The holiday season isn’t all that far away, which means now is a good time to start thinking about whether your electrical system is ready to safely handle all your Christmas lights and decorations. Christmas displays are undoubtedly beautiful and a great way to get everyone in the holiday spirit. Nonetheless, they also increase the strain on your electrical system and can be a major safety hazard. Let’s look at the impact Christmas lighting can have on your electrical system and electricity bills. We’ll also consider the ways to lessen this impact and ensure your holiday display is safe.
Increased Electrical Load
Consider your Christmas lights inside and outside your home and the increased load they put on various electrical circuits and your electrical system in general. More electrical fires occur during the holiday months than any time of the year, and one of the main reasons for this is due to people overloading their home’s electrical circuits. Circuit breakers are specifically designed to trip if the circuit they control ever gets overloaded due to trying to draw more power than the circuit is meant to handle. If you have too many strings of lights plugged into one power strip or strung together, you can still end up tripping the breaker or starting a fire. There’s also a risk of fire if you use any damaged lights, power strips or cords. The current can end up arcing and throwing off sparks that may catch anything nearby on fire.
The most important thing to do when putting up Christmas lights is to make sure you’re not exceeding any circuit’s designed load. The circuits that most of the outlets in your home are on are 15 amps and 120 volts. They can supply a maximum of 1,800 watts of power at any given time. While 1,800 watts is technically the maximum, you will often encounter issues if you ever exceed 80% of this maximum. That means you never want to try and draw more than 1,440 watts from a single 15-amp circuit. If you do, you could end up with the lights or the circuit’s wiring overheating and creating a risk of a fire.
When trying to figure out how many lights you can run off a single circuit, you also need to make sure to account for everything else connected to that circuit. While this means factoring in the total wattage of all your normal lighting on that circuit, you also need to be careful about anything else you want to plug in. If you have a circuit that’s already near its maximum capacity and then try to run your vacuum on that circuit as well, you can overload the circuit and cause the breaker to trip.
If you like to go all out for the holidays with a huge number of Christmas lights, be careful not to overload your electrical system in general. Even if the lights are on different circuits, they could potentially draw so much power that it could cause your main breaker to trip at certain times. One sure sign that you’re trying to draw too much power and exceeding the amperage of your electrical panel is if your lights and TV flicker. If this happens, it means that you either need to cut back on your Christmas lights or upgrade to a larger electrical panel.
Greater Electricity Consumption
The more Christmas lights you have and the longer they are on, the higher your electricity bill will be. Most homes that only have modest holiday lighting will see an increase of $15 to $20 on their monthly electric bill. Your electric bill could easily spike by up to a few hundred dollars if you have a large display. The best way to avoid such a huge spike in your electrical bill is to toss out all of your old strings of incandescent Christmas lights and upgrade them to LEDs. Even if you have the biggest, brightest display in the neighborhood, your electricity bill typically won’t increase by more than $30 to $50 if you use LED lights.
Also, LED Christmas lights are much less of a fire hazard than incandescent lights. Even small incandescent lights can get hot, and the larger bulbs can get so hot that you can’t even touch them. LEDs, on the other hand, stay quite cool even when on for hours at a time. They convert almost all the energy they use directly into light. With incandescent bulbs, quite a bit of the energy is converted into heat. Using LED light strings on your Christmas tree is especially important for helping prevent it from potentially catching fire.
Tips for Ensuring Your Christmas Lights and Decorations Are Safe
If you hang lots of Christmas lights outside, consider having an electrical contractor install a new, dedicated circuit outside your house or possibly more than one new circuit. Doing so is an easy way to ensure you don’t risk overloading any of your circuits. It also allows you to plug many of the light strings directly into an outlet instead of having to run everything off extension cords. This risks overloading the cords.
If you need to use any extension cords for your outdoor lighting, you need to check that they are grounded and rated for outdoor use. If you have a newer home, all your outdoor power outlets should be GFCI outlets. This type of outlet is far safer since it has an internal mechanism that will trip if any ground fault occurs because of moisture or a damaged cord. Without GFCI protection, you could easily end up getting shocked or electrocuted if a ground fault ever happens. If your outdoor outlets aren’t GFCIs, we recommend upgrading them before the holiday season arrives. The other option is to plug everything into GFCI-protected extension cords, but having GFCI outlets outdoors is always the safer choice.
Fully inspect all your lights, extension cords and any other decorations you’re going to plug in. If you see any signs of damage, such as cracks in the sheathing on a cord or light string, you should throw it away. The same is true if you can see any exposed wires or if the plug ends are loose. Replacing any old or damaged cords, lights and decorations won’t cost you all that much and will be far less expensive than what you could pay should they cause a fire.
With roots dating back to 1940, Bryant Heating, Cooling, Plumbing & Electric is the company to trust for all your electrical installation, repair and inspection needs. Whether you need to upgrade your outdoor lighting or outlets, add a new circuit or require any other electrical service, you can count on us to get the job done quickly, safely and professionally. We have locations in Lexington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Bowling Green and Evansville, and we also serve all the nearby areas in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. To schedule an appointment for any electrical, plumbing or HVAC service, contact us today.
