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We look forward to Christmas all year long, and we always want it to be more special and spectacular than the last. Well now it can be, thanks to fabulous, colour-changing LED lights!

A Bit Of Christmas History For You

Lights at Christmas have been an essential feature of our festive celebrations ever since candles were first used to decorate the Weihnachtsbaum, (or ‘Christmas Tree’ as we call it) in homes in early modern Germany, around the 12^th Century.

By the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, Christmas trees had begun to be illuminated with electric lights, especially following Thomas Edison’s stunning display of bravado and showmanship in 1880, whereby he adorned his New Jersey Menlo Park laboratory with incandescent light bulbs as a publicity stunt.

By the mid-20^th Century, it had become customary to deck our streets and building exteriors with strings of electric lights, and by the 60s US homeowners had started to decorate the outside of their houses with ever more extravagant lighting displays, often in an effort to out-do one another.

LEDs Lighting Up The World At Christmas

Here in the UK, Regent Street has been festooned with Christmas lights almost every year since 1949.  Funded to the tune of £500,000 by the thoroughfare’s retailers and business owners, its name has become synonymous with festive extravagance and flair, especially in recent years when it has switched to colour-changing LED lights to provide fabulous illumination for its night time shoppers and revellers.

Apart from being simply gorgeous to look at, LED lighting is incredibly energy-efficient too, as the world famous Rockefeller Plaza tree in midtown Manhattan, New York proves.

Its unbelievable 30,000 LEDs along five miles of cable might seem outrageously profligate for what amounts to a decoration, but energy consumption has been reduced significantly by the use of LEDs, from 3,510 to 1,297 kilowatt hours per day.

Christmas lights aside, it has been estimated that replacing all of New York’s 250,000 street lights with LEDs will save the city $14,000.000 USD in energy and maintenance costs by 2017, and if every outdoor light in the US was switched to LED, the nation would save $6,000,000,000, with a reduction in carbon emissions equal to that of taking 8.5 million cars off the roads!

Savings Closer To Home

You too will be able to make some substantial energy and cash savings, simply by switching some or all of your current, energy-guzzling fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs with up-to-date, environmentally-friendly LEDs.

There’s such a wide variety of LED light bulbs to choose from, and they’ll retrofit perfectly into your existing light fittings, so there’ll be no need to buy any costly replacements.

In comparison to traditional bulbs, LEDs cost a tiny fraction of the amount to power.

An example of this would be the superb GU10 RGB Spotlight with Free Controller. This bulb would be ideal to use at Christmas, as it can be programmed to emit red, green and blue light at varying Lumens of brightness, and create 16 fun, dynamic effects which comprise strobe, flash, fade and smooth. This is all achieved using just 5W of electricity, which is 1/10^th that of an equivalently luminescent halogen bulb.

As with the vast majority of LED bulbs, this GU10 LED has an expected lifespan of 50,000 hours, so it will illuminate your home not only this Christmas, but for many, many more Christmases to come!