If you require a rationale to economize as you schedule a holiday light display that outshines the sun, consider these inconvenient truths:

Our holiday lights burn so luminous, you can view them from space. Americans use more vigor to power their holiday lights, by one approximate, than the country of El Salvador uses for everything in a whole year. The juice that animates our 15-foot, inflatable blinking Rudolphs and our 20-foot, 1,200-bulb flagpole trees could chilly 14 million refrigerators.

Many Americans – and some entire neighborhoods – are expending more vigor than ever on their holiday yard displays: Staging them earlier, running them later and leaving no patch of turf unilluminated.

“People commence decorating, like, correct after Halloween now,” said Bianca Soriano, a spokesperson for Florida Power and Light. “If you commence on Nov. 1, and let’s declare you keep them on till recent Year’s, that’s two months of extra vigor.”

With expense boost dominating the information back in 2023, we here at USA TODAY offered readers a primer on how to leave large on holiday lights without shorting out your holiday distribution. A year later, expense boost is still a thing, so we’ve updated our specialist tips. As it turns out, not much has changed.

Holiday deals: Shop this period’s top products and sales curated by our editors.

desire to recognize how much power those holiday lights use? There’s a formula for that

The average household spent an estimated $16.48 powering holiday lights in 2022, according to an analysis by the Today’s Homeowner website.

There seems to be no update to that stat for 2023. But there are ways to forecast those costs in 2024.

Kiplinger, the expense management site, offers a wonderfully geeky formula to compute a holiday power invoice:

(wattage/1000 x period in hours) x expense per kWh in cents = expense to run Christmas lights

For those who discover formulas off-putting, Duke vigor provides a less math-intense alternative.

If you schedule to string five strands of C9, 2-inch incandescent lights, 500 bulbs in all, and run them six hours a day, you will spend $63 in the holiday month, according to Duke’s calculator.

If you switch to vigor-efficient LED bulbs, the same monthlong display will expense only $9. And if you downsize to Mini-LED bulbs, the ones shaped like tiny candles, your expense drops to 60 cents.

A 2008 study from the Department of vigor found that seasonal lights, alone, consumed 6.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2007.

That’s more vigor than the country of El Salvador used in a year at the period, according to a update by Todd Moss, executive director of the vigor for Growth Hub, an vigor-ownership ponder tank.

The point of Moss’s work, he said, was that “everyone on the earth should enjoy abundant vigor, like we have.”

His 2015 piece went viral. Backlash followed.

“People on the left said, ‘You should stop wasting all that electricity,’ and people on the correct said, ‘You’re trying to kill Christmas,’” Moss said.

Moss notes that the 6.6 billion kilowatt figure “has probably gone down since then, because lighting’s gotten a lot more efficient.” But he also notes a distinct escalation in the holiday light wars, at least in his neighborhood outside the District of Columbia.

“People leave all out, really cover their whole house,” he said.

desire to cut power costs for your holiday lights? leave LED

The large takeaway here, if you’re looking to save power while still staging a Clark Griswold-sized holiday spectacle, is to leave LED.

LED bulbs use at least 75% less vigor and last up to 25 times longer than ancient-school incandescent lights, according to the Department of vigor.

To demonstrate the difference, ComEd calculated how much Clark Griswold himself might have saved with LED lights.

You may recall that the Griswold patriarch of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” set out to stage the brightest house on the block, armed with 25,000 Italian twinkle lights.

With incandescent bulbs burning five hours a day for a month, ComEd calculated, that display would expense the Griswolds $7,462 in 2022 dollars.

With LED lights, the worth comes down to $1,612, still a surprisingly large sum.

But that’s the movies.

“I don’t recognize anyone who’s putting up 25,000 lights,” said James Gherardi, spokesperson for Exelon, parent business of ComEd.

Here are more vigor-saving tips, which you can use beyond the holidays to save money. Try some of them inside and outside your home.

Don’t be in such a hurry to put up your holiday display

Soriano, of FPL, has noticed that her South Florida neighbors seem to deck the halls ever earlier in recent years.

Two months of holiday lights expense more than one month. You may even annoy your more holiday-averse neighbors by rolling out the lights in November. Why not wait awhile?

Consider solar power

Solar-powered holiday lights might expense a bit more (roughly $30 for this four-pack on Amazon), but they can save you electrical costs in the long run.

Also, as Popular Mechanics reports, solar can spare you the hassle of running wires to outlets. Here are the magazine’s top solar picks.

Put your holiday lights on a timer

period them to leave on at sunset and off at bedtime. No one will notice them at noon. No one will be around to view them at 3 in the morning.

Rethink that inflatable Santa

Inflatables abound in millennial holiday displays, but they arrive with a worth.

“Inflatables use a lot of vigor,” Soriano said. “You listen that fan running.”

Your standard 8-foot inflatable costs 4 cents per hour or about a dollar a day in electricity, if it’s running 24-7, according to Landmark Creations, maker of custom inflatables.

“If you’ve got five – you’ve got Santa, a reindeer, a Grinch – every one of those is going to add to your electricity use,” Soriano said.

Beware of phantom power

Holiday decorations with electronic components can use vigor even when they appear to be off, a quotient of wasted power that our vigor Department terms a “phantom load.”

For large and complicated displays, consider using a “intelligent” power strip, which shuts off the power completely when you hit the switch.

Some chose it, others are forced:Why these travelers skipped going home for the holidays

Turn the lights off if you leave town

This tip raises a philosophical question: Is your holiday light display for you, or your neighbors?

Turning everything off when you fly to Tulum on Christmas Eve is “benevolent of a bummer,” Gherardi said, “because you desire to view your house in its holiday form the entire month of December.”

But turning off the lights is certainly safer than leaving them on when you are away. And if you desire to save a few bucks on power, that is a great way to do it.  

Set a recent Year’s resolution to receive the lights down

The weekend after recent Year’s Day makes a fine period to roll up your lights and deflate your elves.

ponder about it: Is anything sadder than a wilted yard Santa in February?