Tag Archives: LED lights

Example Noma LED Christmas Lights Outside

Last season I took some pictures of my Noma LED Christmas lights outside on my little blue spruce tree. Since I had to go buy three more sets of lights this year, I figured I would take another picture as an example. The main reason is to show the difference in some of the colours of the LED lights:

Multi-colour Noma LED lights outside

The tree is now about 20 feet tall and has 8 sets of 70 lights. That’s 560 LED lights on the tree. If you notice, the green LEDs at the bottom of the tree (the new lights) are much brighter than the ones at the top. In fact, the green LEDs in the old lights are really not visible at all. I happened to notice that the markings on the lights are different so I assume that the Noma LED Christmas lights are manufactured by a different company this year versus last year. This might be the reason or maybe they just decided that the green should be brighter.

Either way, I like the new green as it ads some different colour to the tree. I will have to make sure I mix up the old and new lights a bit more next year though. The orange, red and yellow all blend together so you need to have something different. This is where the blue and green come out more. There are fewer blue and green LEDs on each strand but it would be over powering to have more blue and green lights.

Canadian Tire Christmas LED Light Promotion!

By Jeff Ivany

10 Replies

In case you missed it being advertised, there is a Canadian Tire Christmas LED Light promotion on now. On top of getting up to 50% off of various multi-coloured Noma LED light sets, you can also make use of the $2 off coupon from the Ontario Power Authority. The Every Kilowatt Counts program sent coupons out to all homes in Ontario a number of weeks ago. Don’t worry if you can’t find your coupons for the LED Christmas lights though. Canadian Tire usually has a bunch of them in store. You may have to ask the right person but when I bought my lights today, I just had to ask the cashier about it. Even then, I think she already applied the discount before I even asked for it. :)

For a set of 70 Noma LED Christmas lights, it cost $5.40 after tax and after the rebate was applied. That’s a savings of about $9.40 per set of lights!

Don’t wait too long though! The Canadian Tire Christmas LED Light promotion is only on until November 23, 2007. Also, don’t forget that the Every Kilowatt Counts coupons are only good until November 30, 2007.

Noma Outdoor Solar LED Lights

By Jeff Ivany

45 Replies

I was flipping through the Canadian Tire advertising flyer this weekend and I noticed a number of solar powered LED Christmas light options. For example, here is a 200 light solar outdoor LED light kit. At first glance, it looks like the prices are a little steep for what you get. The Multi-coloured set (linked above) is $60 for 200 lights for a total length of 86 feet (two 43 foot strands).

I poked around on the Canadian Tire website just now and found the Noma 100 LED light set for $25. This strand is about 33 feet long. Two strands would be $50 and about 66 feet in total. It would seem that the lights are spaced out more on the solar LED light kits.

For only $10 more, you do get solar powered lights. Now, at the minimal cost of running LED lights, you’d probably never pay off the $10 difference in electricity consumption alone. Just think of the decorating possibilities though! You don’t need an extension cord to reach your trees outside that you want to put lights on. That’s a good savings of $10-$15 right there so maybe it is worth it to buy the Noma outdoor solar LED lights.

The biggest question I have is in the middle of December, how much daylight do you need to charge the batteries? It would really suck to get these and find out that a typical Canadian winter day doesn’t have enough daylight to charge the batteries. I’d hope to get 6 hours out of a charge too. With the sun going down around 4:30PM these days It would be nice to have the lights stay on until around 10PM.

Well, I likely won’t be buying any of these solar LED lights but at the rate my blue spruce has been growing this summer, I’ll be buying a couple more sets of the “regular” Noma LED Christmas lights for outside.

I’m not an Environmentalist!

By Jeff Ivany

3 Replies

I’m not an Environmentalist! Honest!

I’ve been finding myself spending a lot of time checking out sites like Treehugger and AutoBlogGreen over the last couple months and that has lead to me a number of other fantastic sites that are all focused on “saving our environment”. Now, I often ask myself why the heck I am reading these sites because I really don’t care about the environment. It’s not something I worry about on a regular basis and the theory of global warming isn’t something I subscribe to. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some global issues that affect our environment that need to be addressed.

Anyhoo, I’m not an environmentalist. I’m just cheap.

I keep doing all these things like converting to compact fluorescent lights, using LED Christmas lights, using a programmable thermostat to reduce energy consumption, etc. It’s all rather earth friendly (at least according to Treehugger) but I’m not doing it to save the world. I’m doing it to save my pocketbook! Heck, now I’m even thinking about how to install stuff like solar hot water heating in my house.

I guess the end result is the same though, I am helping to reduce the energy required to sustain my life style. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Noma LED Christmas Lights Outside

By Jeff Ivany

6 Replies

Since I had a comment on one of my older posts about the Noma LED Christmas lights outside, I figured I’d post a couple pictures of my tree from this past Christmas. They aren’t great pictures but they should give a bit of a reference.

The first one is my tree outside. It’s roughly 14 feet tall and I put 5 strings of 70 multicolor Noma LED lights on it.

Our blue spruce with Noma Multi-colour LED Christmas lights

The second one is of our little tree we had in the house this year. It was only about 6 feet tall and we put 3 strings of lights on it.

Noma "white" LED Christmas lights on our indoor Christmas tree

The part I like the most about the LED Christmas lights is how little electricity they use. I had all of those lights on (plus some more not in the pictures) for 8+ hours a day for almost a month. The total electricity used is probably less than what I’ve consumed on my laptop just putting together this post. Fantastic.