Be on the cutting edge with LED holiday lights.

Each bulb with this new LED technology uses only 0.04 watts and is up to 90 percent more efficient than its incandescent counterpart. So a household burning 10 strands of lights for eight hours a day for a month at $0.0853 per kilowatt-hour would spend $127.67 for large incandescent bulbs, $7.20 for traditional mini-lights, and just $0.72 for LEDs. Also these newer bulbs are sturdier, last up to 100,000 hours, or 20 years, and barely warm up thus eliminating most fire concerns.

To also maximize holiday lighting savings, use timers to limit light displays to no more than six evening hours a day. Leaving lights on for 24 hours a day will easily quadruple your energy costs while also creating 4 times as much green house gases from the additional energy needed to light them.

And be safe, unattended lights can cause fires, especially if the lights are on a dried holiday tree or wreath, so always unplug your interior lights before going to bed or leaving the house. See the U.S. Department of Energy website to learn about the savings.

Sylvania LED light bulb

There is a shortage of light emitting diodes (LED) in the USA due to increased consumer uptake as people rapidly begin to use them in place of power hungry incandescent bulbs. According to a recent Department of Energy report on LED technology it states that 7% of electricity used America is to light our homes and businesses. Although that number is down significantly in the last few years due to the adoption of efficient lighting, there is still a great deal of ground to be gained. Further adoption will be because of continued innovations in more subdued color LEDs which will begin to make their way to the market. The DOE expects this further adoption to result in even larger decrease in energy use.

A small change like using this technology has a BIG impact as the cumulative savings of the continued adoption of LEDs over the next 20 years could lead to saving 1.500 terawatt-hours which based energy prices today is around $120 billion. The savings would eliminate the need for 24 new large power plants, to say nothing of the decrease in carbon emissions. So don’t delay get the LED out today!

A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits incoherent monochromatic light when electrically biased in the forward direction. This effect is a form of electroluminescent. The color depends on the semiconducting material used, and can be near-ultraviolet, visible or infrared. LED bulbs use less energy than your standard incandescent bulb, a whopping savings of 96% energy means a very low electricity bill. LED bulbs are the safest and the most cost-effective artificial light source in the world.

Many LED bulbs now fit into standard sockets and they work well with all types of light.     Advances have been made to make the color temperature of LEDs more of a traditional warm white. Applications for use include shops, bars, offices, show rooms, homes and more.

The leading LED manufacturer is Long Life Lamp Company which has been around for more than 15 years. Its latest high power LED, the 3rd generation, is designed to become a replacement of fluorescent tubes and halogen lamps, which is the future direction of the lighting industry. Although the price of these products are higher than current lighting sources, LED is better than other available lighting technologies due to its dramatic energy savings of up to 96% with higher luminance, therefore, the overall cost of using LED is less than others. Keep in mind that LEDs last up to 60,000 hours and produce virtually no heat making them highly cost effective over the long term especially when you factor in additional labor costs needed to replace conventional bulbs more often.

For additional information on these products and where to buy them, see www.longlifelamps.co.uk .

A TV automatically turns on the surround sound amplifier, a smart microwave oven downloads new cooking recipes, a thermostat automatically changes to its energy saving set point when the security system is enabled, bathroom floors and towel racks heat up when the bath runs, an email alert goes out when there is water in the basement. When did the Jetson-style home of the future become a reality? When products from INSTEON™ set the new technology standard for a new type of cost effective advanced home control.

They enable product developers, much like the iPhone has, to create these distinctive solutions for homeowners, and others yet unimagined, by delivering on the promise of a truly connected ‘smart home.’ They have cost-effective dual band network technology optimized for home management and control. Their  products can interact with one another, and with people, in new ways that will save energy while improving the comfort, safety, convenience and value of homes around the world.

Today’s homes are stuffed with high-tech appliances, entertainment gear, computers, and communications gadgets. Utilities, such as electricity, lighting, plumbing, heating and air conditioning are so much a part of modern life that they almost go unnoticed. But these systems and devices all act independently of each other however, there still is nothing that can link them all together. Houses don’t know that people live in them. Lights happily burn when no one needs them on, HVAC is insensitive to the location and comfort of people, pipes can burst without anyone being notified, and sprinklers dutifully water the lawn even while it’s raining.

For a collection of independent objects to behave with a unified purpose, the objects must be able to communicate with each other. When they do, new, oft times unpredictable properties can emerge. In biology, animals emerged when nervous systems evolved. The Internet emerged when telecommunications linked computers together. The global economy emerges from transactions involving a staggering amount of communication. But there is no such communicating infrastructure in our homes out of which we might expect new levels of comfort, safety, convenience and energy management to emerge.

There is nothing we use routinely in our homes that links our light switches or our door locks, for instance, to our PCs or our remote controls. It’s not that such systems don’t exist at all. Just as there were automobiles for decades before Henry Ford made cars available to everyone, there are now and have been for some time systems that can perform home automation tasks. On the high end, all kinds of customized systems are available for the affluent, just as the rich could buy a Stanley Steamer or a Hupmobile in the late 1800s. At the low end, X10 power line signaling technology has been around since the 1970s, but its early adoption is its limiting factor—it is too unreliable and inflexible to be useful as an infrastructure network.

The INSTEON family of products enables simple, low-cost devices to be networked together using the power line, radio frequency (RF), or both. All INSTEON devices are peers, meaning that any device can transmit, receive, or repeat other messages, without requiring a master controller or complex routing software. Adding more devices makes an INSTEON network more robust, by virtue of a simple protocol for communication retransmissions and retries.

For more information on the sytems or where you can purchase it see www.insteon.com