LED Christmas lights are ideal for both indoor and outdoor use

If you’re thinking about Christmas and how to light up your house and garden in a special way, have a closer look at LED Christmas lights.

LED lights manufactured specially for Christmas come in the form of ropes or strings that you can wind around Christmas trees or use to frame other elements of the house or garden. For example, you can use them to define doors and windows, to highlight the edges of paths and walkways, to emphasize pillars and columns, or to simply draw attention to landscaping or décor elements in your house or garden.

Solar-powered LED Christmas lights are particularly effective because you don’t have to plug them in to an electrical power point. Instead of individual lights on a rope, a large number of LEDs are encased in a sheath of plastic. Each one has its own battery, so in effect each one has its own mini solar factory where power is generated. Solar Christmas lights come with a solar panel, and this panel automatically recharges the batteries every day. They should receive at least three hours of sunlight a day, but they will charge even if it is cloudy. Good quality solar string lights have a light sensor that turns them on and off automatically. So once the batteries are charged, the LEDs will light up at dawn and then turn off at dusk. It couldn’t be simpler.

Check our selection of Christmas solar lights

LED string lights are also available in different colors – the most popular being red, white, blue and green, which are all perfect Christmas colors. LED string lights also come in a wide variety of shapes from stars and snowflakes, to snowmen and Christmas trees. And they come in different lengths. Popular lengths are 23 ft and 39 ft. The shorter size incorporates 50 LEDs and light-to-light measures 16.5 ft. The longer one incorporates 102 LEDs and measures 33 ft light-to-light. Some Christmas lights LED blink, twinkle and flash on and off, which makes them delightfully animated. More on animated Christmas lights

There are many advantages of LED Christmas lights over the old type of Christmas string lights. The first is that they use less electric energy. Off course solar powered Christmas lights don’t use any electricity at all, so that’s already a huge advantage because it makes the cost of operating solar-powered LED lights unbeatably zero. But even electrically-powered LEDs are considerably cheaper to run than regular old-fashioned incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. Check our selection of solar string lights and solar rope lights

LED bulbs have become particularly popular since people began to realize the importance of saving energy. But it’s quite interesting to note that they have been around since the 1920s – nearly a century. One of the reasons they haven’t been used for Christmas lighting until quite recently is because they were originally red lights – those are the little lights you see in appliances that show that they are working. At that stage incandescent lights had a distinct advantage over LED Christmas lights because the light itself was white, but the bulbs could be made using different colored glass. Now the tables have turned and LED is the bulb everyone is talking about, for Christmas and for every other day. More on outdoor solar lights