This Christmas light setting is hiking up your energy bills – here’s 3 settings you should use this season

While Christmas lights are fun, colourful and set a festive scene, they can also be a tangling hassle – and they can seriously hike up your energy bills.

According to Green Match, the UK spends approximately £189 million to light up their Christmas tree every year – an extortion amount of money! While it does depend on the type and volume of lights you have, as well as how long you’re running them for, you will notice a change in your energy bills at the end of December.

To cut down on your energy bills and be more sustainable and kind to the environment, there are a few handy tricks to try, like switching to the best smart lights, scheduling timers and cutting down on the amount of lights you have. But it turns out the setting you have your lights on can also affect your energy usage.

It was recently revealed by Stephen Hankinson, an energy expert at Electric Radiators Direct that there’s one specific light setting that’s really affecting your energy bills.

What Christmas light setting affects your bills the most?

According to Hankinson – as reported by Yahoo – ‘sequential’ is the most expensive Christmas light setting you can use. Sequential lighting is best described as random paused flashes where each bulb takes it in turns to flash within a sequence. Hankinson used an energy calculator and worked out that based on wattage and daily usage, the sequential setting costs 46p a day, which can amount to an estimated total of £16.56 from December to January.

Sequential lighting, alongside simply turning your Christmas lights on without picking a cycle, has the most dramatic impact on your bills, so we’d suggest avoiding those this year. But it just isn’t Christmas without lights, so here are three settings you should use if you want to keep your costs low.

3 energy-saving Christmas light settings

1. Twinkling-flashing

The first light setting that’s said to be the most inexpensive is ‘twinkling-flashing’. As you’d expect from the name, this light setting is a combination of twinkling and flashing lights, and Hankinson says it costs around 16p if you were to have the setting on for six hours.

2. Slow-glo

The next cheapest setting is slow-go. Slow-go lighting is when the bulbs slowly light up to their full brightness before dimming away. Some light packs will also skip bulbs so one bulb will do the slow-go setting while the two lights on either side of it are off, before swapping. According to Which.co.uk, the estimated cost of slow-go is 0.05p an hour which totals to an average running cost of 21p over Christmas.

3. Chasing-flashing

Chasing-flashing is the final budget-friendly light setting, before the sequences take a big leap to over 30p running costs. It’s surprising that chasing-flashing is as inexpensive as it is, considering it’s probably the crazier setting to choose as it repeatedly flashes the lights for different beats at a time. But according to calculations conducted by Which.co.uk, chasing-flashing costs just 0.06p an hour and an overall cost of 26p during Christmas.

For more energy-saving advice, check out these 7 tips to save money on your Christmas lights.