It's one of the first things people wonder when they start looking at permanent LED lighting - and it's a completely fair thing to ask. You're putting lights on your home that could be on every single evening. Doesn't that add up fast?
The honest answer might surprise you: running a full permanent LED system on a standard Calgary home, at full brightness, every evening, costs less than $15 a month. In most cases, considerably less. Here's exactly how that works out - and why the electricity bill is probably the last thing you need to worry about.
1. LEDs Use a Fraction of What You'd Expect
The reason permanent LED systems are so cheap to run comes down to how efficient the technology is. Traditional incandescent bulbs convert only about 10% of the energy they consume into light - the rest is wasted as heat. LEDs convert roughly 90% of their energy into light. They do far more with far less.
A typical permanent roofline LED system on a standard single-family home draws somewhere between 100 and 200 watts when running at full brightness. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the same as running two or three old-style incandescent light bulbs. Your kitchen kettle uses more power in three minutes than your entire roofline system uses in an hour.
2. The Numbers for a Typical Calgary Home
Let's run the actual math. Alberta's residential electricity rate sits at roughly 16-18 cents per kilowatt-hour. We'll use 17 cents as a working figure.
A 150-watt system running for 6 hours every evening uses 0.9 kilowatt-hours per day. At 17 cents per kWh, that's about 15 cents a day. Over a full month, that comes to roughly $4.50.
Even if you run a larger system - more linear footage, landscape uplighting, patio and pergola lighting - and push the draw up to 300 watts running 8 hours a night, you're looking at around $12-$15 a month at full brightness. That's the high end of what a typical residential installation will cost you in electricity.
For most homeowners with a standard roofline system running 4-6 hours an evening, the monthly electricity cost lands somewhere between $3 and $8.
3. You're Almost Never Running at Full Brightness
Here's the thing about full brightness: most people don't use it most of the time. Permanent LED systems are fully dimmable, and the warm ambient setting most homeowners settle into for a typical weeknight evening is a fraction of the maximum output.
Running your lights at 50% brightness doesn't just look better for everyday use - it uses roughly 50% of the power. Running at 30% ambient drops your electricity cost proportionally. The $15-a-month figure is the ceiling, not the average. Many homeowners find their real-world monthly cost is closer to $3-$6 once they settle into how they actually use the system day to day.
4. Compare That to What You're Spending Now
If you're currently putting up temporary lights every Christmas season, consider what those are actually costing you in electricity. A typical set of incandescent holiday lights draws 5-7 watts per metre. A 15-metre roofline covered in traditional lights pulls 75-105 watts - and that's just one string. Many homes use three, four, or five strings across the full front elevation and garage.
Factor in that those lights often run 8-10 hours a night through December and into January, and the electricity cost for a single holiday season with incandescent strings can easily match what a permanent LED system costs to run for three or four months - with nothing to show for it the other eleven months of the year.
5. Long Lifespan Means No Replacement Costs
Electricity is only part of the running cost picture. With temporary lights, you're also replacing bulbs, strings, and entire sets every few seasons as they fail. Quality LED chips used in permanent systems are rated for 50,000 hours or more of operation - that's over 20 years of nightly use before the light output meaningfully degrades.
There are no bulbs to replace. No strings to restring. No annual hardware store run for the section that stopped working. The system you install is the system you run, year after year, at the same low operating cost.
6. What Running Costs Actually Look Like
To summarise what the numbers look like for a typical Calgary homeowner:
- Nightly usage at moderate brightness (4-6 hrs): $0.05 - $0.10 per night
- Monthly cost at moderate use: $3 - $8
- Monthly cost at full brightness, all evening: up to $15
- Annual electricity cost: $40 - $120 depending on usage habits
For most households, permanent LED lighting costs less per month than a streaming subscription. It's genuinely one of the least expensive aspects of owning the system - which is exactly how it should be.
If you've been holding off on permanent lighting because you were worried about the electricity bill, you can take that concern off the list. The investment is in the installation. Once it's up, the running costs are low enough that most homeowners stop thinking about them entirely.
Want to know what a system for your specific home would cost to install and run? Get a free estimate from the Luminair team at luminairlights.ca.