I saw the below poster in the Christmas Tree Barn shop. I was intrigued to see if you could really run 1,000 lights over Christmas for 50p...
8 hours for 30 days is 240 hours at 34p per kWh is £81.60 if we are using per 1kW, but that is the output of a small heater and not a string of lights.
The actual consumption tree lights was not on the box. I plugged in my mains meter and found that my tree with 400 lights was drawing 6 watts – so 1,000 lights would be 15 Watts – which would be £1.22 over the period. A bit more than the claimed 50p, but not unreasonably so.
What about the other Christmas items?
Cooking a turkey. Not so easy to rewire the kitchen to include my meter. A bit of googling suggests that an oven uses about 1kW – so a four-hour turkey roast would cost £1.36
Watching the King’s Christmas Message on the TV is going to be too cheap to measure. An average TV uses about 100 Watts, so the 10-minute speech will be less than 1 pence.
The biggest energy use for Christmas is likely to be the drive to be with your in-laws. A 100-mile round trip would use about 15 litres of petrol and cost you about £24 (at £1.60 per litre). Each litre of petrol is 8.9 kWh, so that is 133 kWh.
Our return trip to the in-laws used as much energy as a town would use to run the tree lights in every home. (9,000 rows of lights each with 1,000 bulbs)
(in an EV this would have been about 25kWh of energy and cost £8.50 - enough for a village with 1,500 homes)
Ofgem have done a nice video on the consumption of some common items and what they cost per year to run here. https://lnkd.in/eAfBcJVX
So, if you want to save energy this Christmas, stay at home.
#energy #christmas #turkey #drivinghomeforchristmas
Ofgem
