One of the biggest things that has got to me this year is to do with Christmas lights. My wife and I dearly love putting them up and having the display every night between the start of Advent (the 4 Sundays leading up to Christmas day) through to Epiphany (6th January).
We used to have lots of incandescent lights, which would burn a lot of power - until one year a few years ago I "busted" a few kids who were walking along with a pair of pliers and "busting" the globes of some fairy lights we put as a boundary around our yard. We started switching to LED lights the following year and have slowly replaced things as the incandescent ones have burnt out.
This year, we had only one incandescent light thing in our display: a 0.8m high 3D Christmas tree made of a rope light with incandescent bulbs inside. All the rest (including some other rope light stuff) use LEDs. Our entire display this year uses less power than a toaster on minimum setting.
"That sounds great," I hear you say, "because of the reduction in energy consumption meaning it will have less impact on the climate!"
"Hold your horses," quoth I, "for there is an elephant in the room!" LEDs are expensive to produce compared even to the compact fluorescent "globes" that we here in Oz have had mandated for some years - and what's more, they have a significant amount of embodied energy (the energy used to produce them) because they are made on a crystalline semiconductor substrate which is "doped" (meaning that deliberate impurities are added to the crystal lattice of the substrate to allow current flow in a controlled manner), and this is a process which is energy expensive.
The issue is not so much the LEDs, though, since they have a very high MTTF (Mean Time To Failure, a measure of how long they last). Rather, the issue is the quality of the rest of the light sets. Your typical Christmas light set contains 5 basic parts:
- a plug pack, typically 24VAC these days at various current ratings (anything from 150mA to 1A for the sets we are operating this year)
- a rectifier, sometimes with additional control cirtuitry for the ones with multiple colours and multiple functions
- said LEDs
- connection mechanism between LEDs and the wiring harness, and
- that wiring harness, between the plug pack and rectifier/controller, and between the rectifier/controller and LEDs.
Seven sets of LED lights from last year aren't working properly, and three we bought only last year (so this is the second year we wanted to use them but didn't). One of the five has a blown plug pack, one has a busted rectifier, three (the ones we bought last year) have all got busted wiring, and the other two have connectors that mean the LEDs don't connect into the wiring harness properly anymore (despite the fact that they are supposed to be "outdoor" rated, the contacts have rusted and have no springiness to hold the LEDs in, let alone have a decent electrical connection...).
Apart from the plug pack (where I'll simply have to purchase a replacement), I can and will fix the others at some point... but the question is why should I have to? LED Christmas lights still cost a premium but they are made so cheaply that they don't seem to last terribly long, and that means that all that embodied energy in the LEDs and the goodness of them lasting so long is completely wasted.
It's a scam, as far as I can tell, and we should not be buying into it.
