What’s the electric bill for the biggest Christmas lights displays in Tampa Bay?
It’s hard to put a price on the joy of seeing Christmas lights illuminate our local neighborhoods. We asked people to do it anyway — by sharing their electric bills with us.
Brian Reitmeyer, whose annual Christmas display at 960 Valley View Circle in Palm Harbor features about 12,000 lights, said he’s used to it. “It’s the No. 1 question we get.”
Some people feel let down when he says his lights only add around $15 to his monthly bills, which came to $253 and $324 last November and December.
Such is the magic of LED Christmas lights. The energy-efficient bulbs, which began to corner the market about 15 years ago, have in 2023 almost completely replaced old-school incandescent Christmas lights. LEDs use around 75% less electricity, allowing modern light displays to grow gigantic without prohibitively huge power bills.
The 47-year-old Oakdale
Christmas Display in St. Petersburg features around 700,000 lights, but about half are old-school incandescents. That shows on the bill, which last December tallied around $3,400, said owner Ted Kresge. Still, that’s down from closer to $5,000 in the all-incandescent days.
Kresge’s display draws about 1,100 amps and required Duke Energy to install two additional power poles and meters on his property. Those allow his house to use as much power at one time as about four typical homes.
The Star Wars-themed Merry Sithmas lights display in Lithia began with three houses in 2020. Now every one of the 13 homes on Quintessa Lane in the Fishhawk Ranch subdivision participates.
Visitors this holiday season will find Darth Vader dueling with Obi-Wan Kenobi on a lava planet, an inflatable Jabba the Hutt and the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO hanging out in the cul-de-sac amid an estimated 100,000 LED lights — all to the backdrop of the famed John Williams score.
And yet, Star Wars geek Dan Cheney, who with neighbors Bryant Bell and John Cokkinias spends weeks decking out the neighborhood, saw his household bill rise to only $184 last year for his own 10,000 lights. That was an increase of only $11 from the month prior, sans lights.
If you go big enough with LEDs — like the estimated half-million lights adorning the award-winning Ultimate Christmas Lights House in Clearwater — the power bills do eventually add up to something substantial.
Last year’s light display added about $1,000 to the bill, said owner Warren Hunt. The display has been a family tradition for 35 years, with the past 21 years at the current location of 2833 Meadow Hill Drive.
Hunt said it’s more than worth the expense to meet people who visited the display as children, now returning with their own kids decades later.“And,” Hunt added, “we spend more on the snow juice for our two snow machines than the electric bills.”
It’s impossible to tell precisely what Christmas lights cost in electricity simply by reviewing utility bills. For starters, there’s no way to tease out what usage came from the lights versus seasonal fluctuations in air conditioning and heating.
A spokesperson for the Chick-fil-A restaurant at 6299 W Waters Ave. in Tampa, which has been attracting crowds with more than a million Christmas lights for decades, pointed out that TECO statements, which start mid-month, don’t cover exactly the days when the lights are up.
The Waters Avenue Chickfil-A’s December power bill was around $7,900 last year, but in the summer months, when the air conditioning unit works harder, the bill tops $9,000.
“Our bill for the lights really is not crazy,” marketing manager Theresa Thijs said. “We’re actually relieved when the season comes because our bills drop.”
To calculate a more precise estimate of what
Christmas lights cost in electricity, try this rough calculation. Find the wattage of your lights, multiply it by the hours per day they’ll be on, and divide by 1,000 to find how many kilowatt hours per day they’ll use. Multiply that by what your utility charges per kilowatt hour to find your cost per day.
Home Depot’s best-selling strand of 100 LED lights, for instance, uses 7.2 watts. Ten of those strands, for a decent display of 1,000 lights, costs around 7 cents a day if you run them for six hours nightly. That’s a total
of around $2.10 a month, before taxes, at Duke Energy’s current rate.
Or you could have 10,000 of those lights for about $21 a month. Step those up to larger, more powerful lights — say 1.5-inch bulbs at 50 watts a strand — and a total of 10,000 lights would cost about $146 monthly.
One thing that both TECO and Duke Energy recommend for saving money is a timer. No matter the cost, there’s no sense in leaving Christmas lights on when there’s no one awake to see them.