Installing Christmas Lights as a Window Cleaning Add-On

A Greener Charlottesville - Holiday Lighting with a Green Twist: As the holidays get closer more and more people are firing up the Christmas lights but they are also raising the electric bill. Putting up the Christmas lights around your house is often times a fun family tradition but can also bring on some holiday headaches. A local company is making the process easier and with a green twist. Jim Harshaw, owner of Albemarle Window Cleaning says, "LEDs have sort of come to be the new thing in Christmas lighting and five years ago they were more or less unheard of in Christmas lights." LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes were first invented in the early 1900s but have gained big popularity in the past few decades because of there use in telephones, calculators, and TVs. Now the LED technology is making holiday lighting more energy efficient. "The roof line lighting, that we're doing on a house like this, uses one thirty second of the power." A traditional incandescent mini bulb, the kind that you usually see on a Christmas tree, uses about a half a watt per bulb. LED holiday lights only use 4 hundredths of a watt per bulb.
Not only do the LEDs use less energy but they last much longer. "The incandescents that we use are professional grade, or for instance the ones that you can buy at Walmart are usually about a 1500 hour bulb for the incandescents. The LEDs are around 100,000 hours they say." Albemarle Window Cleaning designs and installs outdoor holiday lighting for homes and businesses across Central Virginia. But this year they have started uses high efficiency LEDs and offering a carbon off-set. Harshaw says, "Someone brought to my attention all of these Christmas lights we install, and we've done probably about a hundred homes over the past 2 or 3 years, and that's a lot of lights and that's a lot of energy." At the end of the year Albemarle Window Cleaning will buy all of the carbon off sets for the lights they use, helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the holiday season. If your looking to invest in some LED Christmas lights know that they do cost more up front but are well worth the investment, both for your wallet and for the environment. Video here.

Christmas Decor, the United States largest professional holiday decorating firm is spearheading the effort to spread the use of LED (light emitting diodes) lights with its 375 locations in 48 states.

One guy has a business that tells you everything you need to know in order to make over $15,000 in your first year hanging Christmas Lights. He also has a number of different websites to go through; Christmas Light Kit, Missionary Money & Christmas Cash.

.

This display (below) was the work of Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio, electrical engineer who spent about three hours sequencing the 88 Light-O-Rama channels that controlled the 16,000 Christmas lights in his annual holiday lighting spectacular (from Christmas 2004). His 2005 display includes over 25,000 lights that he spent nearly two months and $10,000 to hook up. So that the Williams' neighbors aren't disturbed by constant noise, viewers driving by the house are informed by signs to tune in to a signal broadcast over a low-power FM radio station to hear the musical accompaniment. The rough quality of the video has led some viewers to believe it was put together in stop-action form from still photographs, but that is an artifact of the high compression used in the clip circulated via e-mail. Mr. Williams has posted instructions for recreating his "Wizard in Winter" sequencing, and another of his choreographed Christmas light music. Carson's Christmas display proved so popular that it was featured in a Miller Lite beer commercial in December 2005. But so many people had been flocking to see it that it caused a traffic jam in his subdivision. There was a car accident in the subdivision and the police couldn't get to the scene because of the congestion. So he decided to shut it down.

.