Holiday lights...

At the beginning of next year we are expecting our electricity bills to spike dramatically. Rate caps in our area are expected to expire at the conclusion of 2010. Over the last six months we have been making changes to our electricity usage in an effort to prepare ourselves for what could be a 50% increase in our electricity bills. We have switched all of our lighting to use energy efficient CFL bulbs. We have also started using "smart" power strips for our electronics and are turning things off whenever possible. What is hard this year is that the children want the Christmas lights on the tree to be on all day. I have a very hard time telling them that we can only have the Christmas lights on for a few hours a day. My plan is to let them have the lights on the tree kept on but I insist that our outdoor lights are used very sparingly. Next year I hope to be able to replace all of our Christmas lights with new LED lights.