When the Christmas mood is dark, light helps

No Christmas mood there, no piece?

All cloudy, gray, foggy, wet, joyless and above all dark, but definitely not for Christmas?

If you enter the word "dark" in a synonym dictionary, it is very significant what comes out of it:

"In the evening, unfortunate, regret, covered, deplorable, compassionate, shaded, grasspiece, covered, brown, brown -haired, brunette, insulating, desolate, dark haired, dark, dark, dice, discouraging, difficult, pace -worthy, moving, frightening, shocking, joyless, mysterious, hard, heart -moving, heart -moving, heart -moving, heart -moving, Heart, hopeless, miserable, miserable, critical, painful, lightless, co -conductive, painful, raven black, puzzling, shady, black, black, black -haired, pitch dark, pitcher, suspekt, tragic, sad, dristy, bleak, cloudy, indefinite, indistinguishable, unpleasant, unfriendly, unfriendly, unfriendly Uncertain, unhappy, unfortunate, unfortunate, unclear, unsolvable, blurred, vague, suspicious, dark, blurred, ambiguous ” ( vocabulary.uni-leipzig.de too dark)

Perhaps OK is still ok in the evening, and might even promising, but all the rest of this synonym sequence freed from the demand from the doctor why people suffer from winter depression.

When the weather is Christmas, there is really not so much, there are clear plus temperatures around Nikolaus, which could even be double-digit around mid-December. Such a prediction is more of a tendency than security at the beginning of December, but the fairy tale of the "white Christmas" , like all fairy tales, is more of a imagination that has been a reality due to long tradition.

You can find out exactly how this desired idea of ​​the tradition was considered to be true in the article "disenchanted - the myth of white Christmas" , in any case, the fact that in the lowlands there is statistically only snow every 7 to 10 years (depending on the period from which the average is calculated, and this snow does not necessarily have to be fresh and wonderful white).

If there is no snow that creates a friendlier Christmas mood, (and can) artificial light must (and can) take on this task:

Light brings mood, especially in Advent

Whether you feel really comfortable in your apartment depends very much on pleasant lighting, and with typical Christmas lighting, it is the fastest to bring Advent mood to the apartment.

Whether you start laughing or crying when you look at your electricity bill also depends very much on the lighting, and with Christmas lights you can quickly prepare the mood of mourning in the new year.

Here are a few amazing numbers:

German households consume approximately 500 million kilowatt hours of electricity for Christmas lighting during Christmas time - a power consumption with which 140,000 households could be supplied for a year (calculated with around 3,500 kWh per year, a realistic value for the average budget, and even if the Christmas lighting has now now been reduced, the basic tendency of the numbers remains disturbing.

LEDs, not just for Christmas

There has been a means for a long time to sustainably reduce electricity consumption for light, and not necessarily only for the Christmas lights, follows an idea for Christmas lighting with permanent added value:

Store scenario:

If you turn your living room into a shining Christmas paradise with 10 fairy lights á 140 watts and let these fairy lights burn for 7 hours a day, you consume around one kWh per day, at today's prices (according to Eurostat an average of 0.2981 euros per kWh in the first half of 2014, i.e. 9.24 euros throughout December.

If you- like many Germans- thought that it was much more: the oven consumes 3 kW per hour, so baking cookies quickly costs over € 5,- €, and the Christmas goose too ...

Based on this example calculation, the above information on the 500 million kilowatt hours can also be understood: an average of 6 light decorations are to be used per household, and if they only burn for a good 5 and not 7 hours, one German households consumes an average of 0.5 kWh for Christmas lighting per day, which probably does not burn every day, we say once that it burns 25 days in December.

There are around 40 million households in Germany, 0.5 kWh x 25 days = 12.5 kWh x 40 million households = 500 million kilowatt hours.

LED light chains or LED light hoses instead of these fairy lights , they only consume about a tenth of what fairy lights use with light bulbs, i.e.. B. 14 opposite 140 watts. This means that they no longer consume a kWh a day, but 3 kWh all December for the starting scenario calculated above, i.e. just under one euro.

LED light chains are also available from specialist companies for a few euros, but of course it takes a few years for the complete purchase price for such new Christmas lighting to pay for itself.

Unless you think a little further: today there are LED light chains that have said goodbye to the usual Christmas design (green cable, yellowish light candles), you have transparent or black cables and white LEDs, or are transparent light hoses that shine at regular intervals (both at www.Leds.de, LED-Minilichter chain, light chain with warm white, LEDs, LEDs, LEDs Hose, between € 5.90 and € 19.90).

With such LED light chains and LED light hoses, you can also save electricity after Christmas, often even with a profit for the living atmosphere. You can hang up the energy -saving light sources at any point in your apartment or make you glow in all possible containers (always ready: butter bread bag), where point lighting makes sense.

Energy -saving sense makes point lighting z. B. wherever the lush ceiling light burns from early in the morning to late in the evening- four energy-saving lamps with 30 watts in the hallway are also 120 watts, for five winter months a few hours in the morning and from school until late in the evening are always 8 to 9 hours and 1 kWh a day, just under € 10 a month, a good € 110 a year. A few such areas in the house with a tenth of energy consumption, and they are on their way to wealth ...

Children's Christmas? Do it colorful!

Especially when you have small children, you can also use electricity -saving LEDs to cause a lot of craziness in the direction of Christmas lighting:

You could z. B. build an imaginative Christmas landscape on an specially parked, multi-stage arrangement of cardboard boxes with bed sheet, with an LED Christmas tree and an LED baby ice bear with red loop around the neck, around it around 20 flickering LED tea in all possible colors ...

Very big cinema for the very small ones, which of course can still be decorated with a wide variety of handicrafts; Everything together for a good € 35 and no electricity costs, this decoration runs with batteries/batteries.

But there is also a lot with (more environmentally friendly) cables for the socket, with LEDs equipped with LEDs there are silver and golden and colorful decorative light chains, toadstools and colorful or naturally left pasture, snowmen and Christmas pyramids, seagulls and swans, reindeer and penguins ...