Do Permanent LED Lights Increase Your Hydro Bill?

It's one of the first questions Calgary homeowners ask us when they're considering permanent LED roofline lighting: "Is this going to wreck my electricity bill?" It's a fair question. The lights are on your home year-round. You can run them every night if you want. It sounds like it could add up.

The short answer is: no, not in any meaningful way. But rather than just telling you that and moving on, let's actually do the math — because the numbers are genuinely surprising, and understanding them will help you feel good about running your lights whenever you want.

How Much Power Do Permanent LED Nodes Actually Use?

Traditional Christmas lights — the old incandescent C7 or C9 bulbs your parents strung along the roofline — draw anywhere from 5 to 10 watts per bulb. A typical roofline installation might use 100 to 200 of them. That's 500W to 2,000W running every evening through the holiday season. It adds up fast.

Modern permanent LED nodes are a completely different technology. Each individual node in a Starise installation draws approximately 0.2 watts at full brightness. That's not a typo. Two-tenths of a watt per light point.

Why so low? LED (light-emitting diode) technology converts electrical energy into light far more efficiently than incandescent bulbs, which waste most of their energy as heat. The LEDs we use are also driven at low current, which keeps power consumption minimal while still producing vivid, punchy colour.

The Math: A Real Calgary Home

Let's walk through a typical Starise installation on a standard two-storey Calgary home. A full roofline installation — front eaves, garage roofline, and some accent coverage — will typically use somewhere between 100 and 200 nodes. We'll use 150 as a realistic middle estimate.

• 150 nodes × 0.2W per node = 30 watts total draw
• That's less than a single standard light bulb.
• Running 6 hours per night × 30W = 0.18 kWh per night
• Over a full year (365 nights) = 65.7 kWh annually

Now let's apply Alberta electricity rates. As of early 2026, regulated rate option (RRO) pricing in Alberta sits around $0.14–$0.18 per kWh depending on the month and your provider. Using $0.16/kWh as a reasonable average:

• 65.7 kWh × $0.16 = approximately $10.51 per year

If you only run your lights during the fall and winter holiday season — say, October through January, roughly 120 nights — that drops to about $3.46 for the entire season.

Compared to Old Incandescent Christmas Lights

To put that in perspective, let's compare to a traditional incandescent roofline setup. A homeowner with 150 C9 incandescent bulbs (a common size for roofline use) at 7W each would be drawing 1,050 watts — that's 1.05 kilowatts — every hour the lights are on.

Running that same 6 hours per night over a 90-day holiday season:

• 1,050W × 6 hrs × 90 days = 567 kWh
• At $0.16/kWh = $90.72 for one season

Meanwhile, the permanent LED equivalent costs about $3.46 for the same period. The LED system uses roughly 35 times less electricity than traditional incandescent lights. If you were renting incandescent lights from a holiday lighting service or buying new strings each year, you were also paying for that electricity without even thinking about it.

Alberta Electricity Rates: What You're Actually Paying

Alberta's electricity market is deregulated, which means rates fluctuate. The Regulated Rate Option (RRO) — the default rate for most residential customers — changes monthly based on energy market conditions. In recent years, RRO rates have ranged from as low as $0.07/kWh to as high as $0.22/kWh during periods of high demand (typically cold snaps in January).

If you want to be precise, you can check your current rate on your ENMAX, ATCO Electric, or other provider's bill. But even at peak Alberta rates of $0.22/kWh, running 150 LED nodes all year long would cost roughly $14.45 annually. It remains negligible regardless of rate fluctuation.

Fixed-Rate Plans

If you're on a fixed-rate electricity plan (many Calgarians sign up through brokers for rate certainty), your per-kWh cost is locked in — typically in the $0.10–$0.14/kWh range for multi-year contracts. At those rates, running your permanent lights year-round costs even less.

Using the Scheduler to Minimize Usage (If You Want To)

Even though the energy cost is minimal, many Starise customers appreciate having precise control over when their lights run. The Starise app includes a built-in scheduler that lets you set automatic on/off times based on sunset, sunrise, or a fixed clock time.

A popular setup: set the lights to turn on automatically at sunset and turn off at 11:00 PM on weeknights, midnight on weekends. This means you're not running lights at 3 AM when nobody's awake to enjoy them, and you're not wasting even those few cents of electricity overnight.

You can also set seasonal schedules — run lights every night from October through February, then switch to weekends-only or off entirely in the spring and summer. The scheduler handles it automatically so you never have to think about it.

The Honest Answer

Permanent LED roofline lighting will not meaningfully increase your hydro bill. The technology is efficient enough that even running your lights nightly for a full year will add roughly the cost of a single coffee to your annual electricity expense. The comparison to incandescent holiday lights isn't even close — LEDs win by an enormous margin.

If energy cost was ever a concern keeping you from enjoying beautiful home lighting, this is the one thing you can confidently stop worrying about. The real cost of permanent lighting is the upfront installation — not the electricity.