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 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 exterior — draw anywhere from 5 to 10 watts per bulb. A typical home exterior 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 node in a Starise installation is rated at about 0.96 watts — the published figure for our Gen 2 system. What a node actually draws at any moment depends on brightness, colour, and the effect running; settings below full output draw less than that figure.

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. That efficiency is the whole story of this article — the rest is just multiplication.

The Math: A Real Calgary Home

Let's walk through the same example we use in our full electricity-usage breakdown: a 150-foot roofline, which at one node every 8 inches is roughly 225 nodes. To keep the math honest, we'll calculate a ceiling — every single node at the full published figure — and note that real-world settings (dimming, colours, effects, shorter hours) draw less.

• 225 nodes × ~0.96W per node ≈ 216 watts — the on-paper ceiling, with every LED at the full published figure
• Running 6 hours per night × 216W ≈ 1.3 kWh per night at that ceiling
• Over a full year (365 nights) ≈ 473 kWh annually — again, as an upper bound

Now apply your electricity rate. Alberta rates vary by month, provider, and plan — check your own bill for the real number. Using $0.16/kWh purely as a worked example:

• 473 kWh × $0.16 ≈ $76 per year at the ceiling — roughly $6 a month, before real-world settings bring it down

If you only run your lights during the fall and winter holiday season — say, October through January, roughly 120 nights — the same ceiling math drops to about 156 kWh, or roughly $25 at the example rate, for the entire season.

Compared to Old Incandescent Christmas Lights

To put that in perspective, let's compare the same roofline strung with traditional incandescent C9 bulbs, which are typically rated around 7W each and spaced about a foot apart — roughly 150 bulbs over 150 feet, drawing about 1,050 watts every hour the lights are on.

Running that same 6 hours per night over a 90-day holiday season, at the same $0.16/kWh example rate:

• Incandescent: 1,050W × 6 hrs × 90 days = 567 kWh ≈ $91 for one season
• Permanent LED, at its full ceiling: 216W × 6 hrs × 90 days = 117 kWh ≈ $19 for the same season

That's roughly five times less electricity even when the LED system is calculated at its absolute ceiling — and real-world settings widen the gap, because dimming, colours, and effects hold nodes below the full published figure while incandescent bulbs only have one setting: on.

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, check your current rate on your ENMAX, ATCO Electric, or other provider's bill and plug it into the ceiling math above. Even at peak-month rates, the 150-ft ceiling example works out to under $9 a month — and that assumes every node at the full published figure, six hours a night, all year. Real settings come in under it.

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 and predictable — the same math applies, just with your contracted rate in the last step.

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 lighting will not meaningfully increase your hydro bill for typical evening use. Even the ceiling math — every node at the full published figure, six hours a night, all year — lands at a few dollars a month at typical Alberta rates, and real-world settings come in below it. The comparison to incandescent holiday lights isn't close — LEDs win by a wide margin on the same roofline.

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.