Martin Lewis has eased concerns over the cost of keeping your Christmas tree lit this year. During his weekly presenting slot on Good Morning Britain , co-presenter Susanna Reid asked the Money Saving Expert about the cost of running festive lights.
With energy bills soaring, many people will have been worried that keeping their Christmas tree illuminated will send bills through the roof . But thankfully, Lewis has been able to ease worries.
“Good news,” he told viewers. “As long as you’ve got LED lights, a string of 100, which is a pretty decent amount, if you were to have them on for six hours a day for the month, it would cost you around 18 pence.”
Read more: Families switching to Secret Santa trick to cut the cost of Christmas
After a follow-up from Reid, Lewis confirmed that the 18p figure is for the whole month, not per day. Though he did warn that this figure is for LED bulbs, not the more expensive filament lights.
Lewis also reminded families that they do not need to keep lights on all day. “Just in the evening when you’re there [at home], so you can keep that element of Christmas going,” Lewis added.
His comments come after Which, the consumer champion, carried out a number of tests on various different Christmas lights. They discovered that running your Christmas lights for six hours a day is actually cheaper than most household appliances, with festive lights costing an average of 0.9p per day.
The organisation also determined that white lights are no more or less expensive on average to run than multicoloured lights, with the difference in running costs depending more on the brand and setting than the colour. Speaking of settings, Which reasoned that you could reduce your Christmas-lights energy use by 67% by switching to a different setting.
The cheapest setting they found was “twinkling-flashing", which would cost around 20p to run for the full festive period, six hours a day from 1 December to 31 January. The most expensive settings were “on” and “sequential”, which both cost 56p to run six hours per day over a two-month period.
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