local discount warehouse for about $16. That's a little more expensive than mini-incandescent bulbs, but not much.

In addition to being much cheaper to operate, they are cool to the touch, less likely to break and also aren't likely to burn out during our lifetimes. The LEDs should last about 100,000 hours, which adds up to roughly 666 Christmas seasons.

So, regardless of whether you prefer red and green for Christmas, blue and white for Chanukah, red, green and black for Kwanza or just like amber or yellow, why not make this a Green holiday season by saving energy while enjoying the festive times?

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A syndicated technology columnist for nearly two decades, Larry Magid serves as on air Technology Analyst for CBS Radio News. His technology reports can be heard several times a week on the CBS Radio Network. Magid is the author of several books including "The Little PC Book."